ABSTRACT
Following a brief consideration of the importance of narrative in Canada's refugee determination process, I argue that the task of appraising refugee stories needs to begin by understanding them as imaginative constructs. I then consider how creative writing by and about refugees extends the stories they are expected to tell, whether in the hearing room, the press, or the memoir. Recognizing that these venues typically reward refugees for telling factual trauma stories, I focus instead on the valency of ostentatiously imaginative literary representations of the refugee as a storyteller. In doing so, I consider how the refugee writer's flights of fancy communicate difficult, complicated truths.
