Roy Kiyooka (1926–1994) was a renowned Canadian artist, educator, and writer who was a pivotal figure in Vancouver. In an early 1990s interview, he recounted: “Since the early ’70s, I would spend practically all my energy on writing. Because it simply enabled me to address things that I couldn’t in terms of making sculpture or painting. And in both cases, there was a constant feeling that whole chunks of my experience were being left aside. Such as an attempt to negotiate for myself what it meant to be an oriental Canadian, to articulate that, to see my kinship with my relatives in Japan . . . I realize when I had first had the impulse to write, that what I wanted to do, given who I was, the fact of my prairie background, I wanted to be able to write to tell the story of my own life.”