katherena vermette on crafting a real story out of fakery
I wanted to make this pretendian person who was literally, directly mining. It wasn't just picking things off of Google and making some searches. She was deliberately mining from her daughters and from her ex-husband.
Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with writer katherena vermette, author of the award-winning 2016 novel The Break, the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo, as well award-winning poetry collections and books for children.
Her latest novel is real ones. It’s the story of a pair of sisters, lyn and June, whose mother’s claims to Indigenous identity come under more scrutiny than they can bear.
real ones
June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.
Into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.
The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
Speaking about the graphic novels that informed how she wanted to approach visual storytelling in her Echo series, katherena vermette cited these graphic memoirs:
- Alison Bechdel: Are You My Mother? and Fun Home
- Teresa Wong: Dear Scarlet
- Sarah Leavitt: Tangles
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