In ten artful texts, Whitehead combines the personal (familial trauma, an eating disorder and sexual assault, e.g.) with the political while challenging standards and definitions as declared by Western academia. In this essay collection, he contemplates Indigeneity, queerness, and mental health under settler colonialism in North America. Joshua Whitehead, author of the fantastic Jonny Appleseed, is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation who holds a PhD in Indigenous Literatrures and Cultures. Now Nominated for the PEN AMERICA Open Book Award 2023 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. 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.

Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. 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. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”-beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession. The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world

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