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What were you like as a child and when did writing and reading become important in your life?

I’ve always gravitated toward books and writing. Whenever I visit my parents’ house, they have this huge stack of poetry and prose stories that I wrote as early as five or six years old, very young.

Here’s a passage I found from the writing I did in middle school and high school (as always, obsessed with apocalypses):

If the world were to end tomorrow, what exactly would it be that you remembered? We’ve always pictured the future: space exploration, the means of transportation. Our future is much more different, instead of flying in aerial vehicles, we lie in the graves we’ve dug for ourselves; we impatiently wait for a tomorrow that will never come, praying to a god that no one believes in.

Buildings lie dormant, crumbling at their seams, ravaged by time and war, like slumbering beasts they rest. Flames burn as far as the eye can see, engulfing everything within its grasp, feasting on Earth flesh. The skies are a blind prophet, and the stars are chased away by meagre light and oil-fire.

I grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba for most of my childhood. I spent my summers in Peguis First Nation about two hours north of Selkirk on my reservation.

I grew up poor, in housing projects, in a town very much segregated between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples fairly divided between north and south ends. Class is already inter-polated into that structure Indigeneity and race are already there, gender as well. Of course, I was Indigenous and poor, a blossoming queer kid, very visible in my class.

I was this chubby overweight nerd. I was quite a lone wolf.