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I want to ask about your roles as writer versus professor, or creative person versus academic person, or artist versus employee.

This role as a professor is new, and I think it will be a challenge. I’ve had conversations with myself and asked if academia is the correct pathway for me. I’ve been so exhausted and excavated by academia, and injured by it and wounded, but also sometimes upheld by it.

I started at University of Calgary as the only Indigenous grad student. The cons of being inside the institution sometimes outweigh the pros. How I’ve maintained that balance is by succeeding outside the university: writing full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed.

But I do also enjoy the work of academia, the work of philosophy and social theory. Those theoretical ways of thinking are so very vital and necessary for us as people to decolonize, to work toward change, and hopefully redefine hetero-patriarchy and capitalism and misogyny and homophobia. We need the tools academia gives us.

We need to read Judith Butler and Deleuze and Guattari. But the language of that theoretical work is so inaccessible, which is what I disagree with strongly in academia. These tools that can be used for large scale global reformation are being offered to the one percent who can understand the jargon.

Academic theory is a type of poetry, but a poetry that is trying too hard to sound like poetry, to the point it becomes obtuse. I try to read theory like poetry (even though academics themselves insist on a hard division between creative and critical work).

I take it as my job to eat these theories—eat gender theory and queer theory and decolonial theory and post-colonial theory—and dissolve it all in my belly and spew it onto the page as fiction and poetry and nonfiction. That’s more accessible.

When philosophy becomes story, it becomes the greatest tool we can use for societal reformation. Jonny Appleseed contains handfuls of theoretical thoughts. You’re learning the work of someone like Jodi Bird, for example, while reading a good story and sitting with character.

My dream is that academic writers can learn to use the tools of story more inherently and strategically to widen the range of its readership and listeners for their very important work of social change and social justice.

Can you articulate how you do theory through art? What is the difference if you engage in theory through a novel or through an academic article? Is it more than just accessibility?

For me, it’s also reading academic theory as creative writing. Really, all things are story, to allude to Thomas King. For example, placing a power hierarchy between poetry as the highest form and genre fiction as a lower form is misguided. When I teach my students, sometimes instead of doing an essay on comparative literature, I might tell them to take what we have read and make an art project. Once we did a section of fairy tales, and I taught Indigenous fairy tales. At the end of the section, a student who was a baker used her own creative practice. It was one of the coolest projects I have ever seen, talking about consumption of women and girls in fairy tales and fables all through the crafting of this cake. The student told a story through fondant all the way around so you had to turn the cake to read the full story, a total interactive experience, and then we were asked to eat it. They had imbued decolonial theory—and MMIWG2S—and made it so very literal.

I remember I have the opportunity to do artwork as a student. I held onto the knowledge more strongly when I was able to interact with it in a way that was personal.

We’re at such an energetic and exciting time for Indigenous writers in Canada. Our most respected and widely celebrated writers in the country right now are Indigenous. How do you see the future of Indigenous literature in this country and your role in it?

I see everyone defying the expectations of border, whether it’s border of province or territory or nation, but also the borders of genre or the borders of form. For example, you have Billy-Ray Belcourt using theory in poetry. Jorden Abel is working on a novel where there are no characters. We’re seeing ingenuity. That excites me because I also don’t feel myself working in one form or genre. Making Love with the Land is my collection of essays about mental health, Indigeneity, and queerness. In some sections, I completely remove pronouns and use syllabics instead. Some sections employ poetry. Some are more ekphrastic writing.

What I hope—and what I see happening—is that we can move beyond the expectations of testimony or confession that for so long Indigenous writing has had to meet, or at least it has had to comply with this expectation in order to go mainstream. Readers expected Indigenous work to feature residential schools. They expected Indigenous writers to feature intergenerational traumas and focus on the breadths of wounds and trauma we carry. We are still doing that. But featuring such trauma is not—or doesn’t have to be—the primary component of Indigenous literatures anymore. Indigenous writers are free to explore various forms of genre and enmesh forms and explore futures and dystopia and utopia. We can write what we want to write. Now we classify writing as “Indigenous literature” simply because it’s crafted by an Indigenous person—and it can be anything. That rejection of the old expectations feels so much bigger and hopeful for the Indigenous literatures to come.