Bad Cree
Bad Cree
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Jessica Johns on Bad Cree
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A dream, and a professor’s bad adviceThe seed of the novel was an actual dream Johns had, vivid enough that she wanted to follow it somewhere. Before any larger project existed, there was just the image and the feeling of crossing a threshold.
I dreamt that I could bring things back and forth from my dreams and the waking world. The dream was so vivid and strange and beautiful, and I loved being able to explore that further in the story it eventually turned into.
That exploration first happened inside a UBC creative writing classroom, where a professor’s directive collided directly with how Johns had been taught to understand knowledge itself. The anger that followed was the engine.
I wrote that story in one of my creative writing classes during my degree, but I wrote it in defiance of advice the class received from a professor. This professor advised us to never write about our dreams, and said that writing about dreams would lose your audience. I had a really hard time with that because dreams are such an integral part of nehiyaw ways of knowing and communicating.
When Johns later described the moment to a Doubleday camera, she compressed the defiance into two sentences. The short story that came out of that classroom eventually became the novel.
This book began as a protest. This book started as an act of revenge. [paraphrased from audio]
To an interviewer at NPR, she explained what made the professor’s advice so specifically wrong for her. The objection was not about craft preferences; it was about whose epistemology gets treated as universal.
For Cree people, and the way I was raised, the knowledge that I have about dreams, is that they’re incredibly important. They’re a way of communicating with our ancestors. They’re a way of knowledge production. My whole life I’ve been taught to listen to my dreams and interrogate them and to know that they’re very valid forms of knowledge and forms of storytelling as well.
By the time she expanded the short story into a full novel, she had shifted her frame: no longer writing against the professor, but toward the Cree readers who would recognize everything she put on the page.
How she wrote it
Notes app, grief, and a severed crow’s headThe physical circumstances of writing the novel were unglamorous and entirely deliberate. Johns found that a desk and a document were not where the book lived.
When I was writing Bad Cree, I wrote every night on my phone while I was lying in bed. Most of the novel was written in my notes app. It’s when I felt the most relaxed and creative.
The opening image that would orient every reader went through at least one earlier draft. NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe asked about the severed crow’s head that greets readers on page one, and Johns revealed what had come before it and why she replaced it.
It wasn’t a crow’s head initially. Initially, I think it was a branch. That was the opening image. I really wanted readers to know what they were in for right from the bat.
For the novel’s more visceral biological sequences, Johns went looking for source material. A book on mycology and the rainforest floor near Vancouver both fed the scenes that pushed her Google search history into unusual territory.
The great book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake was a huge inspiration for that particular scene, as well as the wealth of mushrooms I came across in the rainforests on the Vancouver, BC coast. For most of the gruesome, gory scenes, I also did a number on my Google search history.
The novel’s grief is not metaphorical. Two of the people Johns was closest to died while she was writing the book, and the Cree teachings about death and ancestors that she was receiving during that period went directly into the manuscript.
I lost my kokum as well when I was — my grandmother — when I was younger, and through the course of writing this novel, I also lost my papa, my grandpa, two people who I was really close to and just held a lot. I think that a lot of Bad Cree and the navigation of grief and loss was in many ways my own.
The personal thread
Being an aunty before being a writerThe women who surround the protagonist Mackenzie in the novel, her aunties and sisters, are drawn from a role Johns holds in her own life with more weight than any literary credential.
Being an aunty is actually the most important thing that I am, before anything else, including being a writer. I take my responsibilities as a little mother and aunty very seriously.
When readers from Northern Alberta contacted her after publication, they described the aunties in the book as portraits of their own families. That recognition confirmed what Johns had built the novel to do.
It has been huge to have people particularly from my territory, from Northern Alberta, reach out to me and say, ‘Oh my god, those are my aunties in your novel.’ They see their family members there, they see themselves. And I think that is such a powerful aspect of storytelling. [paraphrased from audio]
On what’s at stake
Grief and resource extraction are the same storyThe horror genre framing of the novel can make it easy to read as a family story with scary elements. Johns pushed back against any reading that treats the political dimension as atmosphere rather than structure.
My work comes from a deeply political place. This story is about grief, love and kinship, but it is also a story of resource extraction and displacement of Indigenous peoples. That’s not a secondary story to this work, it’s something that is woven throughout all of it.
The title question, what it means to be a ‘bad Cree’, is what Mackenzie, the protagonist, spends the novel torturing herself over. Johns wanted readers to see where that self-judgment actually comes from.
A lot of these feelings are colonial trauma and shame that she and her family don’t deserve to carry, and I hope in her journey she learns that assigning goodness and badness to herself, even if she’s made mistakes, isn’t what makes her deserving of love.
The aunties and sisters at the center of the novel are also a deliberate argument about what family protection looks like and why it needed to be on the page.
I really wanted to represent the fierce love and protection that comes from family (whether that’s blood or chosen kin). There is nothing stronger or scarier than an aunty or a sister who will go to bat for you.
What she wants us to sit with
Dreams are valid, and so is this worldJohns wrote the novel toward a specific reader she had never found enough books for: a younger version of herself, queer and Cree, looking for a story that put her worldview at the center rather than the margin. That intended reader shaped every choice.
I wrote a story based completely on the power of dreams, and I hope my audience takes away that dreams are cool and valid.
Beyond the political and the personal, Johns named the most fundamental thing she was trying to give a reader. The measure of success she described is about transport, not argument.
What I hope more than anything is that readers feel immersed in this world, that they feel transported there. In anything that I read, or media I consume, that’s what I’m always looking for. I’m looking for a story that will take me someplace. If Bad Cree can do that, then I’ve succeeded.