Making Love with the Land

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The boundary- and genre-bending non-fiction collection from the Giller-longlisted, GG-shortlisted and Canada Reads– winning author of Jonny Appleseed.

“The land and its elements are my aunties calling me home, into that centre point which is a nowhere, by which I mean a place that English has no words for, is an everywhere, is a bingo hall, is a fourth plane, is an ocean.”

Making Love with the Land is a startling, challenging, uncompromising look at what it means to live as an Indigenous person “in the rupture” between identities. In these ten unique, heart-piercing non-fiction pieces, award-winning writer Joshua Whitehead illuminates the com­plex moment we’re living through now, in which 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 ideas, histories, words, our very bodies?

Intellectually thrilling and emotionally captivat­ing, this book is a love song for the world—and for the library of stories to be found where body meets land, waiting to be unearthed and summoned into word.

JOSHUA WHITEHEAD is an Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of the bestselling novel Jonny Appleseed (2018), which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and won Canada Reads and a Lambda Literary Award; and the poetry col­lection full-metal indigiqueer (2017). In 2016, he won the Governor General’s History Award for the Indigenous Arts and Stories Challenge. He is also the editor of Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Specula­tive Fiction. Whitehead is an Assistant Professor of English and Indigenous Studies at the Uni­versity of Calgary (Treaty 7). He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

ISBN: 9780735278882
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: June 18, 2024

"[Making Love With the Land] defies categorization . . . mov[ing] between genres and languages in a series of essays that open up a whole new window on the meaning of Canadian literature.” —Maclean’s

“Astonishing. . . . [Whitehead] defies every genre. His thrillingly cerebral passages delve as deeply into academic theory as they do into ancestral visions, legends and dreams. . . . [All] delivered with virtuoso aplomb.” —The New York Times

“Joshua Whitehead is one of those rare writers: he can turn his hand to any form and make it his own. . . . Making Love with the Land is a series of essays with a fluidity, as you might expect from Whitehead, between form and subject.” —Toronto Star

“Daringly experimental in form and refreshingly radical in message. . . . [Making Love with the Land] is a groundbreaking exploration . . . and a testament to the idea that our stories are so much more than our traumas.” —Xtra

“While some of the pieces [in Making Love with the Land] are celebratory, honoring the homeland implied in his title, others are mournful. . . . Throughout, Whitehead is a lyric poet writing in prose, proudly declaring himself to be “transgressive [and] punk”—and, very clearly, a survivor. An elegiac and elegant book of revelations, confessions, and reverberations.” —Kirkus Reviews