"Transcanada Letters" by Roy Kiyooka was a landmark when it first appeared in 1975 Thirty years later it remains one of the most remarkable literary texts in Canada "Transcanada Letters " which includes letters Kiyooka wrote from 1966 to 1975 offers a new generation of readers the opportunity to discover one of the most significant artistic and literary figures of Canada s modern cultural history Marvelously crafted "Transcanada Letters" is at once personal meditation and cultural manifesto travel diary and love missive a testimonial of friendship and a dispatch from the creative front

"Pacific Rim Letters "is a never before seen collection of letters Roy Kiyooka wrote between 1975 and 1985 It presents a fascinating and highly valuable picture of the artistic and literary communities Kiyooka was actively involved with as well as Kiyooka as a man with an extraordinary intellect and passion for life and the arts Kiyooka takes the epistolary form into new and radical directions At once tenderly estranged and confessional attentive as much to the minutiae of daily life as to the complexities of artistic and literary creation and embedded in the politics of culture making and those of racialized identities these letters are a literary achievement in their own right

In 1993 Mary Kiyooka sat with her son Roy Kiyooka, one of Canada's most important avant-garde painters, and a tape recorder and in her native Japanese shared her memories with him -- her childhood in Japan, her arrival as a married woman in Canada, and her family's experience in Alberta during the Japanese internment period.