Abstract
This discussion with Mavis Gallant, whose “brilliant sense of place”1 and unsettling prose diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje have paid tribute to, addresses the ways in which craft draws on double, plural, or displaced identities in turn rooted in colliding or intermingling belief systems. The writer engages with a wide range of considerations, from the unfurling of fascism to the relations between the visual arts and literature, thus providing a valuable testimony of modernity in mutation. Gallant’s reflections on early modernists from Stein and Hemingway to Joyce and Beckett disclose the close relations between reading and writing practices, and her critical yet imaginative engagement with questions of perception, apperception, and representation offers us a privileged view of the creative process on the march.