A huge thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for the individual writing grant, as well as the Writers’ Trust and the Woodcock Fund for additional financial support. A week away at Joe Creek Retreat on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast provided for precious writing time. The island of Naxos, Greece, where I completed the final draft, was the ideal location for a four-week writing retreat in the summer of 2015. Thanks to the staff at Prado Cafe and Renzo’s Cafe on Commercial Drive in Vancouver for never saying a word when I chained myself for hours to one of their tables and only ordered one cup of tea.
I am associate playwright at The Playwrights’ Theatre Centre in Vancouver and am grateful to my fellow associates, Elaine Avila, Dave Deveau, Hiro Kanagawa, Adrienne Wong, and Artistic Director Heidi Taylor and dramaturge Kathleen Flaherty for the animated and informative discussion around the controversial title of this book.
I would like to thank Francisca Rodriguez, Laura Glover, Allison Campbell, Barbara Kelt, Joanne Morgan, Fernando Frangella, Richard Lawrence, Maria Mana, Marc Oughton, Barbara Pulling, Emiko Morita, John Sweet, Mark Bantey, Katey Hoffman, and Warsan Shire.
Gratitude to my family and friends, as always, for their unconditional support during the writing process.
Tremendous gratitude to my brilliant, patient, understanding, wonderful editors Deirdre Molina and Anne Meadows for their keen eye and superlative notes.
And finally to my beloved agent Sally Harding for taking me on, for the endless emails and phone calls, for the support, and for that lunch on the water when the idea for this book crystallized.
Permissions
Grateful acknowledgement is made to flipped eye Publishing Limited for permission to reprint previously published material from Warsan Shire’s poem “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” from the book Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, published in 2011. Reprinted by permission. Production photo of The Trigger by Tim Matheson.
CARMEN AGUIRRE is a multiple-award-winning Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written twenty-five plays, including The Refugee Hotel, which was nominated for a 2010 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. Her most recent one-woman shows are Blue Box and Broken Tailbone. Aguirre has eighty film, TV, and stage acting credits, including lead roles in the Showcase series Endgame and Quinceañera, winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Her memoir Something Fierce won Canada Reads in 2012, was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize, and was a #1 national bestseller.
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