INDIGIQUEERNESS: Joshua Whitehead In Dialogue with Angie Abdou

 

            Looking back now, as thirty-three-year-old Josh, I realize I 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 or terminology to explain why I’m so attached to these queer figures or cyborgs or mutants. Now, looking back, that work was so formative to me becoming a Two-Spirit person and writer. I got to escape into a wormhole and be devoured and devoid of all things around me, and in that space of nothingness, there was all things – which made the experience so rich and formative.

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

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

            I remember walking down Ellice Avenue, another street just off the University of Winnipeg campus, adjacent to that creative hub. I was taking notes on the graffiti and the trash and the mundane things that nobody sees. 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 that publication, and it’s been a snowball effect since then. I was working long hours and writing poems for pennies and performing in the streets of Winnipeg for free…and now, being the emerging writer that I am, and sitting on the stage at Canada Reads blows my mind still – that I’ve achieved that level of optics in a short span of time.
            But I never write in a vacuum. Everything I’ve crafted and made has been a whirlwind of community and folks and friends and lovers and family. I kind of write as an animated avatar. A lot of my material comes from listening fiercely to those around me and witnessing that which is discarded or not seen.