“6” in “Indigiqueerness”
Animations are the backbone to nêhiyawêwin (or Cree) as we don’t have genders, we instead animate things (including rocks, sky, mountains, earth, the non-human) and in animating them we are in relation. What I mean here is, I animate my kin/relations, and listen to them, that’s where stories begin.
When did you decide Jonny needed his own book?
I was working with Talonbooks, and my editor was Jordan Abel. We were working on full-metal indigiqueer, a book with all these poems about a cyberpunk trickster who upends canons while becoming a virus to the machine or system. That manuscript was my first foray into speculative fiction through poetry. We had a handful of beach poems, which ended up being scenes in Jonny, because Jordan said they didn’t fit with the interactivity and virtuality of full-metal indigiqueer. He said, “we’re going to have to kill some darlings here.”
nêhiyawêwin Being Cree
Root word: neyihaw— An Aboriginal person
nahâpamiwew— She / he makes a positive identification of him / her / them
nahâpaminâkwan— She / he has a distinctive identity
nahāpiw— She / he has good vision
Root words: nahawâw (prefix)—She / he is put or stored away; -pamina- (middle of the word) —Attend to it/take charge
So, I killed some darlings, and the cuts improved full-metal indigiqueer. Still, I liked the work we cut, ekphrastic poems based on the work of Manitoban painter, William Kurelek. They—both the paintings and my poems—reminded me so much of home that I kept them, hoping to find a way to use them. Then I was at the University of Calgary taking a course called 100 Pages in 100 Days with Aritha Van Herk. I had just finished this book of poetry and didn’t have an idea of what to do next. I thought if we’re making a portfolio as a grad student, let’s just grab these discarded poems. Then I also had this character Jonny, who’d stayed with me since my late teens. I was also attracted to the writing style of all the beatniks, the more famous ones like Ginsberg and Kerouac, but also lesser ones like Albert Saijo. So, I was writing this existential beatnik-y novel about these characters from my hometown Selkirk who were poolhall sharks and would hustle all this money and then go back to someone’s house—a kind of frat artist house—and smoke pot into the early morning and play piano and have existential conversations … that novel never quite worked. It never took off. But in all of that discarded work, I had this tertiary character amongst those people who was like me coming into my queerness within that storyline. That character was named Jonny.
As I write in Jonny Appleseed, every rez probably has a couple Jonnies on it. It’s a universal name and character. Richard van Camp has a famous Johnny. Mine is a high-femme character. While the pool sharks were hustling everyone, Jonny would offer them sex work for a couple bucks or for a couple drinks, and he was the belle of the ball, the star of this completely carpet-stained bar. Jonny was adored and admired by everyone, even in his high-femme queerness.
So fast forward to me in my PhD, having these beach poems, very sensual based poems, and then experiencing a weird click where Jonny Appleseed, having lived with me and having eaten so much of my memories and my love and my pain, came to the forefront of my creativity and mind and said, “Joshua put me in these beach poems. I think I can work with them.”
So, I put Jonny in the beach poems.
That became the first scenes of the Jonny Appleseed where Jonny and Tias are children and are also exploring and blossoming into their queer bodies.
After that, Jonny became central to all my thoughts and dreams and creative processes. He was, in and of himself, an unfinished novel waiting for me to put ink to page.
Beautiful. I love that idea about your literary character eating your pain—a very useful kind of parasite.
I think so too!
Then I had a residency at the Banff Centre, which was so beautiful, living and writing in that recharging space. I was writing ten or eleven hours a day and falling asleep in the mountains. The Blackfoot people say Banff is a ceremonial special place where you’re not supposed to stay overnight. The area can cause very vivid dreams. I put some of my lucid Banff dreams into Jonny. Every reading I go to, everyone wants to hear the beloved bear scene, inspired by Marian Engel. I had that dream there, as well as an apocalyptic dream and a dream where Jonny is fishing and overpowers all of these men and feeds his community as he’s disregarded for not adhering to masculinity—all scenes I put into the novel. The novel became fully fleshed out at the Banff Centre, as Jonny was writing himself through me. In one week there, he and I turned the novella into a novel.
Not only was I so inspired by Banff, but I was also visited by these dark dreams that I tried to churn and knit back into some joy and beauty. So, the space of Banff Centre was so formative to this book, I don’t think I could’ve written Jonny Appleseed without having been in Banff to finish it.
Initially, when I was writing Jonny, I wanted it to be Young Adult. First, because I’d read a breadth of YA queer texts. Annie On My Mind was one of the few joyful endings ever in a YA bildungsroman (in fact it was the first). I read that book and other canonical texts all the way through to contemporary ones like The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Anytime there were semblances of queerness, it was always land based. Characters had to go into the forest—very Shakespearean—and find themselves and their fluidity and then return to urbanity, for the better or for the worse. Or else sometimes the books had straight up appropriation of queer Indigeneity or Two-Spiritedness,5 like The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which I felt was so demeaning but also so disempowering to Indigenous youth—we have rampant youth suicides across all of Turtle Island (what we call North America) and who don’t see themselves in these powerful semblances that are not fully inscribed by trauma.6 I thought of Eden Robinson and the work she was doing and the work of Richard van Camp too—like The Lesser Blessed.
As Eden has explained, if you don’t see yourself in the literary landscape, grab a pen and write yourself in.
I read books like Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese too, and I wanted to see a character like Jonny in the same realm of Indigenous canonical literature. So, like Eden said, I wrote him as YA, and I pitched the manuscript to Arsenal Pulp Press. That happened just after Raziel Reid won the Governor General’s Award for Children Literature for When Everything Feels like the Movies. The infamous Kays used The Globe and Mail to rip that novel to shreds … or try to. But Raziel and Jude, the protagonist from his book, are ten steps ahead of people like the Kays, very strategic. You can’t really rip the book or the character to shreds. Much like Jonny.
Seeing how well Arsenal dealt with the attempted critiques on that book, I pitched my manuscript to Brian Lam, the publisher at Arsenal. He took it on but said it might be a little too much for YA.
I could see why—it would have been risky to put a similar book (one that would be aiming for the exact same awards as When Everything Feels like the Movies) into the world so soon after a controversy. Arsenal decided to market my book as adult fiction, just a literary novel in general rather than aimed specifically at teens, which I was happy with ultimately. But in the stylization of the book—the short chapters, the typeset, the font—I wanted Jonny Appleseed to have the feel of YA, for the Indigenous youth who picked it up.
The bildungsroman genre was very informative for the book, reading all those texts, Indigenous and not, and then wanting to mutate the genre to my own uses. I think of Jonny Appleseed as young adult, as I don’t name his age in the book, but I also think of it as adult fiction.
I also deploy a lot of my poetic training into the novel, so it reads like poetry or oratory at times. Poetry is at the base of everything I do. Plus, some folks have said the story is full of magic realism with the dreams. I don’t see that genre myself. Dreams for Cree folks, and for myself specifically, are ancestral knowledge being passed. That’s the context of my use of dreams. But I did enmesh a mix of genres and forms. Some people also say the book reads like memoir.
I agree! We’re going to get to that.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.