Electricity Slides

Electricity Slides describes a disjointed, somewhat dystopian, slightly connected series of events, written in the Dadaist “cut-up” style of the 1950s. The book first started out as a series of performance art monologues written and performed live for a multidisciplinary exhibition put on by the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective every year in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The stories alternate between a third-person narrative and the first-person narrative of the protagonist, who goes without a name throughout the book, but whom we discover is a military officer who has suffered an emotional breakdown during a battle and as a result speaks in a lyrical, poem-prose manner. Throughout the book, the reader is taken through a psychotropic funhouse-like journey, like a dream, where vignettes are connected only slightly, but keep the reader moving.

AUTHOR

John Brady McDonald

John Brady McDonald is a Nehiyawak-Metis writer, artist, historian, musician, playwright, actor and activist born and raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak. The great-great-great grandson of Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree, as well as the grandson of famed Metis leader Jim Brady, John’s writings and artwork have been displayed in various publications, private and permanent collections and galleries around the world, including the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. John is one of the founding members of the P.A. Lowbrow art movement, and served as Vice President of the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective for nearly a decade. John also served a term as vice-chair of the Board of Directors for Spark Theatre, and as a Senator with the Indigenous Council Committee of CUPE Saskatchewan. The author of several books, John studied at England’s prestigious University of Cambridge, where in July 2000 he made international headlines by symbolically “discovering” and “claiming” England for the First Peoples of the Americas. John is also an acclaimed public speaker, who has presented in venues across the globe, such as the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival, the Black Hills Seminars on Reclaiming Youth, The Appalachian Mountain Seminars, the Edmonton and Fort McMurray Literary Festival, the Eden Mills Writers Festival and at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Hi artwork and writing have been nominated for several awards, including the 2022 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Awards, the 2022 High Plains Book Awards, and the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards. John was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Saskatchewan).