Description
The much-anticipated new work from the Giller-longlisted and GG-shortlisted author of Jonny Appleseed. A boundary-and genre-pushing mash-up of memoir and fiction in the spirit of Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth.
Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit Ojibwe/Cree (nêhiyâw) storyteller from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1), is one of the most exciting and important younger writers on Turtle Island today, not only within the Indigenous community, but—as his award-winning debut novel Jonny Appleseed demonstrated—in the wider literary world as well. Dealing with topics such as Indigeneity, queerness, mental health, body dysmorphia and chronic pain through a variety of literary genes (speculative fiction, essay, memoir and confession), Making Love With the Land is a brilliant, heartbreaking look at what it means to live between identities. It also, importantly, recasts how we view Indigeneity. Through his skillful use of a variety of forms and stories, Whitehead guides readers through a prism that reflects and refracts what it means to be Indigenous today in oftentimes painful but also glorious ways. The memoir is both timeless and universal, and very much of this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating ideas about “the land”—as recent pipeline protests have shown us. Who “owns” the land? What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies? These are the questions that Joshua, uniquely and passionately, addresses through his extraordinary storytelling.
Above all, Joshua has written a multi-faceted, emotionally and intellectually thrilling, and utterly captivating love song for the land. In powerful stories, he shows how the land itself is a queer kin, lover, spirit, mother, aunt—and library of stories waiting to be unearthed and summoned into song.
Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit Ojibwe/Cree (nêhiyâw) storyteller from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1), is one of the most exciting and important younger writers on Turtle Island today, not only within the Indigenous community, but—as his award-winning debut novel Jonny Appleseed demonstrated—in the wider literary world as well. Dealing with topics such as Indigeneity, queerness, mental health, body dysmorphia and chronic pain through a variety of literary genes (speculative fiction, essay, memoir and confession), Making Love With the Land is a brilliant, heartbreaking look at what it means to live between identities. It also, importantly, recasts how we view Indigeneity. Through his skillful use of a variety of forms and stories, Whitehead guides readers through a prism that reflects and refracts what it means to be Indigenous today in oftentimes painful but also glorious ways. The memoir is both timeless and universal, and very much of this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating ideas about “the land”—as recent pipeline protests have shown us. Who “owns” the land? What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies? These are the questions that Joshua, uniquely and passionately, addresses through his extraordinary storytelling.
Above all, Joshua has written a multi-faceted, emotionally and intellectually thrilling, and utterly captivating love song for the land. In powerful stories, he shows how the land itself is a queer kin, lover, spirit, mother, aunt—and library of stories waiting to be unearthed and summoned into song.