Shannon Brown (she/they) is a prairie-born, East Coast-based Special Provost Alumni PhD student studying queer theory and Canadian literature at Dalhousie University. Their work explores how queer Canadian state subjects harness fiction as a tool to challenge national hegemonic priorities and gaze toward unusual potentialities of purpose and connection in our shared spaces. This research is especially concerned with representations of care, kinship, and queer temporalities. Shannon’s critical and creative work can be found in Fruitslice Magazine, Circe Magazine, and the University of Alberta’s Crossings Journal.
“This creative non-fiction piece engages with the song “Vampire Alberta Blues,” written by the talk-singing, Manitoba-based musician John K. Samson in 2016. This polemical song strikes at Alberta’s cultural, socio-political, and economic industries of consumption, destruction, and life-taking. Each encounter I’ve had with this song is strange, sonorous, uncomfortable, and validating. This text captures one particular encounter at the intersection of Alberta’s histories of social violence and recent anti-trans legislation. Through this reflection, I investigate how from thousands of miles away, stories of suffering and conscious resilience resonate through song.”
During my first winter in Halifax, my friends back home lay themselves on the steps of the legislature building. The heart of the old fort is built from steel frame, sandstone, granite, and millions of pounds of paper. Sketched riding boundaries and trimmings of the river lots. Named and renamed. Bills stacked and heaped enough to lay the bodies upon. Health professions acts abhorred by the amnesty international. Symmetrical, ornate, with 94 steps for the people to space themselves out and stretch their limbs out wide. (Play) dead on the heart of the capital.
In Halifax, the late afternoon barista at the Trident Cafe rotates soundtracks between The Mountain Goats and The Weakerthans. Whining and cathartic bridges of lyrics from across the country. I am 4684.5 km away from my prairie city and Samson sings,
The vampire Alberta stalks across the money market rates/Ducks into a Hummer.
The vampire Alberta wears a bowtie and a pin that says/”Support the arts.”
They call it a die-in. For 72 seconds, they lay down on the granite. 72 seconds for the 72% increase in the risk of attempted suicide for gender-diverse youth within one year of Alberta’s new anti-trans policies. Bill 26, 27, and 29. From the doctor’s office to the classroom to the way that bodies move and sweat and run and stretch and suck in the air that keeps them going. On the steps, most are on their backs, their coat collars obscuring the soft skin on their necks. Faces only, eyes closed and soaking in the shallow, grey November light. They are a mass of gloved hands and boots, propped up and leaning into each other. The curbed edge of the stairs dig into lower backs and soft skulls. Some of them are face down, the ice-cold stone step creasing a red and deepening indent into their foreheads. They breathe as they die for 72 seconds. Hot air through cool teeth heat the steps.
The vampire Alberta takes a photo for another slide/In the powerpoint of all the places he won’t remember.
The vampire Alberta wipes an oily mouth along a sleeve/Of forest in the foothills.
Since always, queer Albertans breathe in three ways: 1) the deep and slow intervals that keep our hearts pumping just enough, like long surviving bears and creatures who get through the seasons on little to eat; 2) short, quick, exhales of relief; 3) the deep pleasurable intake after a laugh or a look or a liberating touch that we keep preciously tucked into our nesting spots alongside the other nesting bodies there. Any breath is a good breath. A delicious and affirming sound. Clipped and grieving, grieving and healing. Living, ongoing, transcending; in the space between words and dying.
Even here—way out here—I recognize the storied sound of my province’s gasping horror film terror. A different kind of creature, breathless, creeping, and biting. It is mythological and scary beyond what is right now, beyond those 72 seconds, beyond what I can ever actually comprehend in the short life I have lived so far.
Across the country, in the corner at the Trident, I am in the heart of the fort and nowhere at all. I am dead on the steps. I am breathing in the stone and blowing out my life.
The vampire Alberta drools a perfect inky tailing pond/And shakes awake.
The vampire Alberta lifts a nearly empty glass and pleads,
“I need another one of these, so keep ’em coming.”
Good times are coming.
