Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. Abel currently teaches classes on creative writing, contemporary Indigenous poetry, as well as research-creation at the University of Alberta. Having published multiple poetry books like The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited, and Injun, Abel has won multiple prizes for his writing such as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Additionally, in 2021, he published NISHGA, an autobiographical assembly of illustrations, poetry, audio recordings, and legal documents as a means of discussing intergenerational trauma, displacement, and dispossession. For Abel, writing is a tool of reconnection and a method of healing. As the founding editor of Yarrow, publishing the best new and established Indigenous literary writings, Abel can be regarded as an inspiration for young neechie authors and poets.
TC: What were you like growing up, and did you ever expect yourself to be where you are now?
JA: As a kid, I was very, very unpopular. In part because I just loved reading and writing and wasn’t particularly good at other things. I remember being at some kind of social gathering and somebody gave me a pad of paper to draw pictures on or something. Instead of drawing, I started writing a story, and that was a thing I really enjoyed doing and continued to enjoy throughout my childhood and youth. It was never something I thought I could move forward with; it was just something I liked doing. It was not until partway through my undergrad that I did a Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Alberta, where I work now. When I started my undergrad, I started in sciences. I had no intention of ever following through with anything creative. Partway through that Bachelor of Arts was when I thought I could continue forward or at least take a shot at trying to exist in the creative writing and literature world.
TC: So, would you say you’ve always been a storyteller?
JA: Yeah, I think so. There’s been this creative impulse I’ve had my whole life to create stories, create narratives, create words. Maybe even more than stories, I’ve just been interested in the textures of language. That’s been kind of the through line for me.
TC: That makes sense. Do you remember the first story you wrote?
JA: The best way I can describe it is as really bad Star Trek fanfiction, but I loved it so much. I was so proud of it and I was really, really deeply into it. And I remember I showed it to my teacher at the time, must’ve been like Grade 2 or 3, and I was like, “Look at this amazing thing I wrote!” I guess she’d never seen Star Trek, so she had all these questions like, “What is this ‘warp speed’ you’re talking about?” And I had no idea how to describe it to her. That’s the first thing I can remember writing.
TC: I love that. I can also admit that writing fanfiction has become a distraction for me.
JA: I think it’s great. Not only do I think fanfiction is cool in its own right, it has its own place, but I think for writers, it has a really important developmental role because writing is a really hard thing to do. Especially in fiction writing, not only do you have to be able to write a sentence, you also have to be able to think about character and setting and dialogue and all of these other things. And when you write fanfic, some of that is a little easier because, like, here’s a character I already know, here’s a setting that is sort of familiar. You don’t have to spend a lot of time creating these things yourself; you can use them as jumping-off points. When I think about my early interests in fanfiction, thinking back on it, that was a point when I learned something, that was a point when I learned to do something, or at least part of a thing. I learned how to write part of a story. It’s a difficult thing to do, and by learning bits and pieces over the years, that’s how you put the whole thing together eventually.
TC: Do you think the community of fanfiction was a big part of your enjoyment? Or at least the fanbase?
JA: I grew up in a household with very few books. My parents didn’t read, but they did watch TV shows. They were into fiction and narratives, just not through prose and books. They were having discussions about stuff that was happening on the level of creative writing so there was a glimpse of what a creative community might look like there. People getting together, talking about a thing, and other people elsewhere who were also talking about this thing. I guess the way those communities worked, inviting thought and discussion about things, are building blocks of creative work.
TC: How would you describe your writing style or your writing niche?
JA: The thing that I try to write is kind of difficult to describe. I want to write in a way that nobody else writes. I want to do something that is so uniquely me that it can’t be replicated. That looks like different things throughout my publications. I have five published books, and that first one, The Place of Scraps, has a very unique visual style and is a work that is very personal. And maybe this is common for other writers, and certainly when I teach creative writing this is one of the things I tell my students, you have to be in whatever story you’re telling. For me, I feel like if I were to take the intersectional axis approach, I would say one axis is urban Indigenous, another is queer, another is potentially interested in these very particular forms of conceptualism. Aligning all of these unique things together, my writing has to be centred there in some sort of way, and that is the pathway forward for me.
TC: Do you think that any of the writing you did when you were younger continues to impact your writing today?
JA: Everything I’ve ever written has impacted me in one way or another. Positive, negative, or neutral. Those earlier writings were really foundational for me in teaching me what processes of creativity worked for me, and which ones didn’t. They taught me a lot about writing: in particular, they taught me a lot about what I want to do, and what I don’t want to do, and how I exist in relation to creativity. If I want to continue being a creative person and if I want to continue doing this stuff, I have to find a creative practice that nurtures me in some way, or at least is one I can live with and enjoy sometimes. So, after that moment, I made this really conscious decision to just do writing that made sense for me, and that I thought was fun. That turned out to be work that was highly conceptual and work that was tactile sometimes, and work that didn’t look like writing to a bunch of my cohort, but it was work I really believed in and that I thought was cool. That was when I started writing The Place of Scraps, and that was a really important moment for me when I shifted gears and started down a different path of creativity. This is the path I’ve been on ever since. Every book I’ve written has had some kind of conceptual component to it; the one biggest exception is NISHGA, which is my memoir. It’s not a conceptual book, but it includes some concrete poetry and writing, and then it’s also very visual and design focused. In this incredibly difficult book about intergenerational trauma and the afterlife of Residential Schools, on the level of designing it, and putting it together, there was a lot of positive creative energy that allowed me to carry forward. If I had to write it in a more traditional style it would have never happened. I had to do it in a way that was uniquely me. These are all lessons I’ve carried forward, and that’s the only way I’m really capable of writing. I do think that everyone is good at something particular, and I have to lean into my areas of strength and that just happens to be this particular weird intersection of thinking deeply about Indigenous issues, and different Indigenous issues with every book, and also thinking about conceptual writing and where those things can meet and overlap.
TC: I really like hearing how you had this moment of “let me figure out how to shift this thing I don’t like, because I obviously still love being a creative.” I feel like a lot of young people force themselves to like things, and then they grow up hating it later.
JA: Yeah, I thought I was supposed to write a particular way, or I saw what other people were doing and I thought I had to be doing that to be successful, but that’s not true, and that’s a difficult thing to learn.
TC: Do you think Yarrow came from that sort of thinking? How did the lessons you learned throughout your life lead you to creating this space for Indigenous writers?
JA: Good question. Yarrow came from two main places. Maybe three places. The first place is that Chelsea Novak, Jessica Johns, Conor Kerr, and I were all really interested in Indigenous literatures and were also really interested in centering the place we live, work and exist: Treaty Six territory. We felt like there was a space for Indigenous literatures here that needed to be filled; we needed to uplift Indigenous voices. The second thing is that we feel like there’s a deficit of Indigenous editors in Canada, and the only way to get more is to create more opportunities for Indigenous editors. And the third thing: Yarrow represents a particular type of opportunity that wasn’t available to me as an emerging writer and editor in 2009-11. I was trying really hard to break into the publishing industry in Vancouver and I was having zero luck. So my hope is that Yarrow can potentially be the answer for other people to do work in a low-barrier way. I guess all of my experiences in writing and publishing have informed the way I want Yarrow to work. When I say “low-barrier” I truly mean that. Our mentorship is open to any emerging Indigenous editor in Canada, whether affiliated with a university program or not. I really want to help create positive opportunities for Indigenous peoples entering into this field, both as writers and as editors. I think it’s important that we exist here, that we have spaces, and we have pathways forward. It’s important we don’t get roadblocked like I did, that we don’t feel like there’s no way to enter.
TC: You talk about having this space for Indigenous writers and editors, and opening it up, but is there anything else that you think is really important for them? Or is it just having the opportunity?
JA: There are two things I can think of. I do think it’s important to have that opportunity to try out things and do some substantial editing you can put on your resume. The way that writing and editing work is that you need to be in relation with other people, and so one of the things Yarrow can do is begin to create pathways for some of our emerging editors to meet other people in the publishing world and to create those connections. I think the idea of networking is kind of gross, and I don’t love it, but I do far prefer something that is more generous and more reciprocal, so you actually enter into real relationships with others in the industry. The other thing is that I do think it’s really important for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to learn how to edit Indigenous writing if you’re going to be in publishing. We are open to any mentorship with any emerging Indigenous editors in Canada, but also for U of A specifically, we’re opening it up to non-Indigenous peoples as well. It’s not possible, probably, for every Indigenous piece of writing to be edited by an Indigenous person, even if we trade and find more editors; there are just not enough for it to be possible. I want non-Indigenous editors who work with us to have some footing in how to work with Indigenous writing. How to carry it forward in respectful ways, and not, in the worst case, in ways that are insulting and problematic.
TC: It makes a lot of sense to open it to non-Indigenous editors. I’ve had pieces edited by non-Indigenous editors, and it was clear there was a gap between us. What I had written was an Indigenous teaching, but they believed it was just a metaphor. Or being assigned an Indigenous creative work just because I am Indigenous, but not fully having the skills to work with the piece. Do you have any messages for anybody who wants to get into this area of Indigenous literature?
JA: A couple of different messages. The first one would be that I really am hoping that people take me up on volunteering and working with me. The way you do that is just by filling out a form on the Yarrow website. And the second thing for Indigenous editors and writers, I do think it’s really important to continue to try to exist within writing and publishing. It’s important for Indigenous editors and writers to be able to tell their own stories in their own ways and not be confined or constrained by non-Indigenous expectations of what Indigenous literatures are or can be. There’s a particular desire on the part of the publishing industry to say that Indigenous literatures are this thing, they fit into this box, and anything that is outside of this box doesn’t really work for us—and I guess my message is to tear down those boundaries to say that Indigenous literatures is anything Indigenous peoples want them to be. We need to have a narrative sovereignty over what it is we produce.