Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND

Alicia Elliott

For readers of Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries: A Memoir comes AliciaElliott's A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUNDa Canadian Bestseller now in it 's third printing!which questions, confronts and challenges our ubiquitous taboos and ignorance around racism, poverty and sexism as experienced by Elliott, an award-winning Tuscarora writer, who grew up on Six Nations reserve and in both the US and Canada.

What are the links between depression, colonialism and loss of languageboth figurative and literal? How does white privilege operate in different contexts, specifically for a person who is mixed race? What does it mean to be a "bad mother"? How do we navigate the painful contours of mental illness in loved ones without turning them into their sickness? How does colonialism operate on the level of literary criticism?

A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND, Elliott 's debut essay collection, is her attempt to answer these questions and more. While the title comes from a Mohawk phrase used to describe depression, the image of seeing a mind spread out on the ground is how she has come to view this collection: watching the synapses fire, making connections between past and present, between the personal and the political, between the seemingly smallest details of a life and the huge, historical patterns we keep stubbornly enacting. These essays are Alicia 's mind spread out on the ground for us. By offering us pieces of her life, as well as insight into how that life relates to the history of this country and continent, Elliott hopes to encourage readers to think the same way about our lives: how it has been impacted and shaped by history, and our role in not only upholding that history, but changing it, creating a better history for tomorrow.

ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario with her husband and daughter. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, The Butter, Room, Grain, The New Quarterly, CBC, Globe and Mail, Vice, Maclean 's, Maisonneuve, Today 's Parent and Reader 's Digest. She 's currently Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly. Her essay, "A Mind Spread Out on the Ground" won a National Magazine Award. She will be the 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC, working with their Creative Writing Department. Alicia is also presently working a manuscript of short fiction.

Available products
Book Published 2019-03-01 by Doubleday

Comments

With caustic wit and sharp prose, Elliott turns her own lived experience into seething declarations on the political and social issues of contemporary Canada. Elliott is fierce and unapologetic in damning the 'settler' class for propagating a modern take on colonial attitudes toward Indigenous Canadians and people of colour . A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a breathless barrage of facts, confessions and conjecture.

Melville House

"A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a tour de force. . . . Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott takes her place among essayists such as [Roxane] Gay and [Samantha] Irby, infusing intimate details of her own life with sociopolitical analysis and biting wit. . . . In this collection, the particular structure of the personal essaybeginning with the experience of the writer and then weaving in threads of related materialis at its finest."The Globe and Mail

"Exceptional essays as arresting as her title. In forthright prose, in a format that should make it difficult for non-Indigenous Canadians to ignore, she also links past and present, laying out how the colonial legacy still shapes contemporary lives, Indigenous and non-Indigenous."