MASCULINIDANS-25

14 September 2011

Conversation between Joseph Boyden and Sam McKegney at the Arc Lounge in Ottawa, Ontario.

JOSEPH BOYDEN, a Canadian of Irish, Scottish, Métis roots, divides his time between northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of the short story collection Born with a Tooth (Cormorant Books, 2001) and the non-fiction works From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway (NeWest, 2008) and Extraordinary Canadians: Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (Penguin Publishers, 2010). His novels include Three Day Road (Penguin, 2005), the Giller Award-winning Through Black Spruce (Penguin, 2008), and The Orenda (Hamish Hamilton, 2013).

SAM MCKEGNEY: In Through Black Spruce the children playing on Sesame Street are described as having “blackfly halos,” an image that reflects innocence but is simultaneously ominous. Could you discuss how you were using that image and then also reflect perhaps on your experience with youth in Moosonee and Attawapiskat and these other small Indigenous communities in northern Ontario?

JOSEPH BOYDEN: I think as writers we’re always looking for the image. You can’t overwhelm a story with these images because they lose their intensity. But I remember, from my own reality, walking down Sesame Street in Moosonee and seeing this kind of thing, and the kids are just completely unaware of something they’ve gotten used to, which for an outsider is something that’s just a pain in the ass! But I wanted an image that captured that they are saintly in their own way. And I didn’t want it to be a dark image. I was looking for that one image that would capture something I’d seen in my own real life in just a very precise way, without really wanting to believe at the time that people would down the road say, “Oh, this is a wonderful kind of metaphor for something.”

There’s certainly a dark connotation but then there’s the whole reality of children being innocent and not ready to enter into this world of experience, which they’re certainly going to do in Moosonee and everywhere else in the world… and it’s Will, you have to remember, Will Bird, who is seeing them this way. They’re going to enter into a world of his experience eventually. And he fears for that, I think. Will’s a softie at heart, so that’s why I think it’ll be fun to talk about him and masculinity because he’s a Two-Spirit person, in some ways. Not in the sense of sexuality but of understanding the feminine very very well.

Some of the communities—Attawapiskat, Kash [Kashechewan], Albany [Fort Albany]—are very remote, fly-in communities, of less than a thousand people, typically. It’s interesting, I think, that young men anywhere, but especially in these communities, look to the older ones to see where they belong and how they should act. And oftentimes, when I come in as an outsider, as a stranger, it’s with silence, it’s with a lack of eye contact, it’s with sometimes open, very passive aggression. They put up a vibe of, “Fuck you,” you know what I mean? “I’m not even gonna look at you but if I deign to, I’d mess with you,” kind of thing. And that’s all bravado, right? I think any young man goes through this, so it’s not just an Indigenous thing, but I think growing up when it’s pretty hard-scrabble like it can be on the reserves, that bravado is—and I don’t want to tie it to gangs—but it’s certainly something necessary to survive, which is often unfortunate. They’re not given the chance to experience that softer side of themselves in public or with friends. And again, that’s a very overarching statement, ’cause I have so many friends whose children are these wonderful young boys and going into manhood who are absolutely gentle and sensitive. But when you grow up in a tough environment, which a lot of these kids do, you’re going to reflect that very quickly and you’re not going to allow your childhood or your innocence to blossom like I wish it could.

But then, once you break through, once I broke through, I’d go up to these communities and spend a few weeks at a time and come back a number of times a year. So at first this was the perception. And then when I’d break through and get to know the families and show them that I was here not to boss you around or anything, but to absorb what you want to share with me, and once people open up, it becomes a very different thing, right? It becomes a situation where the young men begin to warm to you because you can joke with them and immediately, as soon as I could see a kid crack a smile, I knew, it’s a different relationship suddenly. And humour is always the way that I approach it. Situations either in small Indigenous communities or in Sydney, Australia, where I don’t know anyone—humour is universal in terms of breaking through that shell, that icy shell.

But a lot of these kids, these young men, I could very generally say that many of them have lost what their grandfathers had, which was hunting skills and fishing skills and the ability to feed your family and to play a very active and important and strong role of quiet leadership in your family. And I think a lot of the troubles that we see now on reserves with a large male population that doesn’t know what to do with itself—and that ends up turning to alcoholism, that ends up turning to violence, it ends up turning to marital distress—is because they’ve lost that important role with their families and with themselves. And that’s gotta be devastating for a people who for 15,000 years have lived in an area and in the last fifty, the power dynamics and the sexual dynamics have all switched and just flipped on their head.

SM: That points in the direction of the contemporary attractiveness of things like gangs, which are such an important part of your second novel.

JB: Absolutely. It’s what brings back the ego, what brings back the purpose in life. “I’m gonna be a tough guy. I’m gonna be a provider, but I’m gonna do it in a dangerous way.” Yeah. Absolutely. And that I think that plays out even more in urban Aboriginal communities, in Winnipeg, et cetera, et cetera, than it does in the smaller isolated communities.

SM: That makes me think of the dynamic between Marius and Will in Through Black Spruce. Will self-represents as a person who had the role of the person you were just describing, the one who was able to support and feed the family, feed the community, and Marius emerges as a threat not simply because he is bringing forms of violence into the community through drugs and alcohol, but also because he offers this alternative model of male power.

JB: That’s very interesting. I’ve never really thought of it that way until right now. But that’s exactly what Marius would do, is he’s offering an alternative. He’s offering something to these young men that they’ve lost. I didn’t think of that at all, but absolutely, that’s what I’m sure goes on in reality.

SM: The role of Gordon Painted Tongue is also really intriguing, both as a reflection on male power and as an indicator of the struggles involved in coming into personhood as a man. On the one hand, he can be linked to a lot of stereotypes about Indigenous masculinity through his voicelessness…

JB: The strong, silent …

SM: … silent, stoic, stalking …

JB: Absolutely.

SM: And he’s very physical, like, he’s very much a body. And yet, he’s the one who is non-traditional. He’s the one who’s learning the traditions from Annie. What sort of concerns were you working through in that characterization?

JB: I actually wrote a short story called “Painted Tongue” in Born with a Tooth that’s about Gordon, but in another world before Annie and all of this. So I’d written that story years ago in the mid-1990s and it was considered really seriously for publication by a number of big U.S. magazines. And it made me realize that maybe I do have what it takes to become a writer. And I’m telling this story because what I did with this Painted Tongue character is I took this stereotypical drunk, urban, long-haired, dishevelled, monochromatic Indian that you’ll find across any urban centre in Canada and I kinda flipped it on its head. And I went, “Who’s the real person behind me?” Behind the long hair hiding his face, he’s a sensitive little boy having to live tough on the streets. That’s when I first realized that a powerful thing I can do in my fiction, especially with First Nations, is play with the stereotype and then explode it and make the audience go, “Oh, wait a second, an Indian girl can really be a fashion model?” Of course she can. Look at the young woman in the margarine commercial, “We call this maize.” You know that one I’m talking about? So I’m taking the “beautiful Indian maiden” and showing her to be really tough inside.

So when I was writing Through Black Spruce, and I had forgotten about that story—you don’t think about your old stories when you’re writing new stuff, especially ten or fifteen years later—I was writing the scene where the protagonist Annie was on the streets of Toronto and comes across these old Indian street people and on the set—I’m writing like I’m a director—I see the scene, and I’m like, “Roll.” What do we got here? Annie comes across these Indian people… And then Gordon, Painted Tongue, from years ago, without my consciously wanting him to, walks onto the set. And I’m like, “Cut. What are you doing here? You’re from another world, get out of the story.” And he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave. And it was like, “Okay, well, if you’re going to stay, you gotta do something.” And so he ends up becoming Annie’s protector, you know, the tough Indian, silent, strong Indian type, who is just a child inside. He was the Painted Tongue from the old story, in some ways. And I was able to flesh him out and allow him to become more three-dimensional because I had more time to spend with him on the page.

SM: Was there ever a worry or a concern with the relationship between Gordon and Annie because she’s such a strong character and yet he plays this role of protector? Was there ever a fear that people could impose upon the story a “damsel in distress” model where she requires the male hero to swoop in and save her?

JB: I think I could worry about all kinds of things when I write something and that would just end up shackling me, so I wouldn’t write anymore. But what I realized quickly is I’m again flipping stereotypes by having Annie in the city as a lost soul, but in the bush, she knows what she’s doing; she’s been taught well by her uncle Will. Gordon, on the other hand, has never even caught a fish before. He’s an urban Indian, so I’m kinda playing with the urban Indian/rural Indian thing. So Annie is on her feet in her own territory. As soon as she leaves her territory and goes into the city, she’s not. Gordon: same thing, he’s on his feet, he understands his world, his urban world of the streets, but you bring him out into the bush and he’s done for. And so I really had fun doing that. You don’t expect the young beautiful First Nations woman to be also able to hunt and fish and trap, and you don’t necessarily expect an urban street Indian to be in the bush and not know how to catch fish or protect himself. And so I wasn’t too worried with that. I’m constantly looking at, “Why does this stereotype exist of the Indian as the drunk or the Indian as the strong silent type? Where does that come from?” And it comes from certain very specific situations that have become Hollywood-ized. And so really exploring them and breaking them apart—fracking them, I guess—is what I do, where I inject the water and the heat into these stereotypes to explode them to see what’s on the inside.

SM: Will is an interesting character because he’s rich with traditions, he understands a role that is fast-leaving his community, and he feels responsibility toward that role. And yet, he has his weaknesses, too. You allow him his flaws. What is your relationship to him as a character?

JB: I have never used real-life people and just basically made them into my fictional characters, except maybe you could argue once, and that’s Will Bird. I’ve got a dear, dear friend, probably my best friend in the world, named William Tozer, who’s a Cree hunter and trapper and bushman, who lives in Moosonee, who’s a few years older than me, not much older than me, but, he’s going to be fifty, I guess, so yeah, he’s six years older than me. And he and I have been friends for a long, long time and I’m fascinated by him. And when I first was thinking of the idea of writing Through Black Spruce, I thought, my friend William has the most fascinating life. And as a fiction writer, I didn’t want to write non-fiction, I wanted to write fiction, so I said, what if my friend William really did lose his first family in a fire while he was flying home. (He did not have an affair. He wasn’t flying home from an affair or anything. He was flying in from a pop-and-chip run up in Attawapiskat, and saw his house was burning down. He lost his wife and two kids.) I imagined, what if William did not meet his beautiful, wonderful wife, Pamela—they now have three amazing boys and an amazing daughter, Rain. So that’s where the fiction took off, from the reality. I hope he comes off as funny on the page because my friend William in real life is hilarious, he’s a trickster, he’s a wonderful guy. So Will Bird is a “what if” scenario of what William Tozer might have been if he had not connected with his very powerful, wonderful wife, Pamela.

Will Bird, he’s the bushman, he’s a tough guy, but of course, he’s got flaws. He can’t stand up to Marius; he tries to and he shakes. But haven’t we all been in that situation where we’re faced with somebody’s who’s an asshole or a very dominant, physically overbearing person who wants to mess with us, and we wish our reaction was, “Yeah, I’ll stand up and beat you up,” but that usually isn’t the case, you know?

SM: One of the things that I find really intriguing about the portrayal of Will and his circle of friends—because it’s a very tight-knit male community of three, right?—is that although the story is simultaneously recognizing the negative way drugs and alcohol are affecting the broader community, there’s a very sympathetic portrayal of how, actually, alcohol brings these guys together.

JB: When they sit down on a back porch together…

SM: Yeah.

JB: … and drink a case of beer together. Of course. What’s more masculine than sitting on the back deck and opening a square of beer and drinking it with each other, right? It’s the way males learn to bond. You need that in order to talk with men in a way that doesn’t make you feel like a sissy or a woman or make you feel weird; you have to oil things up with alcohol. It’s hilarious, it’s funny. And it’s true. But that relationship goes farther than that. Will and Chief Joe Wabano grew up together, I imagine them having grown up together. And then this weirdo outsider, Gregor—like, they’re all misfits, you know? They’re all total misfits. I look back at writing Through Black Spruce—my scenes with Chief Joe and Gregor and Will, short as they were, were really fun to write because they’re all such misfit losers in so many ways, wanting to be tough guys, but they’re like three stooges. And there’s no way they’re going to be tough guys as much as they want to put that across. And that’s such a male thing, too, isn’t it? The idea that you try to put off your vibe, your aura, that you’re a tough guy and then other people look at you and go, “Oh. That’s a strange little guy.”

WHAT’S MORE MASCULINE THAN SITTING ON THE BACK DECK AND OPENING A SQUARE OF BEER AND DRINKING IT WITH EACH OTHER?

SM: Did you feel any compulsion to move to the present, because you had done historical fiction?

JB: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. When I finished Three Day Road—I’ve often told this story in talks and stuff—but when I finished Three Day Road and it began selling suddenly around the world, I got depressed and I shouldn’t have been depressed. I was like, “I should be really happy: I’m travelling around the world, my book’s in fifty countries and fifteen languages, like why am I …?” It’s because I missed Xavier and I missed Niska and I missed Elijah and hanging out with them every day and having them talk to me and me talk to them, kind of in your own weird writer way. And suddenly they were gone. And that’s when I realized, you know what, the Bird family has so much more to say. And that contemporary First Nations existence in Canada needs some light shone on it by somebody who at least knows a little bit, you know what I mean? And so that’s when I decided, there’s going to be at least a second book, probably a trilogy.

SM: And I understand the original title was Suzanne Takes You Down. Have you always been a reader of [Leonard] Cohen or …?

JB: Who’s he?

SM: [Laughter]

JB: I thought I made that up. I’m teasing you. No, I loved it. That was my very early title just because, you know, a publisher always wants something rather than an untitled novel. Give us a title. They’re buggin’ me for one right now and I’m like, I don’t know. But yeah, that was the early version. Yeah, certainly, like Leonard Cohen, you want to talk about masculinity? You want to talk about the Two-Spirit person. So often in First Nations, a Two-Spirit person is somebody who is bi-sexual or gay. Absolutely a Two-Spirit person can be, but I think it’s bigger than that. I think a Two-Spirit person is somebody who can live within a female and male form—internally, obviously, I’m not talking about physically changing yourself—but internally can inhabit the skin of both male and female. And as a writer I’ve called myself once a Two-Spirit person. I think people were probably like, “I didn’t know Joseph was gay.” But that’s not what I meant. I have seven older sisters. I grew up with eight women, my mother and my seven sisters, very strong women raising me, and so, of course, how could I not understand the female? That’s where the woman’s voice often comes from in my work.

SM: Three Day Road is a novel that addresses two crucial institutions of social engineering: the military and residential school. Were you thinking through parallels between those institutions as you wrote the story or did they simply speak to each other because of the characters and what they had gone through?

JB: There was a quiet war going on in Canada in the early 1900s. We weren’t loud, like the Americans. The worst we had in some ways was the 1885 rebellion with Riel. In comparison—not to belittle it in any way—but in comparison with other battles, especially American battles against Indigenous forces, it was very minor, in terms of the death toll. Canada was very good at not being loud and brassy like the Americans, but acting in that British way of—I don’t want to say deceptive because I’m not a hater of the British by any means—but a very insidious battle going on, a war against First Nations. The British Canadian way of controlling geography and of getting what we wanted from the First Nations was not to do the Custer kind of thing or the Ulysses S. Grant kind of, “let’s wipe ’em all out,” you know? “Let’s kill the Red Devil.” It was very insidious. It was, “We’ll offer them things, we’ll bring them Christianity, we’ll create residential schools.” So there’s this quiet insidious war going on in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century.

But there’s also this very loud war going on over in Europe. Very loud. In every way you can imagine. It’s the first mechanized war. It’s the first war to introduce weapons of mass destruction, in terms of gas and artillery shells and the tank. It was a modern mechanized approach and so was the British approach to Canadian Indians. It was a very scientifically social approach. And so there’s this quiet little insidious war going on at home and there’s a very loud war going on overseas.

SM: With relation to Xavier and Elijah’s experience of being removed and placed in this entirely foreign environment of the war—certainly it’s a greater struggle for Xavier, more than a little bit because of the experience that Elijah has from an institutionalized environment in residential school. So there’s a way in which Elijah is prepared for the structure that he’ll find himself in.

JB: Absolutely. The military structure and the residential school, of course. But what doesn’t he have? He doesn’t have the soul. Everyone loves him in his military unit. He’s talkative, he’s funny, he’s everything that everyone would wish an Indian would be. He’s heroic, he’s brave, he protects you, he does all these things. But what he doesn’t have is that connection to where he comes from. And that’s what ultimately unhinges him, that he doesn’t have the growth of Xavier. If you read the prologue of Three Day Road, on the first page: Xavier teaching Elijah how to trap and Elijah quickly realizing the power in killing but not the power in the actual pursuit or where that comes from or why you kill. He’s so unhinged because he doesn’t have that connection to where he comes from and who he is. He’s ungrounded.

BUT I THINK INDIANS ULTIMATELY UNDERSTAND THAT REALLY DEEPLY, AT A CORE LEVEL, THAT NO ONE IS PERFECT, THAT WE SHOULDN’T NECESSARILY STRIVE FOR PERFECTION, WE SHOULD STRIVE TO REACH OUT TO OTHERS.

Whereas Xavier barely survives this war because his Auntie raised him to know where he came from, who he is, and what to do, what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s not just a Christian value system, right and wrong, at all, it’s very much an Anishinaabe and a Cree idea of morality. Christianity is very black and white, very Manicheistic. With Cree and Ojibway people, the understanding is that they aren’t poles, right and wrong, that all of us contain both extremes and it’s how we balance and fight and struggle with them and then ultimately treat others that determines who we are. Here’s an example, Martin Luther King, who’s revered as the great icon of the twentieth century for so many people, and in her diaries Jackie is talking about, “I’m sure he was drunk when he came into Jack’s wedding and he was not the nicest of …” You know what I mean? Of course he wasn’t! You put someone on a pedestal, they’re going to get knocked down. But I think Indians ultimately understand that really deeply, at a core level, that no one is perfect, that we shouldn’t necessarily strive for perfection, we should strive to reach out to others. That’s a big tangent. But it’s all about masculinity. Accepting your role as a masculine man is not just, “I’m gonna serve you the food that you need to eat, I’m gonna keep you alive”—it ain’t that simple. This is a very different world that we live in.

SM: One of the things I’m fascinated about with the development of Xavier and Elijah is how Elijah is able to create a myth of himself throughout the novel that validates his own sense of self. So he has this sense of masculine self-worth that is refracted back to him by those around him, the military personnel that he’s stationed with. But at the same time, it makes Xavier less and less sure of himself. So as the myth of Elijah creates the hero, that’s when we hear Xavier say, “I’m becoming more of a ghost,” right? Do you see a connection between these processes and the struggles of, say, young Indigenous men in urban scenarios seeking validation by those around them, and how that may encourage them towards models of masculinity that are unhealthy? Or is that the critic in me projecting onto your story?

JB: No, I love that reading. Who doesn’t love or is not attracted to the idea of completely reinventing who are you and where you come from? And not in a giant way, but making yourself more attractive or approachable or even heroic to others? But Elijah doesn’t have his—again, it goes back to identity, right?—he didn’t grow up in the bush, he grew up in a residential school. He grew up with no mother, no father, and again, it goes back to the whole. And by the way, another aside: If you look at any group that has come from impoverished places, oftentimes you’ll see fatherless families. You’re going to see families without the male figure and the creation of gangs from that. From tougher socio-economic places, you’re going to find young men wanting to band together because they’ve never had the father figure. Fathers are often either dead, in jail, or just not around. And so this is not just an Indian thing.

SM: That cycle that you’re discussing seems to create its own perpetuation in the sense that from the absence comes an urge to seek out a meaningful male role, while none is actually modelled for you.

JB: And then you end up with a weak male role again. You end up with somebody who talks about honour and respect and protecting each other’s backs, but gangs fall about immediately as soon as money or authority come into the mix. There’s so often a lack of a male authority figure or a male figure who is benevolent or who is kind or gentle or in any way effeminate. There’s just no room for it. And that’s the failure of gangs. Gangs will always pop up and then be defeated, pop up and then be defeated, and then pop up in another way. They’re like spores.

SM: Xavier is entirely broken at the beginning and then chronologically the end of Three Day Road. He’s symbolically emasculated by virtue of his amputated limb and he requires the stories of his Auntie in order to usher him home. Niska has a lot of power as a character.

JB: People don’t typically call Ojibway culture matriarchal, but the woman is everything. I don’t think there’s any traditionalist who would disagree with that. And the female is the powerful one. You don’t invite a woman on her moon into a ceremony because the power of life that she brings and holds in her is too much for a human to deal with.

Niska’s father allows her to watch when he takes care of a windigo when she’s a young girl, because he knows, “You’re the next, you’re the next in line.” And it’s not so much that he’s chosen her to be, it’s just she has what he has. She has the natural, I don’t want to use the word “power”—that crosses over male and female—but the family’s raison d’être, which is they are healers. But in healing you sometimes have to excise the cancer. And that’s what dealing with the windigo is: cutting out that bad part of us when it gets too overwhelming.

AND THAT’S WHAT DEALING WITH THE WINDIGO IS: CUTTING OUT THAT BAD PART OF US WHEN IT GETS TOO OVERWHELMING.

SM: That’s certainly at the core of Three Day Road, and it emerges again in Through Black Spruce in the way that Will frames his duty to get rid of Marius. He calls Marius the “root” of the problem, saying he “needed killing.”

JB: Yeah, he needed killing. That’s an old Southern expression that I stole…

SM: In a novel that’s so aware of the historical conditions that have created needs, or desires, in communities for forms of narcosis like drugs and alcohol, is there a way that Will is missing something regarding how Marius is himself a product of these conditions?

JB: Oh, absolutely. You know how Niska’s father passed down to her the power? Well Niska didn’t pass it down to Xavier. That power jumps over to Annie. And so Annie is the one who, without anyone being able to teach it to her, realizes, “Holy mackerel, I’m having these visions.” In her contemporary world, she’s had no one to teach her much except her Uncle Will, who can only teach her the bush. Uncle Will doesn’t really have much of a connection to the shaking tent at all or the sweat lodges. That’s not really his thing, you know? He’s missing that. But Annie is desperate for something. And this is how I see so many contemporary Native people. They’re not desperate but they’re hungry for what has been lost over a few generations or five or six or seven generations of people going to residential school and losing their religion. I sound like REM, but they’ve lost their religion over the course of a hundred years.

Will gets Marius on a very intuitive level. He understands that Marius is not a good dude. Marius is a very frightening person and is a cancer in their little community. And Marius is directly linked, he’s a blood relation to Elijah, right? Bad things will continue to reinvent themselves or gestate again in each generation unless they’re dealt with, unless they’re excised. I see it in my own family, for example. I come from a very large and complicated family and, as amazing as some of it is, there’s a lot of darkness there, too. You have to deal with your past and where you come from to understand who you are and where you’re going. I grew up without a father since I was eight years old, so I’m a fatherless guy, and my younger brothers, who were six and four, are even more fatherless. We grew up without a dad for the majority of our lives. If you don’t know your history, you have to try to learn it in order to see what you’re doing wrong now, if that makes any sense.

SM: Well, if you don’t mind me asking questions about you personally—

JB: No, not at all.

SM: The final line at the end of your bio on the Penguin website reads: “I’m the father of a son, Jacob, and a writer.” What do you see as the relationship between those roles—father and writer?

JB: Well, this is a question probably you and I will have to—well, actually it plays right into masculinity—but would take another half hour to deal with in terms of my relationship with my son, because he grew up and I grew up often apart physically because I’ve lived in New Orleans and he’s lived in Toronto for pretty much all of his life. And he’s twenty-one now, so he’s at that age where he is his own man but I still see the boy in him. I especially see how I’ve not done my duties as a father and need to be reminded once in a while by my wife, Amanda (not Jacob’s mom, obviously), that I did the best I could. That’s all anyone can do, you know what I mean? My son’s a good kid and a strong kid, and he’s much his father in terms of searching for who he is and what he is at a very difficult age for a young man. You remember what it was like to be nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one and twenty-two? So that’s where he is now and I’m almost reliving it when I think of him. When we talk, I almost relive those years, which were very tough for me. But it has absolutely everything to do with masculinities.

How do you deal with and raise your own children, facing that and saying, “No, I wasn’t a perfect dad. I was far from it. At least I was there though.” And that’s what’s important is that you’re there when your child needs you. I think my son was lucky that I was there. I was lucky that my father was there at least for as long as he could be before he died. But I think so much of the issues of masculinity is needing a strong male role model, who is not just a tough guy or whatever, but somebody who can really show that effeminate side, ultimately is what it boils down to. That side that you’re not afraid to be gentle and kind and overly fawning or doting. Brings up a lot talking about this. About my son’s and my relationship.

SM: As a parent, it’s difficult to show vulnerability because we’re taught in various ways that to be masculine is to be strong, right? And so, to create scenarios in which vulnerability is actually a sign of strength is a really difficult thing to do. Which connects, I believe, to the role of the writer because literature allows people to experience vulnerability in a safe way.

JB: You can turn the TV off when you’re watching a movie, you can close the book, absolutely, yeah.

SM: And also, for people—because it’s a personal, one-on-one relationship with the book you’re holding in your hand—someone who is very scared of their vulnerable side or who doesn’t want to present it to others can still share that with a text, right? So, to tie it back to the novels, Three Day Road got a lot of people reading books about Indigenous issues who would never otherwise pick up Indigenous lit. What do you see as the power or role of story in seeking other possibilities for masculinity?

JB: I can only give a personal example. Recently, CBC Radio had an idea for a program called Bad Behaviour and they asked me—and probably seven or eight other people—to write something and expose some little dark side, a small glimpse. So the original thing that I wrote was about being a punk rock kid and getting into a lot of trouble and watching friends die and a few go to jail and me somehow surviving. But they kinda pushed me and said, “Can you be more specific because it’s only a four-or five-minute little story that you give to leave the listener thinking.” I suffer from depression but hadn’t for many, many years. And two years ago I was in a very bad place again I hadn’t seen in decades, to the point that I was very fearful for my own life. And my wife Amanda, who’s incredible, was trying to work me through it. It’s very difficult being married to a person who suffers this kinda thing. But she was like, “Well, do something.” I said, “You know what I wanna do? I wanna write about my own attempt at suicide when I was sixteen, a very serious attempt, and I’m gonna give this to them and blow them away and say, ‘Fuck you,’ to the demons.”

AND SO THAT’S PART OF BEING A MAN IS ADMITTING THAT YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY VULNERABLE, THAT YOU FUCKED UP, THAT YOU MESSED UP.

So that’s what I did, I wrote a piece called “Walk to Morning,” and it’s about attempting suicide when I was sixteen by jumping in front of a car and miraculously surviving. But then I realized as I was writing it that, number one, I am dealing with my issues really directly but, number two, now that I’m a figure that people might listen to, I can’t in any way glorify the idea of suicide, so I brought in the bigger issue of Moosonee and Moose Factory and First Nations small communities across Canada. In Moosonee, there were eleven attempts—no, eleven successes—and probably 100 attempts in a community of 2,500 last year. And I finally realized that I feel like I’m a man since I’ve done this because I’m very vulnerable now. I’ve opened my most personal and dark times to Canada, and I’ve done it not just for me. I’ve done it because I’m feeling the pain of my friends who are losing their children. One of my friends lost two of their kids in six months, killed themselves. It’s that kind of thing. I end the piece for CBC begging, if at all you feel the way I did, walk through till morning because I tried it at night and if I’d just kept walking, I might have…

And so that’s part of being a man is admitting that you’re absolutely vulnerable, that you fucked up, that you messed up. I’ve taken it up as a cause, this idea of not allowing certain issues that are deadly to be hidden: “We shouldn’t talk about them for fear of them being like a contagion.” That’s not the way suicide works, I realize. That’s not the way depression works. That’s not the way drug addiction works. It’s talking about and bringing it open on the table and saying, “Let’s look at it.” And that’s ultimately for me at this point in my life what masculinity is.