My city's still breathing but barely, it's true
Kyle Edwards' debut novel Small Ceremonies tackles the meaning of hockey for Indigenous peoples in Winnipeg
I have a long-distance and one sided relationship with the city of Winnipeg. I’ve never been to the city, and I don’t care for the new version of the Winnipeg Jets, but, for whatever reason, the place fascinates me.
I remember the first time I saw the original Winnipeg Jets on television and being drawn to their logo. I was a child and they were playing my beloved Boston Bruins on one of those rare afternoon/evenings when they played on the local television station instead of the extra one you needed to pay extra for. There was something about the exotic name of the city. (This also went for the Quebec Nordiques, but that’s another story for another day.) Then, as a teenager, an upperclassman introduced me to the band Propagandhi and my interest in the city grew. From there, I found John K. Samson (former member of Propagandhi) and The Weakerthans. I even invested time into the movie “My Winnipeg” because I wanted to know who would make a movie abut such a city. It’s a surreal masterpiece that could only come from such a place.
With all of that, I still don’t actually know much of anything about the city. I can’t know it from a distance. I certainly can’t understand its long and difficult history as a trade center for the Indigenous people of Canada and the legacy of colonialism that defines the city today. One thing I do know, though, is the city loves hockey.
When the Jets left for Phoenix at the end of the 1996 season, the National Hockey League lost one of its most devoted fanbases. The team stunk, and, yet, people showed up. The arena was falling apart and fans still cheered, supported a team destined to leave a small market for a new one as the NHL tried to expand into the American south.
And this is a long way to introduce Kyle Edwards’s debut novel Small Ceremonies, which focuses on the lives of indigenous people on the periphery of Winnipeg’s society. They also play hockey for their high school, and the local high school athletics organization wants to kick them out of the local league. Well, it says other teams don’t want to drive so far to play at the Tigers rink o The novel is a free-wheeling exploration of a place, its people, and a sport that brings them together even in the face of endless losing seasons.
Edwards, a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica, and Maclean’s and who has won two National Magazine Awards for his reporting, uses multiple storylines, narrators and voices to create a chorus that examines the layers of history that tie us to a place. Small Ceremonies doesn’t look to explain. Instead, Edwards settles into a pattern of storytelling that creates rumbles from scene to scene, character to character. He has a keen eye for moving story along, not wasting time in a place or a moment. He doesn’t chew on his words. Instead, he shows his characters trying to navigate through this world that feels like it could crumble at any moment. By using both Winnipeg, its history, and hockey, Edwards paints a mosaic that comes together in a violent ending society is destined for.
Andrews is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Small Ceremonies is his debut novel.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
[Read an excerpt of Small Ceremonies on LitHub]
Who’s the first person you wrote in this book? There's a lot of characters to organize, so who's the first character that you started figuring out and started writing?
The first character that I started figuring out were Tomahawk, Tommy, and Clinton. It started out as a short story, actually. I wrote the short story. It was kind of a story that weaved the perspectives of those two teenagers.
I wrote the short story and I submitted it somewhere actually. I submitted it to this literary magazine that was owned by Penguin Random House, and one of the editors there got back to me and was like, "Hey, we don't really want to publish this, but would you be interested in turning it into a novel?" While I was writing the short story, I thought about that and, the person who I spoke to at the time, this was like five or six years ago, Joe Lee, he ended up being my Canadian editor actually.
Did you submit it to Hazlitt then?
Yeah, they were the first people actually to buy the book, but it was on spec — they wanted the idea of it. I was fortunate to work with Joe Lee over at McClelland & Stewart for the entire time before we found our American publisher
But it started with Tommy and Clinton and then there are a lot of characters that were brief mentions in the short story that I sort of expanded upon, I gave them their own sort of space and voice in the final novel.
Why Winnipeg then?
I grew up in Manitoba. I grew up on a small rez like two hours north of Winnipeg, and then I went to high school in Winnipeg, and I thought it was a really interesting place. I feel like I don't read a lot of literature. There are some. Carol Shields is somebody who wrote a lot about Manitoba and had mentions of Winnipeg, but, when I was in high school, there was this crazy magazine article that came out that called Winnipeg the most racist city in Canada1. I was like, oh, that tracks. It's a pretty rough place to be Indigenous.
The North End of Winnipeg2, which is where this book takes place, is this sort of like inner city neighborhood. It's a pretty big neighborhood and it's had this legacy of being a place for people who are sort of marginalized and who are sort of pushed to the periphery of society. I mentioned this briefly in the book, it started around World War II when immigrants were coming over from Europe and they ended up in the North End and then there was this changeover where it eventually became a predominantly Indigenous neighborhood and I was fascinated by that history and also the way it is now, how it is this place that a lot of Indigenous people, when they move to Winnipeg, often call home. Winnipeg as well, in terms of a political sense, I would say it's the cultural and political capital for Indigenous peoples. There's a huge cultural presence in Winnipeg when it comes to indigenous arts and culture, there's crazy big events every year and it's where a lot of the conversation around things like reconciliation in Canada are happening, dealing with the legacy of Indian boarding schools3 and whatnot. There's a lot to it and I thought it was a really fascinating place that I want to write about. When I started writing fiction I was like, oh, should I?
I always had this question in my mind: should I write about a place that people actually care about, but I think where I landed was I think I want to write about a place that I care about and hopefully that makes other people care too.
I think that's that's a better instinct to follow. How many times do you want to read another book about New York City?. And do you want to try to go against an LA writer? Go up against somebody like John Fante writing about LA? So how long have you not lived Winnipeg?
It's a bit about 12 years now. I've lived in Toronto. I've lived in New York. And now I live in Los Angeles.
Does that also then give you a different perspective of the city from a distance?
A little bit, yeah. I go back at least a couple times a year to go visit family because that's where all my family is. I think it maybe does that, gives me a distance from the characters. I like having that sort of separation. I feel like what I really wanted to do, because I'm from there and because this is a coming-of-age story that deals with maybe things that I've encountered in my own life, I didn't want to rely heavily on myself. I didn't want that. That's a question I've gotten a lot over the past a couple of weeks: is like how much of this is based on your real life? And not really any of it. So I think it was nice to have that distance and separation from both the city and the characters. It gave me a different perspective.
I think I had a bit more freedom I think.
It feels both personal, but also there is a distance. Writing a memoir shouldn't be in the moment of the memoir because you have no way of analyzing that place in the moment. You're stuck in it. Any story you should have some perspective and be able to be a little bit more free because I imagine, growing up Winnipeg, you had a different feeling to the city then you do now.
Oh, totally. Like, I hated it when I was there. I was like, oh, this is horrible. You hear all the people who also sort of lament certain things about Winnipeg, whether it's the way Indigenous people are treated or whether it's the cold-ass winters. You're sort of away from it and you're like, wow, like, Winnipeg actually rules.
Well, there's definitely aspects of it that are because it's not Los Angeles. There's things that can be done in Winnipeg that you could never do in Los Angeles. There are benefits to Los Angeles, such as the weather and the fact that no one actually has a job, but it's expensive to do things, like small shows, you couldn't have specific events there because of it. And community in that way, it's harder. I think that is something a city like Winnipeg, from a distance, would have an advantage over another city.
Totally. I mean, the quality of life stuff is true. A lot of people retire in Winnipeg because it's very cheap to buy a house currently. Whenever I think about buying a house, like, oh, yeah, buy a house in Winnipeg, it's cheap as hell.
Would the mortgage be more or less than your current rent in Los Angeles?
Oh, my mom is paying significantly less on her mortgage than I do for rent in Los Angeles. I was almost like embarrassed to tell her how much I paid for rent one time because I knew how much she was paying on her mortgage monthly. And I was like, oh, gosh.-
Well, so I wonder why more stories aren't written about there or more writers aren't coming out of there right now, because I feel like we've we've lost a bit of like that ‘zine culture that writing that style. Everything is coming through MFA programs and I can tell, often, where someone went to an MFA program, like, oh I know what books you read, I know what YouTube videos you watched. And we’re kind of losing a bit of that weirdness. This story is kind of weird in some of the structure of it. It is linear, but there's so many people filling it in and you're changing voice a lot. Actually, we should talk about. You're changing perspective constantly. There's first person, there's third person, there's some second person with the character Pete. And it's one of those things that I've been thinking of a lot with reading and writing. What was the decision for to play with that, with each character.
That's interesting. So, oh, just one more thing about Winnipeg.
I'm glad you brought up Pete Mozienko. You'll notice too that there are like a lot of Ukrainian references in the book and Pete Mozienko has a very a Ukrainian name and I was talking a little bit earlier about the change over in the North End from like European immigrants fleeing war to Indigenous people. Like a lot of those were Ukrainians and the Ukrainian population in Winnipeg is massive. Canada in general has more Ukrainian people than any other place outside of Ukraine itself. And a lot of them end up in Manitoba, a lot of them end up in Winnipeg — huge Ukrainian population in Winnipeg — and I grew up with a lot of Ukrainian friends and I really wanted toexplore that a little bit in the book. I mention little things here and there, the different Ukrainianisms that are present in Winnipeg. That was one other thing that fascinated me about Winnipeg, because a lot of people don't really know that.
But your wife, you said thank you to her in the acknowledgments, which did make me wonder about the Ukrainian connection. One of the first opponents is this amazing Ukrainian kid, and I was like, oh, there's like a little bit of weird Ukrainian stuff. And then in the acknowledgments, you say thanks to your wife.
Yeah, she is from Ukraine. She was born there, but grew up in Toronto. I took her back to Winnipeg and she was fascinated with the presence of Ukrainian culture in Winnipeg, because it is like proudly on display when you go.
But I didn't do an MFA, actually. So when I started writing this book and playing around with different perspectives, I didn't know that that was, like, not a thing you're supposed to do, because the closest thing I had to MFA was when I got the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and I started workshopping pieces that were playing around with POV, second person, and first person, and third and what you see in the novel, right? And I was fascinated and I'm doing my PhD now at USC, and, even here, it's kind of, it's very similar — second person is just reviled.
You were a journalist, you learned like the first thing is to never tell the reader how to feel, right? Like that's a first class in journalism school.
I remember somebody wrote a music review for the alt magazine I worked at. And the lede was like, "you think you know about cover bands or something, and you hate them." And I was like, “well, first off, why are you assuming how I feel about this? That is a really big assumption.” So it is hard, right? Especially coming from that, that background.
Yeah. So I had a lot of like, just people questioning, "okay, why, why are you changing perspective? Why are you doing this and that?" But because I didn't come from that background, I was like, oh, I'm going to do whatever I want. So that was that was really the choice, but also it kind of helps, if you are playing around with first and third, when trying to evoke someone's personality or just different ticks that they have in their voice, when you're able to switch to from say third or first. Writing a multi-voiced novel is challenging in that way, in the edit that was something we focused on a lot: was just making sure that each character had their own distinct voice and that switch from first or third, or just like first to first whatever, it just helped trying to make sure that each person felt different from the next
You come from a journalism background and one of the things you're taught in journalism is you're mostly writing a third person, generally speaking, until you get to a certain point and then some editors like, yeah, sure, you're smart enough to do this, or we have enough faith in you to write first person. But even one of the things that I learned early is you have to acknowledge that you are still the source of the information. So it is still coming from somebody. And I wonder, recently we've had, well, in the early 2010s, we had that like revival of "longform" where there was a lot of stuff where you were allowed to kind of play with that, and I was wondering if any of that influenced some of this? It seemed some of the chapters that are our first person don't feel first person early and then. I mean I'm just kind of cranking along getting through like you know going through each character and picking up their voice and kind of trying to understand them and then later I feel like Tommy is the one, Tomahawk, that I feel this way, where I was like, oh, I get where he's coming from now with this voice of this character and how he's writing him. I was wondering if you kind of saw your own progression as you wrote this from journalism to fiction in that way, where you're kind of changing what you're doing for that?
That's an interesting question. I think what was interesting about being a journalist is like...I don't know. I was a magazine journalist for a long time then I became like more of an investigative reporter, but I think, for me, my writing might be one of my greatest weaknesses. I get sort of trapped in this storytelling mode, and when I was writing this book, I was like, I want there to be a great deal of fact in here, I want it to be set in a period that is sort of real. In the backdrop of the novel, it's not like alluded to a bunch, but there's this movement called Idle No More and there's a chapter where they go to a protest and they do a round dance and I think that was really important for me growing up.
I just wrote this piece about what it means to write a coming-of-age novel, and I sort of talk a little bit about that, because when I was growing up around this time of Idle No More and the protests and the rallies that were happening, it was sort of like this weird awakening for me. I think it's also sort of like a weird awakening for the characters and that it felt kind of like a dark initiatio,n sort of, and I’m borrowing that phrase from someone who read one of the early drafts of the book, Adam Johnson. He's like, "Yeah, when I read this book, it feels like a dark initiation." And that's kind of like what I was sort of going for, I guess, because for a lot of Indigenous people the feeling of coming of age, of sort of becoming aware of the world around you and your place in it, can feel very strange. I know for me, as a youth, it was sort of like this welcome to the real world moment.
Why hockey? I know it's like the sport of the area, but also hockey's not one that's written about a lot as sport, because it's kind of hard. Think of the great sports books, like WC Heinz's The Professional is about boxing because it's about one person, whereas hockey is similar to soccer and there's not great soccer movies.
I mean, first of all, I love hockey and a lot of Indigenous people in Canada is the sport. It's the thing.It's just super popular among Indigenous communities. I think I wanted to write about hockey because there aren't many hockey novels and I think it's a very beautiful game. It's violent. It's an inherently violent game. It's the only North American sport aside from like boxing or MMA where fighting is actually acceptable.
I feel like baseball they allow it but it's mostly because the fights stink, they're bad at it.
In the novel a lot of the violence that actually happens is on the ice and I feel like that's another interesting coming-of-age thing for a lot of children in Canada. If you come of age playing hockey, you're usually coming of age being surrounded by some sort of violence.
More broadly, I've always found hockey interesting, mostly because it's a very white sport and it's very exclusive to those who can afford it. And and it's the Canadian pastime. Nothing generates more national pride, nothing generates Canadian nationhood more than hockey. It's like ritualized. It's like football in America. It's so embedded in Canadian national identity and, because of that, if you're not like a part of that sort of class of people who do play it, you can often feel like you don't belong. And that's where the idea of the novel came from: I wanted to write about this team that is being essentially thrown out of the league and they have to reckon with the fact that they are being treated differently.
They're being treated differently while also be like playing the thing that everybody there loves. They're trying to fit in. "We're doing the thing you're asking of us, we're playing the sport you're all telling us to play so we can be part of your community, but you're still excluding us."
Right. Right. For a lot of Indigenous communities, hockey is like any other ceremony, you know, it's ritualized everywhere. It's just as big Pow wows or any cultural ceremony you go to, in the fact that it brings us together annually.
There are moments in the book where there is this Native festival and there's a hockey tournament there. Those are huge in Canada, massive. Those things exist all over the place where there's these only these Native only hockey tournaments all over.
There's always that question when you're a writer, "what the hell do I write about?" and I was looking around, thinking about hockey novels, there aren't many, and I felt like, to use an analogy, the perfect arena to sort of like explore not just hockey but all these other things that are sort of associated with it.
Was there a hockey novel you had to read as a kid? Was there one that kids read in school? Because I can't think of like anything.
No, I took some influence from other sports books. I can't even remember the name of it, but it was a YA novel about Lacrosse. It was about this kid that played lacrosse and had to go to the small town off his rez to go play lacrosse. I can't even remember the title, but I read it when I was really young. Another sports book that I took a lot of inspiration from, it's sports adjacent, is Underworld by Don DeLillo. There's a chapter, I don't know if you ever read "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead and there's a chapter of boxing. And I remember reading that a few years ago and I was like, Whoa, this is really cool. I like that you read a chapter and you're like, Oh, that's what I would like to do. And then you're like, can I do that? Can I write like Colson Whitehead? I don't know. But I'll try.
So why did you decide to write a short story instead of continuing on your journey writing, you know, for ProPublica, one of arguably the most important news source we have right now. What's the what's the journey to write fiction.
Growing up, I always wanted to be a novelist. It's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be a writer. I didn't really know how. After high school, I went to college and I studied journalism and I just ended up being a journalist, honestly, like there was no sort of, it just felt like if you get a journalism degree, you should probably go into journalism. And I loved being a journalist. I really enjoyed it, but there was a certain point where I just felt like I had these creative that desires I had to do something else. I was probably a really bad employee at ProPublica and spent a lot of my free time and office time, honestly, thinking about fiction, jotting down ideas for fiction. So I eventually quit. I took another job actually after that that sort of would allow me to have more free time because, you know, being a reporter, especially being a reporter in New York, you almost have no free time. It's constant, You take it home with you and...
Some of the stories weigh on you. They'll never go away.
Oh yeah, especially when you are covering something that's traumatic, it does take a real toll on you. I think that's kind of what was happening with me. I was getting really fatigued that way. I remember I read a book back in the day that was like the author bio said something like this person was supported by the Stegner Fellowship or whatever, and I had no idea what it was. I remember being like, Oh, that would be cool to do one day. Maybe I'll get the Stegner Fellowship and it'll give me a chance to finish this book. And then like a couple of years after that, I wrote the short story to this novel and I was like, "Maybe I should like submit this to the Stegner Fellowship” and it got me the fellowship and I quit my journalism job and I never looked back.
So I went into the Stegnar Fellowship not really realizing like how big it was. I just saw it in the back of a book one time and then when I got there I met all these people who this was like their dream. I was like, "dude, I just learned about this recently." But now, I'm much more appreciative. I realize now how rare an opportunity like that is and was and, honestly, was invaluable. It allowed me to do this.
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