Back in August, Service95 was preparing for our first-ever international Book Club event, which was to be hosted in Toronto, Canada, as Dua touched down in the city for the start of the US leg of her Radical Optimism tour. Naturally, we wanted to spotlight a Canadian author. I began, of course, with the big names – Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen. But as I looked over that shortlist, I realised just how limited my knowledge of Canadian literature really was; it barely extended beyond the classics I’d already encountered abroad.
Determined to change that, I started to dig deeper and one name kept coming up: Billy-Ray Belcourt. An award-winning writer, poet and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation, Billy-Ray has, in recent years, become one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Canadian literature. His work – spanning poetry, memoir and fiction – explores the intersections of love, grief, queerness, colonialism and Indigenous identity with rare tenderness and intellectual precision.
I had just two weeks before flying to Canada, and frustratingly, it would take exactly two weeks for Billy-Ray’s latest release, Coexistence, to arrive at my flat. Everything I read about it promised a book both intimate and political – a collection of short stories about Indigenous love, loneliness, grief and everyday existence. Then, in a small moment of serendipity, the book arrived on my doorstep the day before my flight.
For the entire journey across the Atlantic, I was utterly absorbed. Each story in Coexistence stands on its own, yet threads of shared experience weave through them all. The writing felt both expansive and deeply personal, holding space for the ordinary acts that make life possible.
Now, months after that Book Club event, I find myself speaking with Billy-Ray over Zoom. On screen, he’s thoughtful and warm, his words deliberate yet full of ease. As we discuss Coexistence, he distils the book’s essence into a single, resonant sentence: “I suppose the main overarching theme was that we make each other possible,” he says. “In small ways we help each other live. I was interested in looking specifically at Cree people, Indigenous people – what are daily practices of love and care that make the world liveable?”
Through Coexistence, Billy-Ray brings to life a constellation of Indigenous characters who exist in what might be called the ‘in-between’: moments of ordinariness, tenderness and quiet resilience. His focus is not on spectacle or tragedy, but on the ethics of representation itself; how Indigenous and queer life is depicted and what stories are allowed to circulate.
“In Canada and the United States, there is often a desire to see or to consume narratives of Indigenous trauma, and that’s been one of the dominant ways that the larger public has engaged with Indigenous art,” he says. “And I thought: of course we, like everyone else, experience suffering, but we also are joyous and ordinary, and so proper representation of Indigenous life should include all of these things.”
One of my personal favourites in Coexistence is ‘Poetry Class’. It follows a poetry professor through the quiet rhythms of an evening after teaching: the lingering thoughts from class, the small gestures exchanged with his partner whilst sitting on the sofa, the subdued domesticity of their shared life. On the surface, the scene feels almost uneventful, even monotonous. Yet, in Billy-Ray’s hands, this normality becomes luminous. His prose transforms the familiar into something transcendent; a portrait of queer intimacy rendered with such tenderness and intention. In centring a queer Indigenous academic not in trauma but in the simple act of being, ‘Poetry Class’ expands what kinds of stories are told about both queer and Indigenous lives. Billy-Ray creates visibility through softness, love and the mere beauty of the everyday.
“The common adage is that fiction is an empathy machine,” he says. “It can help generate empathy between people from different positions, parts of the world and object activities. And I suppose I want to invite people, readers from wherever into the room with these Indigenous characters to sit with them, to sit with their grief and with their joy and their struggles. Because to be in the room with someone, from a place of empathy, is how it plays a part in historical change.”
“In Canada and the United States, there is often a desire to see or to consume narratives of Indigenous trauma. We, like everyone else, experience suffering, but we also are joyous and ordinary, and so proper representation of Indigenous life should include all of these things”
Billy-Ray’s stories also powerfully confront the lingering and nuanced shadows of Canada’s Colonial history, particularly the devastating legacy of the policies that sought to erase Indigenous identity throughout the 20th century. His fiction doesn’t simply recount history; it reveals how it continues to live within today’s Canadian society. In the story ‘Summer Research’, a PhD student spends the summer dog-sitting in a former residential school’s boarding house, a place where the remnants of Catholicism seem to hum beneath the walls, alive with haunting spiritual echoes. These residential schools, government-sponsored institutions designed to force Indigenous children to assimilate into colonial Canadian culture, operated for more than a century, with more than 150,000 children separated from their families and sent to live within their walls. The last of them only closed in 1996. Reflecting on this sentiment, Billy-Ray tells me, “I was born in the 20th century, so it still inhabits us as intergenerational trauma, as historical memory,” he says. “And I hope that the book compels readers to think about the 20th century as something that still exists now.”
Through stories like ‘Summer Research’, Billy-Ray exposes how the colonial mindset endures, not only in collective memory but in the psychic and spiritual architecture of contemporary life. His work asks readers to reckon with the truth that history is not past; it is a presence that continues to shape how we coexist today: “So, obviously, shifting historically from that era of subjugation to something different – not that we’ve reached it yet, as Indigenous people are still subject to structural violence – I’m hoping, through fiction, to create the conditions to experience and to feel differently and to share in our joy and in our grief, and not to experience it as something alien,” he explains.
As our conversation broadens, we turn to the state of Canadian literature today – how the landscape has evolved since the days of The Handmaid’s Tale or Life of Pi. Billy-Ray reflects on a scene that is, in many ways, flourishing from within. There’s a growing network of Indigenous writers creating space for new voices and stories that once would have been sidelined. Yet, despite this creative momentum, Canadian literature still struggles to escape the shadow of its southern neighbour. “It definitely has a kind of hegemonic influence over us,” he says, acknowledging the cultural and commercial pull of the US publishing industry.
When I ask about the appetite for Canadian – and more specifically Indigenous – writing beyond North America, Billy-Ray shares a more sobering reality: “One of the interesting and somewhat frustrating responses that we would receive from some industry people is that readers in the UK were not interested in reading about Indigenous experiences of colonialism in Canada,” he tells me. “That they didn’t really see a readership for those narratives, which immediately surprised me because, well, so much of our experiences of colonialism in Canada have directly to do with the British. And so there are historical and contemporary direct connections. So it’ll be interesting over the next few years to see how Indigenous texts exist in Europe and in the UK, what relationship people are able to develop to our writing.”
Although it was disheartening to hear that Billy-Ray Belcourt’s work has met with indifference – to date – in the British market, I can’t help but feel hopeful. His writing possesses a quiet power, the kind that inevitably finds its audience. The way he captures moments of intimacy and simple existence feels both embedded in a sense of place and entirely universal, allowing readers, wherever they are, to glimpse themselves within his words. His stories move beyond borders and across oceans, carrying with them a sense of shared humanity. Slowly but surely, they invite us all to do what his book’s title suggests: to coexist.
