Few writers are as prolific as literary virtuoso Billy-Ray Belcourt. His work is boundless –a brilliant mediation of the body, queerness, love and kinship.
As a member of Driftpile Cree First Nation, Belcourt holds a PhD from the University of Alberta, and also received a Rhodes Scholarship and an Indispire Award. Currently, he’s an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at University of British Columbia.
Belcourt has breaking boundaries and blowing up old colonial ways of doing things in Canadian Literature since his luminous debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World (2017) which was the recipient of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Then he published NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (2019), which received the 2020 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Award for Poetry and was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body (2020), won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Governor General’s Literary Award. His debut novel, A Minor Chorus (2020), awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Belcourt’s most recent book, Coexistence (2024), is a short story collection exploring Indigenous love, loneliness, connection, and the domestic.
Shannon Webb-Campbell: What inspired your new short story collection Coexistence?
Billy-Ray Belcourt: I had an urge to write a story about a queer Indigenous couple in which nothing traumatic happened. Out of this urge came the characters in “Lived Experience.” I wanted to write about queer Indigenous love in a way that felt more authentic to my experience and my friends’ experiences: love that is domestic and subtle and intense and rooted in place. Once I started writing the two characters from the above story into being, others emerged in the periphery. I sought out those characters and thus a collection came into being.
Webb-Campbell: In the short story “Lived Experience,” the character mediates on love. “That’s what love is – someone else’s spirit moving through you. When someone moves through you they leave behind a small trace of human life. It’s how we know we’re still alive” (page 29).
Why is Indigenous love an important theme for you to explore as a writer?
Belcourt: Growing up as I did in rural northern Alberta, I was surrounded by Indigenous love. It was an ordinary occurrence, marked by all the minor and major dramas of living. Eventually, I realized there were few literary depictions of Indigenous love, especially between queer Indigenous people. I wanted to write about the messiness of love as well as its triumphs so that readers could be exposed to the whole range of Indigenous emotional experience.
Webb-Campbell: There are some really gorgeous poetic lines and meditations on language throughout Coexistence. In particular, I loved when the student says “A beautiful sentence is a reason to live. We write because we want to keep living” (page 58). I can deeply relate. I also felt a shared sadness with the character when they state: “I returned to class, not with added agony but roused once again by the knowledge that language was all I had. If I gave up on it, I’d be nothing” (page 60).
How does and/or doesn’t poetry lend itself to short stories?
Belcourt: In the introduction to her collection of plays, Deborah Levy remarks that she made the characters in her plays say things outside the expected range of everyday speech (I’m paraphrasing). This moved me and I understood it immediately. A story could be a place for characters to use language in ways we don’t expect “real people” to. Maybe because I was a poet first, but this approach felt intuitive to me. I didn’t want to wholly suppress my poetic instinct; I wanted instead to allow it to add another dimension of thought and language to the stories.
Webb-Campbell: What are the challenges of writing and crafting short stories?
Belcourt: Short stories are an exercise in ambition and compression. You have to gesture to and sketch out entire lives in a relatively small space or frame. Everything you include has to be in some way essential. I wrote a few drafts of some of the stories so that I could get to this place of refinement.
Webb-Campbell: There’s some incredible humour and insight into human existence, queerness, the settler state, loneliness, belonging, and homelands through a brilliant Indigenous lens. Can you tell Muskrat Magazine readers why these themes resonate with you as a writer?
Belcourt: I’m so glad the humor comes across! My primary mode is more elegiac and cerebral, but to be funny is important to me as a writer. Humour can be a defense mechanism or a relief, and I think I use it in both ways, sometimes at once. Without humour, even dark humour, so much of the Indigenous experience is elided.
Further, I tackle these themes – queerness, colonialism, loneliness, belonging, etc. – because they are the components of a queer Indigenous life. I’m not sure what else I’d write about if I didn’t write about them!
Webb-Campbell: As a poet, writer and creative writing professor at the University of British Columbia, I am most intrigued how creative writing as a vocation became a subject in Coexistence (for example, “Poetry Class and “Literary Festival”). There’s an incredible playfulness working here. Are you taking a jab at the industry, yourself, all of it? What informed these two stories in particular?
Belcourt: All my adult life I’ve been in universities. The academic life is a mode of living I am very attuned to. So, I decided I would write into that knowledge and intimacy. The character I invented for those stories – “Poetry Class” and “Literary Festival” – could give expression to some of my concerns and thoughts and aspirations but ultimately, he is his own self, someone distinct from me. He can’t envision himself outside the university, outside the classroom, and this becomes both a source of frustration and consolation. So many conflicting desires!
Webb-Campbell: Describe your writing practice. Do you like to write in public, or alone? On a laptop or by hand? Is there a difference when you approach poetry versus fiction?
Belcourt: I write intensely when I have a strong idea and time to realize it – so usually in the spring and summer when I’m not teaching. I need entire days sometimes just to figure out if an idea is worth pursuing. I’ll sit at cafes and write into what I think I want to say. I reread the drafts on my phone in all kinds of places – on planes and trains, in the bathtub, in line at a grocery store. If my interest is held and new directions whirl inside my head, I proceed. The process is always the same so far.
Webb-Campbell: What advice do you have for young queer aspiring Indigenous writers?
Belcourt: Write into the space you wish you had for yourself! Be honest about your desires and hopes; don’t diminish your poems and stories by trying to appease white audiences. Hold the possibility of a beautiful queer Indigenous audience in complete regard and certainty.
Webb-Campbell: What do you hope readers take away from Coexistence?
Belcourt: A sense of what it means to desire and make art and love and lose as an Indigenous person. I think of this book as my book about the Indigenous domestic. I hope it gives readers a glimpse into the minutiae of our daily lives, the facets that don’t often make their way into public discourse.
