A Second Coming
Canadian Migration Fiction
Migration stories are an essential component of Canada?s historical/literary continuum; we need to know of such writings to rationalize about who Canadians really are, and where they are from. Aren?t we all the children of migration? Where we came from, how we got here, who we were, and are, and who may become in time ? such themes should interest all those naturally concerned about identity and origin; that eternal enigma wrought of migration. These short-fiction stories tell much about migration and Canada, in ways that are funny, ribald, tragic or contemplative, but never dull.
The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani-prize winners: the novel Berlin (2012); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019, won the 2020 Hamilton Literary Arts Award for fiction. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Island & Other Galaxies, appeared in the fall of 2020 and was longlisted for the ReLit Awards. A new poetry collection, At the End of the World was published in 2021. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both “The Sand Flea” and “Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro” are Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer’s residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a 200,000-word novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.
