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You mentioned that some people read Jonny Appleseed as memoir. I’d like to hear you talk about how Jonny is like you and how Jonny is not like you. The book has a real colloquial feel and I wanted to know: Who is Jonny talking to and who are you talking to through Jonny?

I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. I do have proximity to Jonny. The physical bodies that we inhabit and all the archives of memory and pain and love that we house as BIPOC and queer writers and women writers as well and disabled writers mean we don’t have the ability to not have an umbilical cord attached to our books. We’re regurgitants. Both the body of the text and the physical body nourish and feed each other. That’s how I felt when writing Jonny. I called him “the pain eater” at times. He would take my most traumatic memories and play them out again but do a 180 so they became not hindrances but empowerments for him. He would eat my pain and transform it. Jonny is an avatar of grief.

Within Jonny Appleseed, Jonny’s greatest ability is that he has a voracious appetite—and a chasm of space—to eat pain and then regurgitate it into love or forgiveness. Or sometimes he can excrete pain and simply let it be.

Jonny has not only taken things from me, but he also gives me things. Sometimes when I think “How am I going to pay rent?” a royalty cheque will come in. I owe so much to Jonny. He can work this way for readers too. I saw in Canada Reads how he helped my celebrity defender Devery Jacobs transform and braid together her Mohawkness and queerness. Queer Indigenous youth on my reservation flock to my car all wanting the book signed, saying how it allows them to live their queer truth or nonbinary truth or trans truth.

As far as who Jonny and I are talking to—it’s like plexiglass.

There’s me talking to Jonny.

We’re having a conversation.

I wanted the book to read as if you’re sitting at a table with him, and you’re drinking Red Rose tea and he’s telling you his story.

But Jonny sometimes breaks the fourth wall and talks right to you.

I imagined Jonny telling the story retroactively to an unnamed “you.” Not naming his age or the date of the setting works so, “you,” the reader, can step into his story like it’s a love letter. I tried writing in a loving way for queer folk or Indigenous women and also for those who are part of Missing and Murdered Indige-nous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People and ancestors and future folk. Jonny is forever addressing “you” at whatever point or stage you need to be addressed. By leaving the who he’s speaking to as unannounced and unnamed, it allows readers to inhabit him or witness and listen, whatever they need.

You can take whatever stories help. I think of him like medicine. You harvest what you require at the time and leave the root so you can come back when you need more. The direct “you” address is the stylization for that.

I get the feeling you like writing about sex. Do you find writing about sex uncomfortable or embarrassing. Or does it come naturally to you?

Folks have called me an erotica writer. I don’t think of myself as an erotic writer. I think currently Tenille Campbell is the erotic writer of Indigenous Lit.

I will say it’s incredibly embarrassing when you’re doing a reading in your own hometown, and your family is there, and you’re talking about bottoming and rimming and all those fun sex acts that queerness involves.

But I don’t feel ashamed of writing about sex. I find it quite natural, which comes from growing up with my aunties, mothers, and grandmothers. When I went home to the rez, the women stayed inside the kitchen to work and chain smoke and drink tea. I’d be in the kitchen, and the aunts would be talking about who they snagged (or slept with) the weekend before. They were so loud, and they’d laugh and hit you when they laughed—so energetic and animated.

The men would just be sitting in the living room watching TV and grunting. I was more interested in going into the kitchen and helping the women.

These conversations were just so normal that the idea of sex was simply a part of our lives, not something to be ashamed of. It’s part of our Cree culture.

Even in our trickster stories, we have detach-able genitalia and mountains that become breasts and rivers as vulva, sex and sexuality—hetero sex and sexuality that is—were naturalized and normalized.

Honesty is so important to me in fiction and if you left out that aspect of or drew a discreet curtain, Jonny’s story would feel less honest.

Queer sex was a different thing, though that’s changed quite a bit now. But, yes, you could speak freely of sex with the women. So, when it comes to talking about life on the rez, it’s breastfeeding at the table and talking about the latest snags. Jonny couldn’t be from Peguis First Nation if he wasn’t frankly telling you about an encounter in the park last night or using a mattress to make a makeshift room for “activities.”

I wanted him to be unabashed. I am (and my community is) unabashed about sexuality. I didn’t want to shy away from raunchiness and messiness, but also tenderness.