CURRENT ISSUE

Stories as Medicine:
Dayne Brelyn interviews Lareina Abbott

Thank you so much for sharing “Misi Yehewin–Big Breath.” “Misi Yehewin–Big Breath,” as well as being the title, is so central to this piece and creates a gentle rhythm throughout it. How did Misi Yehewin guide your writing in this piece? Does the idea of Misi Yehewin–Big Breath guide any of your other writing?

This essay was one of the first pieces that came to me when I switched over to the writer’s path. At the time I was struggling with chronic illness and the realization that there were things I would never be able to do again. It was also at the start of my back-to-culture journey and my perception of time was changing from a western viewpoint that involved achieving milestones in a linear fashion, to looking at my life events as a series of spokes on a wheel, that did not have to be repeated to be re-experienced.

The breaths indicate moments where I was both breathing to manage pain, and breathing to drop into important experiences in my life. Through this practice I discovered the astonishing power of stories as medicine. I would say that this concept of time is a part of most of my writing, although I didn’t realize that until now.

Except for the beginning and ending sections, every paragraph begins with an age. Why was age an important touchstone for grounding the reader in this piece for you?

Just like a legend in a map gives you a symbol to represent where you are in space, age in “Misi Yehewin–Big Breath” is a symbol to show where I was in my linear timeline when I dropped into those specific experiences. It is a translation tool from one cultural perception to another.

“Misi Yehewin–Big Breath” beautifully plays with memory and meditation, with these scenes feeling both specific and fleeting. What was your process in writing memory as it is, or can be, experienced?

This is a tough question. How do you explain a process that you don’t remember doing? Often times when I write I look back at what I’ve written and wonder where it came from, or how I could possibly recreate the conditions of inspiration. I do know that often when I write something I love, I am overwhelmed with the rhythm of it, and the words repeat in my head over and over. I know that when I truly drop down into that river of memory, that body of echo water, that I often cry when I read the outcome. I still cry every time I read the bit in “Misi Yehewin–Big Breath” about losing my mother. Maybe the real question is how to write emotion without melodrama, and that one I am still trying to figure out.

You are a two-time winner of the Kemosa Scholarship, an award for Indigenous writers who are mothers, and in “Misi Yehewin–Big Breath” motherhood is explored through the grief of a mother lost and your experience of motherhood with your daughter. How does motherhood shape your writing?

It is wonderful how you saw this in my writing when I missed it. In some ways, all aspects of the triad of female archetypes are present in this piece: a maiden losing her mother, a mother birthing a child, a crone losing her uterus.

In my unpublished memoir and also in a piece I wrote for Chapter House journal called “Windflower,” I ask if the generations of women who died young in my family are the result of trying to “lean in” because their own parents were either dead or desperately trying to just survive due to the continual trauma of colonization. I grew up with a healthy dose of family pride and stubbornness, and I really believed I could make anything happen. But now that I am a parent of a teenager, I realize what my parents went through to get to where they were, and that losing them so young wasn’t just an emotional loss but a physical one that cost me later in life. How do you separate parenthood from the other parts of living a life? The mind-blowing joy and the overwhelming difficulties of parenthood infuse all of my works.

In addition to memoir, you also write speculative fiction. Does speculative fiction inform your memoir writing? Are there techniques or practices you learned from one genre that you’ve applied to the other?

Speculative fiction has always more clearly described my life than straight creative non-fiction. I’ve always believed in the power of speculative fiction to offer hope. I’m intrigued by speculative non-fiction because it aligns more with how I perceive the world and I’d like to delve into this writing genre in the future.

Stephen Graham Jones describes speculative fiction in Indigenous literatures better than I can in his Never Whistle at Night introduction. He writes that “It feels kind of fake and wrong and all too American to throw up walls between what’s real and what’s maybe not real. So telling ourselves stories about the world being bigger than we thought, big enough for bigfoot and little people, that’s really kind of saying to the so-called settlers that, hey, yeah, so you took all the land you could see. But what about all this other territory you don’t even know about man?”

Do you have any future projects that you’re working on that you'd like to share about?

I have two works in progress at the moment. The first is my creative non-fiction project called Song Back Grandmother, which documents the year I spent travelling to reconnect with my Métis family and take part in ceremony. It is, true to form, a non-linear story that weaves that year of reconnection with the oral stories of my aunt, who is a Métis elder, about her upbringing in a northern Métis family, with my recollections of growing up in northern Alberta, and with what I’ve learned about Métis history and culture.

My second project is a dark speculative fiction Métis ghost story called Roadside Allowance Gods, which tells the story of a Métis man who dies in a car accident on the highway and is met by three Métis gods (Jesus, Li Jhyaab the Métis Devil, and Auntie) who bring him to his past to help him figure out who he is, so they know where to put him in the afterlife. It’s a novel about identity and my love of Alberta and northern landscapes, and is written in response to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

 

 

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