Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead
CBC Books | | Posted: March 10, 2022 2:54 PM | Last Updated: November 1, 2022
A personal essay collection exploring Indigeneity, queerness and identity
In the last few years, following the publication of his debut novel Jonny Appleseed, Joshua Whitehead has emerged as one of the most exciting and important new voices on Turtle Island. Now, in this first nonfiction work, Whitehead brilliantly explores Indigeneity, queerness and the relationships between body, language and land through a variety of genres (essay, memoir, notes, confession). Making Love with the Land is a startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person "in the rupture" between identities. In sharp, surprising, unique pieces — a number of which have already won awards — Whitehead illuminates this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating new (and old) ideas about "the land." He asks: What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies?
Here is an intellectually thrilling, emotionally captivating love song — a powerful revelation about the library of stories land and body hold together, waiting to be unearthed and summoned into word. (From Knopf Canada)
- Read an excerpt from Making Love with the Land
- Joshua Whitehead's Making Love with the Land explores Indigeneity, queerness and identity
Making Love with the Land is a finalist for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 2, 2022.
Weston Prize jury citation: "A collection that summons the reader into moving explorations of care and kinship with the land and with one another, Making Love with the Land is a lyrical, personal journey to be savoured. Refusing the demands of categorization, Whitehead's beautiful book is equal parts arresting, inviting, and challenging. He writes with fluid dexterity in the English language, while acknowledging the complexity of creating and living in a language that is not always enough."
A collection that summons the reader into moving explorations of care and kinship with the land and with one another, Making Love with the Land is a lyrical, personal journey to be savoured. - 2022 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury
Joshua Whitehead is a two-spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw Indigiqueer scholar, poet, nonfiction writer and novelist from Peguis First Nation. His debut noel Jonny Appleseed, was longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and won a Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction. It also won Canada Reads 2021, when it was championed by actor Devery Jacobs.
Why Joshua Whitehead wrote Making Love with the Land
"Making Love with the Land is very much a sibling to Jonny Appleseed — specifically the reception to that book. Some of the core questions that Jonny grappled with, Joshua is also grappling with, so naturally this book came into being out of necessity, one might say.
The larger aim was to normalize conversations around mental health after years of secret conversations in the corners of rooms that people were having. - Joshua Whitehead
"Some of the lessons I took from Jonny — if I'm going to go there, I'm going to do it on my own terms. And that was kind of what I wanted to do with this book — the larger aim of it was to normalize conversations around mental health after years of secret conversations in the corners of rooms that people were having. And so I felt like the best way that I could do that was to step on the stage and put the spotlight on me and turn it into a monologue, really."