Whitehead, who is currently an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Calgary, reveals personal details that include uncomfortable passages about being sexually assaulted and his struggles with body image. (For) books that are written by marginalized communities, you come to the idea that the autobiographical ‘I’ and fictional ‘I’ are indeed one.” I think that’s the expectation and it’s also something we have been trained to know throughout all of our schooling and our reading practices. I have to come to an understanding and find some peace in that I’ll always be mistaken in some ways, shape or form with the characters that I write even if they are hyperbolic and fictional as all hell. “I think a lot of the expectations of that contour are trauma, residential-school narratives – which I think are so thirsted after, importantly so, but there is so much more to tell. “That’s a question I think about in Making Love With the Land: What makes a book a Two-Spirit book? What makes a book Indigenous?” he says. Presuming an author’s life will inevitably find its way into his or her fiction is hardly new, but it had Whitehead contemplating how these assumptions are different for an Indigenous, Two-Spirit writer. Both books seemed to have autobiographical elements, which led to assumptions from readers or interviewers. The novel centred on a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer young man who revisits his reserve to attend the funeral of his stepfather. Whitehead had already found success as a poet with the 2017 collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer prior to releasing Jonny Appleseed. I think of it as behind-the-scenes of what Jonny Appleseed was and is.” Flash-forward a year from 2019 to mid-2020, and I think I’ve got a book on my hands here. In the stasis of the writing of this as I moved from questions about ethics or perhaps questioning or extraction, I also then had to move into very personal things such as my mental health and sexual assault. One of the questions I wrestle with in Making Love with the Land is that I think it’s a boon as a writer to be able to transform personal experience or pain or even love into story, but also it becomes a practice that can be harmful as a person versus a writer when you master the ability to put things into illusion and put things into story.

“COVID called for so much stasis and so much self-reflection… As a Capricorn, I’m very good at repression. “As I did that, of course, COVID hit and I had nothing else to do except sit at home by myself all day, every day in the imprisoning mundane, I would say,” says Whitehead, who will be at Memorial Park Library as part of Wordfest’s Imaginairium on Oct. He began examining his role in literary festivals and academia and the sort of questions and assumptions that came up during media interviews and Q&As. Writing the essays in Making Love with the Land was initially meant to be a personal exercise for the writer, a way of processing his experiences as a Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indiqueer who had become a literary star thanks to the response to his debut novel, 2018’s Giller longlisted, Governor General’s shortlisted and Canada Reads-winning Jonny Appleseed. Whitehead had not planned on writing a book of non-fiction. “Of course, the personal will always come back to the work, specifically someone who writes up and from the body. “Having learned what I learned from writing this book, I want to do something that is joyful and fun and in the realm of fiction and perhaps is not me bloodletting onto the page continually,” he says. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

Capricorn one two different novel