Welcome to Litsy!

I can‘t wrap my head around what this woman has gone through. I normally don‘t read true crime, or autobiographies in general. However, her story has always resonated with me. #truecrime #jayceedugard #autobiographies

This is an experimental novel / not really a novel by western conventional standards, as it is just as much academic theorizing as a narrative. On the sentence level I found a lot to love here, BRB is such an amazing wordsmith/poet. As a piece of fiction this is a meandering collection of conversations and throughts that ask questions and broach topics w/ no answers or resolutions. If you like that kind of thing + smart poetic writing, read this.

Check out Meredith‘s book recommendation of The Orange Shirt Story on this weeks Manuscript Monday. https://www.bookinterrupted.com/post/manuscript-monday-the-orange-shirt-story

Billy-Ray Belcourt is an award-winning queer poet, memoirist & essayist from Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta. His deeply philosophical experimental debut novel is about how individual lives are inevitably shaped by community and by larger social, political and historical forces. #LGBTQ #Indigenous #CanadianAuthor

After he left, when I was alone in a throbbing silence, I thought: Maybe I‘m predisposed to being a writer because I radiate emotion so openly.

I‘ve been trained to see the novel as this capacious and possibly dissident form for the articulation of social life. I‘ve been thinking: What if I wrote one myself? I‘d reach a larger audience. I could represent the lives of queer and Cree people without the constraints of scholarly norms.

This was great! Not a traditional novel, more of a character study or a study of place. I liked the interview style narrative linking the bigger conversations together

Lyrical, poetic, & often philosophical, Belcourt‘s novel debut (he‘s a published poet) tells the story of a queer Indigenous graduate student who steps away from his PhD program to write a novel. This is a story about identity, belonging, whether or not any accommodation can be reached between a system/institution/tool of oppression & the people it oppresses & much more. Complex, compelling & definitely thought-provoking. Recommended.