A Story with Origins in Dreams and Stars: Interview with Jessica Johns

The eerie opening line of Jessica Johns’s debut novel, Bad Cree (2024), might seem like business as usual in a North American Gothic novel, but it soon becomes clear that that image and the coming horror it foreshadows are steeped in Johns’s Cree culture. After a creative writing professor advised her never to write about dreams in her fiction, Johns pushed back against that advice and penned the short story that she would later expand into this novel, where the Cree understanding of dreams figures prominently. The result is a story that contains the shadowy ghosts and monstrous beings that are hallmarks of the North American Gothic, while also showing how the forces of colonization, polluting industries, and greed haunt the First Nations of Bad Cree’s Northern Alberta landscape.Bad Cree is about a young Nehiyawak (Cree) woman named Mackenzie, who has isolated herself from her family while grieving the loss of a younger sister. She has been having vivid and terrifying “darkness dreams,” as she calls them, which start bleeding into and bending her waking reality. As she carries the crow’s head and other items from her nightmares into the physical world, she knows they’re a warning that something is coming for her—something that will force her to face her grief and confront the things that are haunting her.Johns is a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Northern Alberta’s Treaty 8 territory. She describes herself as “a queer Nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry.” Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published in multiple outlets, including Fiddlehead, the Globe and Mail, and Red Rising Magazine. Her short story “Bad Cree” won the Journey Prize in 2020 from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. After earning starred reviews from Publishers’ Weekly and Booklist, her novel Bad Cree won the American Library Association’s Alex Award for adult fiction that also holds special appeal to young adult readers ages twelve through eighteen, earned Canada’s MacEwan Book of the Year award presented by MacEwan University for contemporary Canadian fiction, and was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award in 2024.Find her online at https://jessicasbjohns.com.—TFRENGAGEMENTS: Have thoughts about this column? American Gothic Studies invites responses to this and other essays published in the journal in the form of Engagements. These short pieces (250–1000 words) are meant to encourage dialogue between writers for and readers of American Gothic Studies. They should respond to an article, interview, provocation, or exhumation published in a prior issue of the journal. They can be complimentary, critical, supplemental, or some combination of the three. Engagements should be submitted through the submission portal on the American Gothic Studies website. Please use the same formatting instructions as for journal articles. If you have questions, please contact the section editor, Christina Connor, at [email protected].