Critical land.
Language as a tool for change

Sylvia Cunningham: Welcome to “Critical land”. I’m your host, Sylvia Cunningham. This is the fourth and final episode of an English-language podcast from the SCHIRN debuting along­side its exhi­bi­tion, Magnetic North: Imag­ining Canada in Painting 1910-1940. This podcast has been an oppor­tu­nity to draw from some of the themes in “Magnetic North” to go beyond what is displayed on the gallery walls. Throughout this series, we’ve talked with Indige­nous artists and scholars about the Group of Seven, decol­o­nizing art, the meaning of land versus land­scape, and what’s missing from conver­sa­tions about climate change. In today’s episode, we’re taking a step away from the art to the literary world where we find a gener­a­tion of writers tack­ling many of these same themes. In this final chapter of “Critical land”, you’ll hear from Cree writer Jessica Johns, a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 terri­tory in northern Alberta, Canada. She’s now based in Vancouver where she’s the managing editor of the femi­nist literary collec­tive Room Maga­zine and co-orga­nizer of the Indige­nous Bril­liance reading series. She’s also working on her debut novel, “Bad Cree.” Without further ado, here’s my conver­sa­tion with Jessica Johns.
[Music inter­lude]
Before we get into your writing, because this is our final episode of “Critical land”, I want to circle back to our starting point which is the art exhi­bi­tion happening at the Schirn, where the Group of Seven’s art is on display in Germany for the first time. And I’m curious, when we reached out for the inter­view and we mentioned the Group of Seven, did you have any asso­ci­a­tion to their work?

Jessica Johns: No…

Sylvia Cunningham: Not at all?

Jessica Johns: Not at all. 

Sylvia Cunningham: And was it ever part of school curriculum or some­thing you saw on the walls or…? 

Jessica Johns: When I say not at all, I mean no personal expe­ri­ence… I’m bigger in the literary world and not so much the art world, but they do inter­sect at some points, and so I have heard of it in passing through artist friends but other­wise no personal connec­tion.

Sylvia Cunningham: In our first episode of “Critical land”, we talked with a Lakota-Scot­tish art professor named Carmen Robertson who was describing how in her expe­ri­ence growing up in a small town, she didn’t get much expo­sure to art at all, but she said she did know who the Group of Seven was, so I was wondering if you had an expe­ri­ence like that. But as I mentioned, we’ve really used this podcast as a chance to move away from what’s solely on the gallery walls. And in our most recent episode of the podcast, I talked with Jocelyn Joe-Strack, who is a member of the Cham­pagne and Aishihik First Nation. And she now calls herself a “scien­tist in recovery” due in part to her expe­ri­ences with acad­emia, where in one example while she was pursuing her Ph.D., she was basi­cally told to back up the research she was doing on land claims with liter­a­ture by southern-based, non-Indige­nous acad­e­mics that she says with sorely under­de­vel­oped. And she ulti­mately chose to leave a Ph.D. program after coming to an impasse about this. And so, I was wondering if you could also person­ally relate to this expe­ri­ence in acad­emia.

Jessica Johns: Yeah, that’s unfor­tu­nately pretty common. It’s pretty common that histor­i­cally in insti­tu­tions, there has been a partic­ular anthro­po­log­ical view on Indige­nous peoples from the lens of white people or non-Indige­nous people which is really diffi­cult and prob­lem­atic when as an Indige­nous writer or artist, those are lived expe­ri­ences and not an outsider looking in. Like very much in the world. So, I have had similar expe­ri­ences in acad­emia. So, I completed in my MFA at UBC for creative writing. Before that I did my under­grad­uate degree in liter­a­ture. And both of those expe­ri­ences had moments where I felt like I was being asked to consider myself outside of myself. Which is a very disso­cia­tive way of trying to under­stand your own iden­tity. In partic­ular this really came out in the MFA program where we were asked to prac­tice story­telling and writing with very Euro­cen­tric tradi­tions and based on Euro­cen­tric story­telling tradi­tions. And that is really diffi­cult when your story­telling tradi­tions or what you think is valid as knowl­edge, as a way of commu­ni­cating and telling stories is not vali­dated and when you’re asked to cite and read and source from white acad­e­mics or white writers that don’t have the same context and knowl­edge that you do, around again your own lived expe­ri­ences, not some outsider looking in perspec­tive.

Sylvia Cunningham: What did you find was the way that you navi­gated through that expe­ri­ence? Did you find you that at some points you were writing and creating work that you weren’t then neces­sarily proud of or that didn’t reflect who you are?

Jessica Johns: In some ways, I feel like it was a detri­ment to my own creative work. Espe­cially at first when I was a new writer and MFA student – I’m just budding, I’m just learning and I’m taking every­thing everyone says to me very seri­ously, so when a person in power, a professor, an estab­lished writer tells me that however I’m doing some­thing is wrong, that it won’t interest people, that it won’t sell…​that was really damaging. And I look back on some work that I wrote that just doesn’t sound like me and not just profes­sors as well in the MFA. You do work­shops, so you get feed­back from your cohort, your peers. And when those are predom­i­nantly non-Indige­nous peers and predom­i­nantly white peers, you’re getting that feed­back rein­forced once again. And so that affected my writing in a lot of ways and it didn’t feel good, but then as I kind of became a little more entrenched in the writing world and how it works and the prob­lems with it and really analyzing the ways white supremacy and colo­nialism have really disrupted and hurt Indige­nous story­tellers and writers for a really long time in Canada. Me pushing back on that became a source of creativity, so my Writers’ Trust award-winning short story, “Bad Cree,” which is now being made into a book, that was written sort of as a push­back against advice that I had received from a white professor not to do some­thing in writing and it was not to write about dreams, which is in Cree culture a very signif­i­cant story­telling device. It’s a signif­i­cant and vital under­standing of knowl­edge and ways of commu­ni­cating with people, like dreams are really impor­tant. And so, to be told by some­body in a group of people, “Don’t ever write about you dreams, people won’t care, you’ll lose your audi­ence,” that was really enraging for me. And so, I wrote that piece as like a – you know what – I’m going to show you. 

Sylvia Cunningham: And you did.

Jessica Johns: Yeah, I did! But that being said, that shouldn’t happen…​this labor, this sort of quote unquote “resilience” narra­tive should be forced on Indige­nous people to over­come and fight back and respond with this award-winning piece, and there­fore I won type thing, that shouldn’t have happened in the first place and instead years of mentor­ship and support in the ways of my writing from the very start would have been far more bene­fi­cial than you know what ended up happening in my acad­emic career.

Sylvia Cunningham: The story you mentioned, “Bad Cree,” this award-winning story that started out published as a short story in Grain Maga­zine and that you’re now trans­forming it into a full novel, what is the process of fleshing out or stretching out the story? I don’t even know where you begin – is it that the novel kind of continues where the short story left off, or are you actu­ally enlarging or expanding on sections where you had cut previ­ously?

Jessica Johns: That’s a really great ques­tion, there have been so many iter­a­tions and changes to this piece to trans­form it into a novel and it’s still in very early drafts, so it’s going to change even more still. But my initial deci­sion to expand it came from not being done with it. I kept thinking about the story. I kept thinking about other things that I wanted to do with it. The char­acter stayed with me. I kept thinking about other things she would do and other dream expe­ri­ences she would have, so I started expanding on these ideas I was having and then it was kind of both and partic­u­larly when I showed it to my agent and when we started the edito­rial process, then it became a process of sort of blowing up areas, so it was like expanding on the story, and then honing in on specific parts of the story and enlarging those and blowing them up and digging deeper into char­acter devel­op­ment, into scene and then after doing all of that, all of a sudden after doing all of that I had you know  200 pages…

Sylvia Cunningham: Oh my gosh…

Jessica Johns: I know. And I was just like, how did that even happen and again, it’s still changing, and it’s still morphing, but it felt kind of organic in that way.

Sylvia Cunningham: So, do you see it as a companion piece or do you almost see it as a new work that takes on life of its own? Because with that short story, you have this begin­ning and middle and end or at least you know where you wrapped it, but maybe that place where you wrapped it isn’t going to be the same in the novel. Are you seeing them as two kind of sepa­rate enti­ties?

Jessica Johns: There’s so much of the orig­inal piece in the novel, but it’s completely different in where it…the begin­ning, middle and end is so different, so I defi­nitely see it as its own thing at this point, but you can 100 percent see its…like this was the seed and this is the tree.

Sylvia Cunningham: There’s a short excerpt I’d like to read from “Bad Cree” … So, you write: “It’s been two years since I left High Prairie, my home, the town where I was born and raised with my two siblings. When I moved, Mom came out to the back of the house to find me putting soil into a bottle. She just shook her head and said that it was my body that carried home, not the land. It’s a Cree mom’s worst night­mare to have her family split apart. Now here I am, a thou­sand miles away in Vancouver. A bottle of prairie soil on my night­stand.” That sentence, “it was my body that carried home, not the land.” Do you person­ally relate to this senti­ment too?

Jessica Johns: Yeah, I’ve actu­ally changed that line, and I think about it a lot though because at the time I was reading a lot of work by ​​Quill Christie-Peters who is an Anishi­naabe visual artist and she writes a lot about how because a lot of Indige­nous people are displaced from their home­lands, you know, recon­nec­tion to home and recon­nec­tion to home­land can be pretty fraught. And one of the ways in which she, you know, talks about coming back home and feeling at home is how, you know, home lives with us within our bodies. It’s in our blood, it’s in our marrow. And I was thinking about this a lot and that really resonated with me when I was writing this. And I’ve changed that line now to read: “It’s our body that carries home, just as much as the land.” Instead of “not the land.” Because no matter where you are, whether it’s your home­land or not, land is so very much…is such an exten­sion of our bodies and ourselves, and whether that’s like if you’re in a city…​there might be concrete under your feet, but there’s land, you’re on terri­tory that’s like I’m here on unceded terri­tory, that’s not my terri­tory that I have to develop and think deeply about my rela­tion­ship with this place. So, I think both those things are really impor­tant, rather than one or the other which I think the first iter­a­tion of that sort of insin­u­ated, whereas I think both body and land are impor­tant aspects of home.

Sylvia Cunningham: I want to pick up on that, what you just said with living on unceded terri­tory. The protag­o­nist says that she moves to “Vancouver.” But outside of this story, the way that you iden­tify where you live and work is “on the tradi­tional terri­tory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.” For those who aren’t familiar with this distinc­tion, can you describe the impor­tance of this acknowl­edg­ment and perhaps also why in your story, you chose to describe the loca­tion as Vancouver?

Jessica Johns: I think that I wrote Vancouver because that’s a place people would be familiar with when they read a story and know where that is. However, I really like the idea of disrupting what people think they know of a place when the truth of that is this is unceded terri­to­ries, which means that the people, the orig­inal stew­ards of this land, Musqueam people, Squamish people, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Vancouver is the colo­nized city of lands that were once theirs – and still are theirs. And to be unceded means that they’d never agreed on a treaty with any of the Euro­peans and settlers, so it was just liter­ally no discus­sions, they just took over and occu­pied the land that was not theirs. So that is sort of what that distinc­tion is.

Sylvia Cunningham: I want to ask you about how you approach language…​because I came across an inter­view you did back in 2017 in PRISM inter­na­tional, where you were previ­ously the poetry editor. And at that time, you inter­viewed the award-winning writer from the Drift­pile Cree Nation, Billy-Ray Belcourt. His debut book of poems, “The Wound is a World” had just come out. And one of the topics you covered is language in writing. And you were talking with your co-editor about when she uses Cree words, she’d bracket them in the phonetic spelling, Billy would use and re-define them as he went. So, at the time, you said you trans­late Cree words when you use them. Have your deci­sions around language or your philos­ophy on it changed even in these past three, four years?

Jessica Johns: Yeah, signif­i­cantly…​thanks for reminding me of that! I loved talking with Billy and Selina. And I love talking about language with people, partic­u­larly Indige­nous people, who are language or maybe not language learners, and just talking about their rela­tion­ship to language. Again, some­thing that’s very fraught and it has changed quite a bit. Because I don’t do that anymore, I don’t trans­late Cree words in my writing anymore and a big reason for this is due to…​there’s a writer named Leanne Simpson, who is another Anishi­naabe writer and acad­emic and someone I admire and follow very much, so I’m emanating her a little bit and her wisdom in this, because she’s talked about this quite a bit and in her work, she used to trans­late stuff into English and in recent works she doesn’t and her reasoning for this is that you know in the age of infor­ma­tion and infor­ma­tion at our finger­tips, infor­ma­tion is pretty acces­sible these days, so if people want to look up what this word means, they can. And again, it’s kind of like this is work you can do as the reader and for a Cree person reading that, they’re going to read it and take some­thing completely different from that reading than a non-Cree or a non-Cree speaking person would. And I like that, I like that there are layers to that and also there’s just…like we do it all the time. If we come across an English word we don’ know, we either put it in context or we’ll look it up, because we’re like “I have no idea what that word means.” And it’s just like why do we normalize that for English and quote unquote “non-foreign” …which is so strange that Cree would be consid­ered “foreign” in Canada, so that’s a prac­tice I’ve started doing more recently, which is not trans­lating the language when I use it and just allowing it to exist on its own.

Sylvia Cunningham: One of the aspects I really love about your writing is how much humor you have even when you’re talking about darker topics, and I think your story “Good Bones” which was published in March 2018 in Cosmo­nauts Avenue encap­su­lates that even with the opening line, which I’ll read: “When my sister finds her eulogy, she’s really not impressed. And she should have been quite happy, I think, consid­ering I managed to come up with so many nice things to say about her.” And without giving too much away, we learn that this char­acter spends a lot of time imag­ining the kinds of ways people will die – and really not in a morbid way, or at least the way I took it, to me it was more in a prepared-for-anything way. And I was wondering, do you think that’s some­thing of a defense mech­a­nism, as if the grief will not be as intense if you know you’re liter­ally prepared for any possible circum­stance?

Jessica Johns: That’s a good ques­tion…I don’t know what that is. One of my friends and really, really bril­liant writers, her name is Samantha Nock and she’s a Métis writer. She has a line in a poem, and it’s some­thing like, this isn’t it exactly, but it’s some­thing like…​Kokum tells me to tell my saddest story and follow it up with my biggest joke. And there’s just some­thing about…and you find this a lot, or I’ve found it a lot with Indige­nous people, and I don’t want to talk about us as a mono­lith, because we’re all very different, there’s lots of different cultures and nations. But…but. I’ve found it to the case that Indige­nous people, pretty gener­ally, are really, really funny. Just really funny people and I think that just exists on itself. Just…we’ve got humor in our bones. And another part of it, this idea of pairing it with maybe darker moments is that grief sort of always lives with us, you know. And there’s inter­gen­er­a­tional trauma that we’re dealing with, there’s the constant trauma of everyday living in a colo­nial world that is still trying to erad­i­cate us and our people and our rights. And that’s an everyday trauma we have to deal with and if we focus on that all the time, I think that’s a really quick way to ensure that that destruc­tion happens, so instead we joke about it. And I don’t know if defense mech­a­nism is the word, but it’s some­where around there. 

Sylvia Cunningham: And in this story “Good Bones,” while the char­acter is imag­ining how people she loves or knows will die, she’s also drafting their eulo­gies. And I was wondering while you were writing this piece of fiction, if you were thinking about your own eulogy and what people would say. Kind of a darker ques­tion…

Jessica Johns: I love that ques­tion, so don’t worry at all…​you know I have not thought, even while I was writing that, about my own death and eulogy and things like that, but I was in a period of thinking quite heavily about people in my life dying and what I would say at their funerals which is a really weird thing to do. And sort of, that’s the premise of the story, getting out this weird compul­sion. But it was also at a time in my life when I was dealing with grief, I had just lost a couple of friends, so I don’t think yeah…​it was a strange thing to be contem­plating death in such an intense way at that time. But I prob­ably should have going to therapy or some­thing…I wrote it down instead.

Sylvia Cunningham: Yeah that’s funny that you say that because there is the ther­a­pist in the story and another line I jotted down was: “’Maybe you should go back to see Dr. Boxma,’ Mom suggests. Dr. Boxma was a wonderful woman who really tried her best, but you just can’t admit weird things to a person with a perfectly symmet­rical face.”

Jessica Johns: I mean that’s just true! If someone is too perfect, it’s really hard to tell them about abnormal things. You know?

Sylvia Cunningham: Absolutely…​because you were writing this story at a time where you describe there were these paral­lels in your life, did you find that because as you mentioned you hadn’t been talking to a ther­a­pist, did you find that was a construc­tive way to be prepared for these circum­stances, to be imag­ining things and kind of working through these scenarios, or was it just a way you were processing and you can’t say if it really helped or didn’t help in the end?

Jessica Johns: Hmm…I don’t know if it helped or didn’t help in the end. At that time too I was really just starting to…​that was one of the very first things I published and I was really just starting to write I feel like in a more delib­erate way, delib­erate in that I was trying to write as a writer and not just as a “secret writer” as I was kind of doing before, just writing for myself.

Sylvia Cunningham: Wait, what do you mean by that, a secret writer?

Jessica Johns: So that piece was some­thing I was writing and thinking, I’m going to write this to send out to try to publish it some­where. A “secret writer” would be like before that where I was writing and I was like, I’m not showing this to anybody, this isn’t for anybody else, this is just for me and my own purposes. So, to anybody else, I wouldn’t be a writer because no one knew I was doing the work. So I don’t know because I was processing a lot of feel­ings and emotions I guess through that piece but I was also very aware that I was writing it to go out in the world, I was writing it to be published, so I was careful I guess not to be too raw in that I still really imbued it with a lot of fantas­tical elements to put a bit of a shield between the work and my own processing and feel­ings. 

Sylvia Cunningham: Making this tran­si­tion from “secret writer” to published writer, do you find that you started to have a reader in mind that you were imag­ining reading your work?  

Jessica Johns: Yes, I feel like I’m writing to myself, like I’m writing stories that me of…not even years ago, like even me just now would really want to read. Because I really love fantasy and I love magical realism, and I love really weird stories. I love horror, grotesque elements, and so I read a lot of that and I’d love to see Cree people in these stories and so I feel like when I’m writing, I’m writing books that I would really like. I’m trying to write things that if I were to not know myself and pick up this book, I would be excited about it.

Sylvia Cunningham: In an article that appeared in the Toronto Star, your agent Stephanie Sinclair said about your work… “In many ways (Johns’) sort of normal­izing and human­izing an urban Indige­nous expe­ri­ence in a way that I think chal­lenges how people think about stereo­typ­ical Indige­nous people. I think that she’s also offering insight and perspec­tive into the joy that exists within many, many Indige­nous fami­lies we don’t hear enough about.” Do you agree with that assess­ment? Is that a goal, or simply the effect? 

Jessica Johns: I think that is an effect because I am not striving out to repre­sent an urban Indige­nous expe­ri­ence you know versus any other expe­ri­ence espe­cially because there are so many different kinds of Indige­nous expe­ri­ences, but I think what she’s getting at is exactly that, that there are so many different kinds of Indige­nous expe­ri­ences and one where, you know, an Indige­nous millen­nial living in the city that’s an expe­ri­ence and writing about Indi­geneity, or just being an Indige­nous writer, writing about stuff, just doesn’t have to be any partic­ular way because of expec­ta­tion and outside people, and I think what Stephanie appre­ci­ates about my writing is I’m just trying to be genuine. I’m trying to write from an expe­ri­ence I know and not one that I don’t. And so that means that an Indige­nous person who’s fucking up a lot of the time, when she’s trying like you know figure out how to smudge because that’s a tradi­tional teaching that she wasn’t actu­ally taught when she was growing up even though she grew up in her commu­nity. You know, she stum­bles through learning stuff and stum­bles through connecting back with her family, because things have happened that have made those connec­tions a little fraught and severed, but her commu­nity and family is still so signif­i­cantly impor­tant. So, I think that even though that’s certainly not a goal, writing from an expe­ri­ence that I know, rather than pretend at some­thing I don’t has resonated. 

Sylvia Cunningham: Do you have a typical writing routine?

Jessica Johns: Yeah, I’m not a morning writer, I tried to be. I tried to be that person who was like I’m going to get up early, get a coffee and write. But it doesn’t work, my brain doesn’t work like that. And so then when I started writing the book, and signif­i­cantly when I’ve been editing, my routine is I can only work on it for 2-3 hours max because it’s a lot and it’s exhausting, it takes a lot of mental energy, so I will do that in the after­noon, and then work on other stuff after, or like light things after­wards. But I do it every day. Because once I get out of a rhythm where there are so many things I have to keep in mind, once I’m start doing it and I’m in it and I’m editing two chap­ters at a time or what­ever I’m done, I’m doing it every single day and if I take a break, then it’s like a wheel has come off of a car and anything can happen at that…​so I keep within that routine, and I also real­ized that in terms of writing, I picked up this routine by acci­dent but I got into a routine of reading every night and right after I’d finished reading, I would put my book away and then I would write on my phone for I don’t know, half hour, an hour, because reading is such a huge – it really helps me write. And so, I’m like laying it bed, not on my computer, not anything writerly, I’m just in my notes app and I’m just like writing, and then I go to bed. And I was doing that, a lot of my novel was written in my notes app.

Sylvia Cunningham: Do you find that because you’re reading different authors right before bed and right before writing, that you’ll look back at sections you wrote and think “oh OK, that was defi­nitely following reading this or that author.”

Jessica Johns: Defi­nitely. Oh yeah. I was reading Eden Robinson, the last “Trick­ster” book in her series. And it’s really grotesque, there’s lots of body horrors. And yeah, there were some scenes I was re-reading that I wrote where I was like, “Wow, I was deep in the Eden Robinson spiral there.”

Sylvia Cunningham: And aside from writing your debut novel, you are also the managing editor of Room Maga­zine, which is Canada’s oldest femi­nist literary journal. With that what I just said, being its oldest femi­nist literary journal, that kind of legacy already intact, what have been your goals since taking over? 

Jessica Johns: There were a couple of things that I really wanted to do when I took over. The managing editor before me, Chelene Knight, she was a really wonderful mentor to me. And I really wanted to uphold a legacy that had already started. She already began it. I wasn’t doing anything new. But she had imple­mented and tried to ensure that the orga­ni­za­tion of room, so it’s like a team of collec­tive members, of volun­teers, of staff. Every­thing was centered on rela­tion­ships – rela­tion­ships with each other, rela­tion­ships with our writers, with our vendors, with orga­ni­za­tions that we partner with to do projects. And these were just really…the literary world can be really cold, espe­cially you know these orga­ni­za­tions built on, you know capi­talism is the running machine that we’re all just cogs in, you know I think she wanted Room to embody some­thing different and move in a different way. So, in that vein, I really wanted to do a couple of things. So, I had kind of started at Room with the Indige­nous Bril­liance reading series, and I really wanted to incor­po­rate it more seri­ously into the Room dynamic, because at the time two years, it was still sort of an offset under the umbrella Room. So, it was a reading series that occurred, but I really wanted to encourage more projects that centered Indige­nous voices, that centered Black voices, and so since then, that has been one of the things I feel we’ve done to a really posi­tive degree. We have so many more really wonderful projects with Indige­nous Bril­liance that are more inten­tion­ally weaved into the fabric of Room instead of an offshoot. And then also reeval­u­ating our systems because every single literary maga­zine is inher­ently built on colo­nial system, in that every­thing from our style guide to the language we use, English, is a colo­nial language. And so I really wanted to ques­tion every­thing we’re doing and disrupt them, and think how can we update these systems, these poli­cies, these guides, these resources, to incor­po­rate anti-oppres­sion, anti-oppres­sive prac­tices and so it’s a lot of backend work, but it’s struc­tural and I feel like as editors, learning from resources that center anti-oppres­sive prac­tices rather than just grammar, is just a really signif­i­cant act in editing and in maga­zine publishing. And yeah, so trying to do those things has been pretty signif­i­cant amount of work and learning and unlearning on my part.

Sylvia Cunningham: And when you’re decon­structing these style guides, are new style guides taking their place, and what are then the new rules or are there new rules?

Jessica Johns: No, no, there are still rules. But they’re more like…instead of straight­for­ward, this is what you do, and this is what you don’t do…it’s more a way to approach editing, so the style guide still exists, it’s just different. For example, one of the things was pretty across style guides across the board in style guides was that you had to ital­i­cize non-English words, and so a disrup­tion in that was you do not have to do this, it’s up to the writer if they would like to. And incor­po­rating into the style guide what oppres­sion looks like in writing, so being able to iden­tify when oppres­sive language is being used, so some metaphors and things like that can be quite racist or trans­phobic, or misog­y­nist. It’s language we take for granted or we’re just not aware of it. It’s been so engrained in our language, in our lexicon that we don’t realize it. So, people will put that into writing and then it comes to us, and instead of just having this thing, like “here’s how you iden­tify a misplaced modi­fier,” this is a style guide that’s like, “here’s how you iden­tify poten­tially racist language” or this prob­lem­atic thing. And here’s how you could approach changing that or here’s how you could approach that conver­sa­tion with the writer who prob­ably didn’t inten­tion­ally do that, and so you have that conver­sa­tion. So, it’s more like that. And it doesn’t have all the answers because there’s no way to iden­tify every­thing that could possibly come up. It’s more so a way of going about editing. It’s a shift about how we have to look at editing I guess. There’s an Indige­nous style guide written by the late Gregory Younging and I think this prac­tice is really modeled after that book where he says right from the begin­ning, like this isn’t a how to, this isn’t going to give you all your answers, it’s instead going to give you a new way to approach these things, a new way of ques­tioning, a new way of thinking about new rela­tion­ship to language and these kinds of things. It’s an opening up. So, he style guide has changed in order to do that.

Sylvia Cunningham: You mentioned you’re the co-curator of the Indige­nous Bril­liance reading series in Vancouver, which high­lights the works of Indige­nous women, Two Spirit and queer writers. And I’m imag­ining that you’re familiar with many of these writers already, but you’re prob­ably learning about new writers all the time as well. And so was wondering if you could leave us with some story or book recom­men­da­tions or people that we should also be checking out.  

Jessica Johns: Yeah absolutely, I love giving recom­men­da­tions, espe­cially from Indige­nous writers and queer Indige­nous writers. So jaye simpson’s book, “it was never going to be okay” came out last year and it’s absolutely bril­liant. It’s a poetry collec­tion. They’re a member of the Indige­nous Bril­liance team and an absolutely fantastic human being. Selina Boan just published a poetry book collec­tion called “Undoing Hours.” Molly Cross-Blan­chard just published a poetry collec­tion called “Exhi­bi­tionist.” Well of course everyone knows and love Billy-Ray Belcourt, and his newest non-fiction “A History of My Brief Body,” up for numerous awards and always bril­liant. I had mentioned Eden Robinson already and the “Trick­ster series.” Very forma­tive series for me actu­ally and my work and her mentor­ship has been really influ­en­tial as well.

Sylvia Cunningham: That was Jessica Johns, the managing editor of Room Maga­zine whose debut novel “Bad Cree” is sched­uled to be published by Harper­Collins Canada in spring 2023. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. A big thank you to all of my inter­view guests for taking the time to speak with me over this series – Carmen Robertson, Martina Wein­hart, Caro­line Monnet, Jocelyn Joe-Strack and Jessica Johns. Thank you also to my friend and artist Miranda Holmes for being a sounding board and allowing me to pick her brain before the very first episode of “Critical land”. The “Magnetic North” exhi­bi­tion at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frank­furt has been extended until August 29th, so you still have some time to see what is actu­ally on the gallery walls, including works by Caro­line Monnet, Lisa Jackson, and a selec­tion of 90 paint­ings and 40 sketches from the Group of Seven, on display in Germany for the first time.