PRAIRIE BOYSPIRIT: An NDN Memoir

A Queer Métis writer bleeds truth onto the page, confronting addiction, white-passingness, and cultural displacement while burning sage from crystal shops and praying to a God that's equal parts Catholic guilt and Cree cosmology.

Between Calgary's black ice and Winnipeg's permanent winter lies a geography of belonging defying any easy categorization. In this debut collection of linked essays, Brennan Kenneth Brown maps the invisible territories where Indigenous and settler identities collide and coalesce, where ceremony bleeds into survival, and where the wild refuses to be forgotten.

Through bizarre-lyric prose cutting as deep as prairie frost, Brown chronicles his journey as a Queer Métis man navigating urban landscapes and ancestral memories. From founding a university writing club becoming unlikely family, to seeking ceremony in crystal shop sage and borrowed prayers, to bleeding into British Columbia's untamed spaces, these essays explore what it means to create home in the hyphen-spaces between cultures.

PRAIRIE BOYSPIRIT is both map and ceremony, both wound and medicine. Brown traces his path through university classrooms and downtown shadows, through makeshift rituals and inherited trauma, and he reveals how identity, like the land itself, refuses to be claimed or contained. This is a book for anyone who has ever searched for belonging in the spaces between worlds—a testament to how we survive, create community, and find our way back to ourselves through the geographies we inherit and the ones we create.

From the mountains' permanent judgment to the prairies' endless horizon, from the chinook winds' false promises to the Red River's ancient wisdom, Brown's debut marks the emergence of a vital new voice in Indigenous literature and nature writing. This book remembers what the land has always known: Some stories can only be told in the language of rivers and rocks, of sweetgrass and sage, of snow and silence.