YOU ASKED ME: What is your biggest fear?
That I wake up one day on a precipice—
Like a mountain cliff?
More upon the face of grammar. And I’ll be reaching for a warmth to cradle my hand as if it were a mitt. Instead, my skin will only feel the cool paper of a novel. All that will be is immeasurable dearth. And me, anchored to a berth.
You asked me: What is your greatest joy?
That I wake up one day on a precipice—
Like a mountain cliff?
More upon the shoehorn of time. And I’ll be reaching for a warmth to cradle my hand as if it were a mitt. Instead, my skin will only feel the cool paper of a novel. All that will be is immeasurable birth. And me, holding hands with mistik, which has never been a mistake.
TO SPEAK TRULY of this manuscript, I need to speak of its gambits. It nearly killed me a handful of times. I am always reaching for your fingers. What I have come to know in the writing, through all of its pained excavations, is that, alongside my search for a utopian vision on an unhinged horizon of unrealized potentiality, I look into the eyes of truth, sticky gauze and ineptitude, two black holes staring out from a socket sunk deep into a skull-land. Here I contemplate the prairies of the now, a broken treaty swinging on a sawed-off jaw. I find there a molar within which to burrow, to live out the days of this present and work myself into anotherness—which may not be a day nor a tomorrow, but a moment in which to witness the lavishness of this now even as it perverts, foregrounded against a doomed backdrop. A now that is, and has been, forever lit by the lanterns of temporality, a becoming and an oncoming. I find solace in knowing I’m quilted by eternity. I would be happy to rest there, even if for a minute, before unsheathing into the changeling I’ve come to know myself to be.
There are many thanks to make for the creation of these stories:
To those who harmed me, I do forgive and thank you.
To those I’ve harmed, I hope you find that place within you, too.
To The Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Development for the Arts, the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Mentorship Program, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for your financial aid in the research and writing of this book.
To Writing-on-Stone, Head-Smashed-In, the Dover Hills, the Bow River, the Red River, Narcisse Snake Dens, Lake Winnipeg, and all of Treaty 7 and 1 for your gifting me of homes; and to the ancestors who dwell, move upon, and mentor on these lands.
To EVENT Magazine, Prism International, The Malahat Review, Grain Magazine, ARC Magazine, CBC Books and Arts for giving several of these essays their first groundings.
To Dr. Derritt Mason, Dr. Rain Prud’homme Cranford, Dr. Larissa Lai, Dr. Daniel Heath Justice, and Dr. Aubrey Hanson for your critiques, feedback, encouragement, and unwavering guidance throughout the process of creating this book in its progenitor as a doctoral dissertation.
To Fluidfest and all of the performers who undertook and transformed some of these essays into grand gestures of movement, music, and art.
To Stephanie Sinclair for being the most stalwart and supportive person in and of my writing.
To Lynn Henry for taking this flooding and cupping it with such grace that it became a manageable dam.
To Bernt for your care, always, seeding terrarium. What a blessing to find you, again and again.
To Chief and Dirk for sniffing out the days when your lapping was a necessary enmeshment.
To Kawennáhere for changing my life forever and showing me the power of story.
To Darren, for your boundless kindness, humour, and grace—I hope everyone can see the invisible labour of being in relation. And I never forgot the lessons.
To everyone who has shown me, and each other, generosity beyond compare. I hope to share just as much with you, when you need me.
To Brandi Carlile for always meeting my grief head-on in song, tempo, and honky-tonks.
To my parents who always know how to wrench me out of the deep well that writing can ask us to fall within.
To my sisters and brothers for your laughter and oddities, an oasis in an already shimmering mirage.
To my grandmother for showing everyone in her vicinity a hulking strength that I wish you could retire, even just a little.
To Akira for placing my hands into the earth and showing me what sovereignty feels like.
To my nephew, Alex: I hope to build a patch of land so that you’ll never know a sharp tendril.
And to you, I say: writing cannot always be fuelled by injury.