Making Love with the Land: Essays

by Joshua Whitehead Narrated by Joshua Whitehead

Overview

A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world



In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"-beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.



Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly-even joyfully-maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Joshua Whitehead performs his essay collection, which centers on Indigiqueer identity and living in an Indigenous body in a society formed by colonialism. Each essay intimately presents Whitehead’s perspective as he examines the world around him and works through discussions of intergenerational trauma, the stories of his family’s experience, and Indigenous storytelling. Whitehead contemplates his personal pain and transformation, what they mean for him as an artist, and how these ideas will change his writing. Throughout the collection, much of Whitehead’s narration remains emotionally removed from his deeply personal subject matter. With his stunning prose, Whitehead’s writing is emotionally complex, but his performance is a missed opportunity to echo that emotional depth for listeners. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/29/2022

Novelist Whitehead (Jonny Appleseed) examines the relationship between queerness, the body, and language in his intimate first foray into nonfiction. In “I Own a Body That Wants to Break,” Whitehead reflects on his experience with disordered eating, finding that the root for the word body in Middle English means “trunk”: “Again this blanket of flesh is rooted in the land,” he writes. “Writing as a Rupture” considers genres and what autobiography means (“In what ways is an autobiography also an obituary?”), while “The Year in Video Gaming” examines how Fortnite served as “a medium for escapism, entertainment, and social enrichment” when his cousins turned to it after a death in the family. “My Aunties Are Wolverines” is a reflection on mourning, and “Who Names the Rez Dog Rez” asks “What does loneliness mean to a rez dog whose foot is wounded from a trapper’s coils?” Whitehead weaves Indigenous Cree language throughout the essays to powerful effect, and though his metaphors can at times be winding, he asks moving questions without resorting to simple answers—“Can a body be sovereign if you continually self-destruct it?” he asks, and “What does it mean to let go of the self?” Fans of the personal essay will relish Whitehead’s evocative, rich prose. Agent: Stephanie Sinclair, CookeMcDermid. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

"Joshua Whitehead's Making Love with the Land is defiantly artful. The essays are alert to so much of the beauty and the terror of the world. I imagine they cost a great deal to write. While reading, I was entirely overcome with gratitude. How lucky we all are to witness Whitehead's kinetic thinking as well as to be in pain with him. A truly dazzling feat of heart, analysis, and sentence-making." —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World and A History of My Brief Body

 

"In his latest ‘wonderwork,’ Joshua Whitehead continues his signature and significant mission to undo colonial notions of genre, pushing the boundaries of memoir and cultural commentary into a wholly new, otherworldly terrain. Here, he makes love with body, kin, queerness, and music, demonstrating how making love isn’t just an act of pleasure, but also one of grief, pain, and sometimes even solitude. A voice to listen to, learn from, cherish." —Vivek Shraya, author of People Change and I’m Afraid of Men

 

"In this essay collection, Joshua Whitehead pushes at the possibilities of form, and the results are consistently a mix of the revelatory and the sublime. A chiaroscuro of self-questioning directed inward as a way to go outward—affectionate, resolute, playful, and wise. Brilliant lessons learned are on offer here, but more as an invitation to re-experience what you might not know you know." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

 

"An elegiac and elegant book of revelations, confessions, and reverberations." —Kirkus Reviews

 

"Thrillingly cerebral. . . . Delivered with virtuoso aplomb." —The New York Times

 

"Whitehead weaves Indigenous Cree language throughout the essays to powerful effect, and though his metaphors can at times be winding, he asks moving questions without resorting to simple answers... Fans of the personal essay will relish Whitehead’s evocative, rich prose." —Publishers Weekly

 

"An absorbing and compelling work of nonfiction."—Inside Hook

 

"A funny, moving, original story about a 20-something Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer

person living and loving and working and remembering in the week

leading up to his stepdad’s funeral."—Laura Sackton, Book Riot

 

"Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live."—Erica Ezeifedi, Book Riot

 

"An excellent book for anyone interested in the art of language and communication, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand more about queer and/or NDN experiences."—The Frumious Consortium

 

"In Joshua Whitehead’s Making Love With the Land, every single sentence leaves a sense of awe as the author offers deeply personal and powerful observations with breathtaking prose. Whitehead writes in such an intimate, poetic and vulnerable way that his work is truly like nothing else. "—Fulton Sun

 

"Meditative and wholly cathartic, Making Love with the Land is a book to savor, its words best experienced the second time after letting them fully wash over you. "—Electric Literature

 

"Whitehead’s writing can be challenging in the best way, asking readers to reexamine ideas around literature and what it can do. There’s something special about the way Whitehead discusses storytelling, especially the way he examines how his personal experience informs his writing."—Kendra Winchester, Book Riot

 

"Beautifully written and deeply vulnerable, Whitehead reflects on his life experiences, opening up about his eating disorder, sexual assault, queerness, being Indigenous, and more. Full of striking, powerful quotes, this thought-provoking book is both heartbreaking and awe-inspiring."—Northern Wilds

 

"Whitehead compellingly examines relationships in a wholistic manner that captures Indigenous understandings of kinship, time, and place. His work is invaluable in examining Two-Spirit Indigenous perspectives on settler colonialism."—H-Net

 

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Joshua Whitehead performs his essay collection, which centers on Indigiqueer identity and living in an Indigenous body in a society formed by colonialism. Each essay intimately presents Whitehead’s perspective as he examines the world around him and works through discussions of intergenerational trauma, the stories of his family’s experience, and Indigenous storytelling. Whitehead contemplates his personal pain and transformation, what they mean for him as an artist, and how these ideas will change his writing. Throughout the collection, much of Whitehead’s narration remains emotionally removed from his deeply personal subject matter. With his stunning prose, Whitehead’s writing is emotionally complex, but his performance is a missed opportunity to echo that emotional depth for listeners. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-08-17
A collection of essays by a poet, novelist, and professor of international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary.

“Am I queer enough to be queer? Perhaps the answer is no. But also, perhaps the answer is yes.” So asks Whitehead, Oji-Cree/nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation. The author resists classification precisely because, borrowing a page from Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. “I identify as Two-Spirit,” he writes, “which means much more than simply my sexual preference within Western ways of knowing, but rather that I am queer, femme/iskwewayi, male/ nâpew, and situated this way in relation to my homelands and communities.” In other words, even as he rejects old, often outdated terms, Whitehead demands to be deemed whatever he deems himself to be—a recipe for loneliness as a teenager, he allows, one that, with weight issues mixed into the brew, yielded cause for alienation and angst. The opening essay highlights an extended metaphor about likening himself to the rough-and-tumble “rez dogs” that own the territory between wild and settled. A brave rez dog was able to chase down a bear, an event that Whitehead likens to a kind of possession, the spirit of the bear churning inside himself as he eats it, “his amino acids and my body-milk coming together and syllabic elements.” While some of the pieces are celebratory, honoring the homeland implied in his title, others are mournful. Some focus on the recognition that the world is on the edge of apocalypse and that its Indigenous peoples “have moved into a post-dystopian future.” Then there is the loss of loved ones to death or separation, the cancers and other diseases that carry away parents and relatives. 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176765816
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/27/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	977,443

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