Cities of Refuge (45 page)

T
hank you to Ron Poulton, Victoria Sanford, Holly Dranginis, Carmen Aguirre, Susan McKeown, Stephen Streeter, Nasrin Rahimieh, Stuart McCook, Alicia Viloria-Petit, Nelofer Pazira, Sandra Helm, Tracy McDonald, Thomas Lahusen, and Ellen Levine. For valued readings, Ken Babstock, Richard Helm, Alayna Munce, and Michael Redhill. For being a part of this novel, and the others, I am deeply grateful to Juanita DeBarros. Thank you to Lara Hinchberger for keen editorial suggestions and, especially, to Ellen Seligman for lending this book her unfailing heart and great talents. And to Alexandra Rockingham, for her artistic wisdom, bravery, and the ever-present mindfulness that guides all who know her.

I’m happy to acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

The novel owes a debt to several text, on-line, and film sources, especially Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s
Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem
, Marc Cooper’s
Pinochet and Me
, Brian Loveman’s
Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism
, Samuel Chavkin’s
Storm Over Chile
, and Joanna Bourke’s
Fear: A Cultural History
. The story told is partly invented, and
partly drawn from the events of the Acul massacre of April 21, 1981, recounted in Victoria Sanford’s
Buried Secrets
.

Copyright © 2010 by Michael Helm

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Helm, Michael
Cities of refuge / Michael Helm.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-4042-9

1. Title

ps8565.e4593c48 2010        C813’.54        c2009-905217-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Lines from “Seven Stanzas at Easter” are taken from
Collected Poems 1953—1993
by John Updike. Copyright © 1993 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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