Why Everyone Should Read Billy-Ray Belcourt

• Coexistence
• Billy-Ray Belcourt
• Hamish Hamilton (2024)

Earlier this month, five public figures engaged in a live literary debate as part of CBC’s 23rd annual Canada Reads contest. A former Calgary mayor, a fashion influencer, an actor, an author and an athlete dissected the merits of five powerful, wildly different books by authors in Canada, voting out one book each episode until they crowned the remaining title the winner. This year, the winner was The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou and championed by Montreal author Heather O’Neill.

The potential and limitations of the debate, particularly its structural shortcomings, were the subject of lively discussion by Canadian writers on X. Writer and book marketing director Cynara Geissler noted how it is unfair to judge short story collections using the same criteria we use to judge novels. Author and editor Jen Sookfong Lee described how conventional wisdom about story structure ultimately fails to reflect and respect the lived experiences of racialized authors.

These necessary critiques of Canada Reads were reminders of why it’s important to question how we know what we know, and why we value some forms of narrative production over others. While short stories and contemporary poetry have been the subject of more sustained focus in Canadian literature than in the U.S. and U.K., those and other more experimental literary forms, like graphic novels, are routinely under-sung and largely misunderstood by mainstream audiences. Yet they’re among the most vital, innovative spaces in which people are writing today.

An exemplary collection of short fiction is Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Coexistence, out this May through Hamish Hamilton Canada. It showcases the short story at the height of its powers.

Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta, north of Edmonton. He is the assistant professor of Indigenous creative writing at UBC. His acclaimed previous work has spanned genre and form, setting the stage for Coexistence.

Belcourt’s first book, the 2017 poetry debut This Wound Is a World, is an electric collection that explores how love and sex hold possibilities for healing and transformation, particularly as counterweights to the pain and trauma Indigenous people have carried for generations.

His bestselling 2020 memoir A History of My Brief Body won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. And Belcourt’s most recent work before Coexistence, the 2022 debut novel A Minor Chorus, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Coexistence is a marvelous extension of Belcourt’s oeuvre. We follow his characters across university campuses, from the tiny apartments of their adopted cities to the boreal forests near the northern Alberta reserves where they grew up. On the drive through their home communities, they listen to Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” in the car, closing their days in bed balancing laptops on their chests, propelled by the dual forces of loneliness and longing that shape erotic life.

The stories are set in present day. It’s a time when the rights and struggles of Indigenous peoples are part of public-school curricula, but casual racism persists. It’s baked into everyday interactions, from the way people react to Indigenous men on dating apps to how they stare them down while they’re walking their dog past a house. Belcourt cuts his scenes of fetishization, predation, degradation and hostility with a frankness that speaks to a weary familiarity.

But the redemptive pull of the collection lies in the unabashed permission he provides for his Indigenous characters to get what they want in the form of receiving the love they desire and deserve. And this is where the book feels radical in its generosity, and the work is striking for its clarity of purpose. For all we need to do to survive, what ultimately sustains us is our memories of when we were wanted, of when we were loved.

“I’m content with the art I’ve made and exhibited throughout my career. But mostly what I find myself thinking about are the moments I experienced so much love I couldn’t bear it,” writes the protagonist in the story “My Diary.”

In “Lived Experience,” two young Cree men sit next to each other in a lecture theatre at a university in Edmonton. They start talking and, over the course of the story, fall in love and start building a life together. Later in the book, “My Diary” depicts a man returning to his home reserve in northern Alberta; the long-lost lover he’s dreaming of arrives at the front door, ready to meet him again.

In Belcourt’s reflections on love as an enduring, often complicated life force, I’m reminded of my favourite poem by the late American short story writer Raymond Carver. He published “Late Fragment” in the 1988 collection A New Path to the Waterfall and wrote it while dying of cancer.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

A new way in

In each story in Coexistence, a legacy of heartbreak foregrounds each moment of repair.

“I want to capture the joy that radiates from my mother in the photograph, a version of her I never knew. The painting is my attempt to extend my mother’s happiness,” Belcourt writes from the perspective of his protagonist, Will, a Cree art student preparing a painting for critique in the short story “Young Adults.”

“It has always been my belief that to paint something is to imbue it with life. So I paint the past; I paint the whole damn world.”

What happens next demonstrates why making art about joy — as Will does in this story, and as Belcourt does in all of Coexistence — is both necessary and risky.

“I understand that as an Indigenous artist you want to present an image of an Indigenous person who isn’t suffering. Is that art, though?” a classmate asks Will in the critique. “I’d argue that that’s more sociological. We’re artists, not sociologists.”

Will gathers his things and leaves before the next session. “It’s a small insistence on freedom, an act of self-determination,” Belcourt writes from Will’s perspective. “I also don’t want to cry in front of everyone.”

The scene reminded me of some of the local responses to Canada Reads this year, and how much we need writers like Belcourt to show us the limits of our imaginations while inviting us to see a new way in.

He interrogates the white gaze as an organizing lens through which we understand the world and considers how it has shaped people’s perceptions of themselves and each other. Specifically, who is and isn’t a worthy object of desire. Indigenous love, he writes, is “the most chaotic force in the world” because “we have to desire one another in opposition to the way the white gaze makes us into objects of disdain.”

An affecting quality of Coexistence is how Belcourt cleverly invites the reader to follow his characters into the moments of transformation that spur an expansive shift in how we allow ourselves to love, which has the effect of opening a door. “That’s what love is — someone else’s spirit moving through you,” Belcourt writes.

I want to spend my life walking through those doors described in these stories. I think many of us do. Similarly expansive thinking appears in Vancouver poet Kyla Jamieson’s 2020 poetry collection Body Count, for example, which chronicles living through life-altering injury, disability and healing.

I need a poem
about happiness I haven’t written yet, an ode
to the ducks in my neighbours’
pool, another for the pink magnolias of spring — some trees
make it look so easy: Yes,
I can hold all this beauty up.

This world doesn’t always seem to let us hold so much beauty. So we should pay attention when it arrives in words like these, from Belcourt’s short story “Literary Festival”:

“I wrote about the future because I wanted to invent it. I wrote about the present so that it wouldn’t obliterate me.”

Words to live by. And good reasons to love hard.