INDIGIQUEERNESS: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou

 

            Looking back now, as thirty-three-year-old Josh, I realizeI saw myself in those books.
            I didn’t know at the time, but I was connecting,having fibres of paper also attaching to tendrils of Joshua’s identity.
            I’ve seen myself in books without having the language orterminology to explain why I’m so attached to these queer figures or cyborgs ormutants. Now, looking back, that work was so formative to me becoming a Two-Spiritperson and writer. I got to escape into a wormhole and be devoured and devoidof all things around me, and in that space of nothingness, there was all things– which made the experience so rich and formative.

I’vebeen appreciating the structure and content of INDIGIQUEERNESS: A Conversation About Storytelling: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou (AthabascaAB: Athabasca University Press, 2023), an extended conversation British Columbia-basedfiction writer (and Athabasca University professor) Angie Abdou and writerJoshua Whitehead [see my 2018 Ploughsares interview with him here] around blendingliterary and genre writing, queer and Indigenous content, working to emerge asa writer and performer, and of aiming work for a young adult audience. I’mcurious as to what prompted this particular conversation, and how it fell intoa book through the press, but I’m appreciating the insight into Whitehead’s workand thinking, the way an approach to writing was formed across genre. Part ofme wishes there could have been at least some spark of introduction to this collection,but there is something enticing, as well, about simply launching immediatelyin. Throughout his work, as well as through this conversation, I appreciate howWhitehead is open about his influences, blending genres such as YA novels,science fiction, punk and anime, and citing Richard Wagamese, Ursula K. Le Guinand Billy-Ray Belcourt; open about the writing in which his writing exists within a far larger conversation.

I’malso appreciating how the conversation is broken up through design and asidesof accompanying visuals, including quoted texts, old poems, photographs and archivalmaterials, providing the body of the book as a performative space, one that isall-encompassing, well beyond the scope of the immediate conversation. “Poetryis at the base of everything I do.” Whitehead responds, mid-way through theconversation. There are some really interesting elements discussed within,also, of how pieces that didn’t fit into his full-length poetry debut, full-metalindigiqueer (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here],evolved into his award-winning debut novel, Johnny Appleseed (VancouverBC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), and how he engages elements of genre writing, fullyaware of a conversation of how literature often looks down on genre.

            I remember walking down Ellice Avenue, another streetjust off the University of Winnipeg campus, adjacent to that creative hub. I wastaking notes on the graffiti and the trash and the mundane things that nobodysees. From that, I wrote a poem, and it became the first poem I ever published,in Prairie Fire. I remember getting my cheque for $100 payment for thatpublication, and it’s been a snowball effect since then. I was working longhours and writing poems for pennies and performing in the streets of Winnipegfor free…and now, being the emerging writer that I am, and sitting on the stageat Canada Reads blows my mind still – that I’ve achieved that level of opticsin a short span of time.
            But I never write in a vacuum. Everything I’ve craftedand made has been a whirlwind of community and folks and friends and lovers andfamily. I kind of write as an animated avatar. A lot of my material comes fromlistening fiercely to those around me and witnessing that which is discarded ornot seen.