Jordan Abel

My guest on this episode is Jordan Abel. Jordan is the author of The Place of Scraps (which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize) and NISHGA, which won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Jordan is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

Jordan’s most recent book is Empty Spaces, which was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2023, and was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award. In its review of Empty Spaces, the Boston Globe called it “a singular, incantatory work.”

Jordan and I talk about how being in academia has enriched his creative work, and why, all the same, he doesn’t always feel he belongs there, and about how he was shocked that his agent and publisher would take a chance on a book as strange and difficult as Empty Spaces, and about how odd it is that his published work to date has been so dark and serious, when he doesn’t see himself that way at all. (We do a lot of laughing in this episode, FYI.)

 

Empty Spaces by Jordan Abel at Penguin Random House Canada.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact