New Books Network 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
Mar 26, 2026
Matt Hooley, Dartmouth scholar of Indigenous literature, and Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cree poet, novelist, and essayist, discuss A Minor Chorus and the move from poetry to an experimental novel. They explore using a singular voice to carry communal desires, Indigenous forms and pseudo-oral history, queer mothering, grief and melancholia, and how romantic intimacy and craft shape beautiful sentences.
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Novel As Practice For Collective Flourishing
- Billy-Ray Belcourt treated writing a novel as a practice to imagine social arrangements that negate colonial and normative violences.
- He framed the novel as a medium to index longing for different arrangements of bodies, feelings, and environments rather than to directly change the world.
Use Your Own Voice To Build Form
- Channel personal anxieties and subjectivity as primary material instead of inventing distant characters.
- Belcourt used his own voice to build the novel's scaffolding while studying contemporary novel experiments to guide form.
Novel's Colonial Genealogy Matters
- The novel form carries bourgeois sentimental assumptions from its imperial origins that can misrepresent Indigenous life.
- Belcourt deliberately rejected writing toward bourgeois sentimentality and instead leaned on Indigenous aesthetics and communal concerns.
