On Waking in a Stranger’s Room

The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war. Set in Damascus and Vancouver, it is the second novel from Danny Ramadan, himself a Syrian Canadian and an LGBTQIA+ refugee, and it is one that draws from his life without burdening the novel to conform to that, or to any notion of a “typical” refugee story. Ultimately, Ramadan decided that the scene he shares here, from Hussam’s point of view, wasn’t needed for the novel. “Still,” he writes, “this little gem is dear to me: The room described here is based on my room in my first year of arrival to Canada as a new refugee. The T-shirt he picks rests in my closet; I am too embarrassed to put it on. The moral, which still features in a different capacity in the final text, was inspired by a photo I took walking around Vancouver for the first time. I also had the audacity to tell one-night stands to stay when the morning came.”

— Jina Moore for