Dallas Soonias is bringing his A-game to Canada Reads for Jessica John's Bad Cree
The great Canadian book debate will air March 4-7
Former Canadian national volleyball star and current CBC Sports contributor Dallas Soonias is championing the novel Bad Cree by Jessica Johns on Canada Reads 2024!
Soonias is Cree/Anishinaabe and is excited to bring an Indigenous book to this year's Canada Reads.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 4-7. This year, we are looking for one book to carry us forward.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books. The debates will take place live at 10:05 a.m. ET. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice. Check out all the broadcast details here.
Bringing an athlete's spirit to the competition
As a former star player on the Canadian National Men's Volleyball Team and a current contributor for CBC Sports, Soonias is no stranger to competition nor the CBC. Hailing from Saskatoon, he is registered with the Chippewas of Nawash. Soonias made history as the first Indigenous male to represent Canada in volleyball and actively promotes a more inclusive environment for Indigenous athletes and students.
He's also part of CBC Sports' broadcast team for the 2024 Paris Olympics and will bring his sharp observations to this year's Canada Reads debates.
Soonias further tapped into his creative side in 2023, when he wrote, directed and produced the short film, Frank Gets the Job Done, which was commissioned by the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival.
Soonias's favourite books of all time are the Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley that follow the misadventures of Scott Pilgrim, a musician and slacker living in Toronto. In fact, Soonias is a big fan of graphic novels and strayed from the genre with Bad Cree — but that doesn't mean it's not right up his alley!
"The author, Jessica Johns, describes herself as a nehiyaw aunty. I'm nehiyaw. This story is a nehiyaw story. So I felt like I had a shorthand with the characters and the author," he said on Commotion.
I felt like I had a shorthand with the characters and the author.- Dallas Soonias on his connection to Bad Cree
"Just listening to how she describes and writes about her family dynamic... I'm right there with her. For me, personally, that was super lucky."
The power of audiobooks
"I'm super dyslexic, so to read I really, really have to try and it takes forever," said Soonias. "So if I want to read something from a book, I have to be so dedicated to it and read it over and over. That being said, audiobooks are awesome and I love graphic novels because they work for my brain — just the way it's wired."
In fact, it was Soonias's love for audiobooks that brought him to Bad Cree. Originally, he was hoping to champion a graphic novel on Canada Reads, but when his friend Tanis Parenteau posted about voicing Bad Cree's audiobook, he was intrigued.
"I thought right away, 'I have to look into this book because of the title," he said. "And then I read it and Tanis does such a great job performing the book basically. It grabbed me and it was awesome."
A family story with horror elements
"[Johns] does such a great job of describing the horror-infused aspects of the book that it kept me, as a non horror reader, very engaged," he told CBC Books. "You feel like you're there the entire time."
Soonias was equally impressed by the care and thoughtfulness with which Johns chose each word. "Speaking to Jessica Johns, you understand that words are incredibly important to her and she doesn't want to put a single word in the wrong place. I think that's exactly what you want in an author."
While the horror elements certainly gave the story excitement, the parts that spoke to Soonias were the quiet moments that showcased the family dynamics and the little details of prairie life.
"This is all stuff that I know because I'm from that area," he said. "So that's what resonated most with me. I think it will with the reader as well, because she's so good at describing things."
Reconciling with land and community
Bad Cree is a horror-infused novel that centres around a young woman named Mackenzie, who is haunted by terrifying nightmares and wracked with guilt about her sister Sabrina's untimely death. The lines between her dreams and reality start to blur when she begins seeing a murder of crows following her around the city and starts getting threatening text messages from someone claiming to be her dead sister.
Looking to escape, Mackenzie heads back to her hometown in rural Alberta where she finds her family still entrenched in their grief. With her dreams intensifying and getting more dangerous, Mackenzie must confront a violent family legacy and reconcile with the land and her community.
Johns is a queer nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Johns won the 2020 Writers' Trust Journey Prize for the short story Bad Cree, which evolved into the novel of the same name. Bad Cree also won the MacEwan Book of the Year prize. Johns is currently based in Edmonton.
"I really wanted to represent, in this novel, the important relationships that aunties have had in my life," Johns said on The Next Chapter.
I really wanted to represent, in this novel, the important relationships that aunties have had in my life.- Jessica Johns
"And the aunties in the novel are a mishmash of all of my aunties in small ways and one of the things that I wanted to do was also kind of subvert this idea of the 'all-knowing' native person. That's kind of funny to me because all of the brilliant people in my life, all of the Indigenous people who are so, so brilliant are also very human and flawed and complex."
