“Thank you so much for coming out on this cold Thursday night,” author Drew Hayden Taylor greets the crowd packed into Hunter Street’s Take Cover Books on the evening of January 18th. “All day I’ve been getting texts and emails from people who can’t make it!”

The crowd offers a polite smattering of laughter. The raucous conversation which had scored the background has given way from pretty much the second he began speaking.

Taylor holds himself with an affable poise, every part the everyman despite the awe his name commands in this neck of the woods—and indeed across much of the country. I’d admired his handsome brown leather jacket as he’d made his way to the front of the room, as well as his gold-and-maroon Peter Gzowski College scarf, whose colours match those of my own.

From the front of the room, his navy-blue blazer and brilliant silver hair lend him the look of your favourite professor.

The venue is, by this point, standing room only. Dozens have packed into Take Cover’s modest East City storefront on Hunter St. East in Peterborough—Nogojiwanong to celebrate the release of Taylor’s most recent novel, COLD. According to Take Cover’s proprietors, brothers Sean and Andrew Fitzpatrick, it’s the biggest event in the bookstore’s history.

Taylor is from Curve Lake First Nation, where he grew up, just outside of the city. As such, many of his friends and family are here to attend the launch. It's an eager crowd, and while I'm one of the younger attendees, fans and friends of all ages have turned up for the big day.

“This is my 35^th book,” Taylor tells his rapt audience. “Not too bad,” he observes, “for someone who has never been to university but has three doctorates.”

With that, Taylor’s wry sense of humour shows itself for the third time tonight; the author had begun his remarks by informing Andrew—who introduced him—that it is in fact, “without further a-Drew" when you’re introducing him. 

While that one might have proved a groaner, Taylor makes up for it with any number of knee-jerkers in quick succession. It’s no small part of what he’s known for—an irrepressible wit and any number of what he himself calls “Drewisms,” which pepper his writing across the various media in which he works.

Taylor is, after all, far from just a novelist — “I like to think of myself as a contemporary storyteller,” he says. 

“When I use the term ‘contemporary storyteller,’ I'm referring to the fact that storytelling used to be primarily oral. Whether across a fire, around the kitchen table, over a cup of tea or whatever, that’s how stories were originally told.”

In recent years, Taylor notes, storytelling has evolved to encompass myriad new media at our disposal, including films, television, and even video games. He himself has written in a number of these venues—Taylor’s first writing credit, at twelve, was for the TV series Beachcombers, and he has written dozens of plays, contributed to television series, and was even recently asked to consult for a video game company based out of California who were developing an “Indigenous-flavoured futuristic post-apocalyptic video game.”

“The thing about being a contemporary storyteller—is not only coming up with the story, but coming up with the best medium to tell the story,” he says. “Is this a novel? Is this a play? Is this an article, or whatever.”

COLD proves a stellar example of Taylor’s interdisciplinary chops; the novel started life as a screenplay for a CBC anthology series called The Magic Hour some twenty-five years back. “At the time, I thought I would write something for it,” he says, “so I sent it off. I wanted to do something fun—something interesting—so I wrote it, and it didn’t go anywhere.”

“I tried telling this story as a movie, way back when, and it wasn’t meant to be a movie,” he admits. Still, when Taylor eventually revisited the script and realized it touched on many of the issues he felt still proved relevant. This formed the basis of what would eventually become COLD.

“This is how a lot of my stuff starts,” Taylor explains. His first novel, The Night Wanderer, came about in much the same way. Originally a play, Taylor admits that he “didn’t really care for it” when it was first produced—it didn’t “whisper sweet nothings in [his] ear.” 

Later, however, he would receive a phone call “saying ‘we’ve been following your career, and we think you’re ready to write a novel’.” Taylor’s first reaction to this suggestion? “No, I don’t think so.”

“We all know the stereotype of the novelist,” he explains. “Somebody who spends ten years working on a novel—they send it off to a dozen publishers, it gets rejected, they put it in their bottom drawer and then become an alcoholic for the rest of their life.” 

“That didn’t appeal to me,” he says, with a rueful laugh.

The publishers, however, returned, offering to pay him in advance. “My first reaction was ‘that’s cheating!’” he exclaims. “Now I have to do it!”

The author’s jubilation was short-lived, however, as he was quickly overcome by a daunting realization: “I had signed a legally binding document that required me to produce on a very specific date a manuscript consisting of 60,000 words, and I was fairly sure I didn’t know 60,000 words.”

In the grip of a miniature crisis about the decisions that had led him to this point, Taylor recounts having “heard those little voices coming from a dusty manuscript on the shelf saying, ‘Remember us? Remember us?’.”

When he examined the script he held in front of him, he found that “the characters were there, the story was there, the issues I wanted to explore were there. It was just in the form of a play that didn’t work. “So,” Taylor says. “I blew the dust off, took it down, and wrote it as a novel—and it did very well.”

Despite its success, The Night Wanderer had been, for all intents and purposes, a YA novel. For his next literary outing, Taylor wanted to do something a little different. “I wanted to do an adult novel.”

“That in itself was funny,” he admits, as whenever he was asked what he was presently working on he would say “I’m writing an adult novel.”

This, however, elicited a lot of confusion about the precise nature of his work, the notion of an “adult” novel seemingly being conflated with the common euphemism of an “adult film,” among the many people whom Taylor told about his present endeavour. 

“A lot of people, especially my family were going ‘Is that what he’s doing?’,” Taylor chuckles. 

The “adult” novel in question would eventually become perhaps his most well-known novel, 2010’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass. It’s through comparison to this novel, that Taylor eventually draws the topic back to COLD. “Motorcycles and Sweetgrass takes place in the summer, on the reserve,” he explains. “This novel [COLD] takes place in winter, in downtown Toronto. It’s an exploration of the urban Indigenous life.”

Like much of Taylor’s work, COLD’s cast is a memorable ensemble whose diversity of perspectives make up the narrative piecemeal. Drew identifies Indigenous Literature professor Elmore Trent and Indigenous Hockey League player Paul North as his “main characters.” Trent he describes as a “borderline alcoholic,” who “was taken away from his reserve when he was a child and only understands his people and his culture through literature,” while Paul’s introduction in COLD paints him as a rough-and-tumble charmer who lives the bulk of his life on the road.

Taylor also highlights police detective Ruby Birch, and bush pilot Merle Thompson as important figures in COLD’s secondary cast, and calls investigative journalist Fabiola Halen, from whose perspective the novel opens, the book’s “most intriguing character.”

Despite blending the tropes of police procedurals, mysteries, and contemporary horror stories, COLD nonetheless maintains Taylor’s trademark wit. He considers this sense of humour an essential survival tool for contemporary Indigenous existence.

“In the contemporary Native Renaissance—which is what I call the late 80s or 90s explosion of native literature—native people were writing plays and novels about the indigenous existence, and primarily about the trials and tribulations of what colonization has done to us,” Taylor recounts. 

“So,” he explains, “a vast majority of the novels and plays coming out of the First Nations community were dark, depressing, bleak and angry—because when an oppressed people get their voice back, they’re going to write about being oppressed.” 

He relays a saying from playwright and author Tomson Highway, who says that “Before the healing can take place, the poison must first be exposed.” Those early decades of the contemporary Native Renaissance, to Taylor, were “all about exposing the poison—a lot of those novels and books, all the characters were either oppressed, depressed, or suppressed.” 

“I have been very fortunate,” he says, “to have travelled to over a hundred and fifty First Nation communities across Canada and the United States, and everywhere I’ve been, I’ve been greeted with a laugh, a smile, and a joke.” 

“It’s been my humble opinion—because keep in mind, I’ve never been to university, so I have no knowledge,” he chuckles. “That it’s been our sense of humor that allowed us to survive those dark one-hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred years of colonization.” 

Taylor recounts something an elder on the Kainai Nation Blood Reserve told him: that “for native people, humour is the WD-40 of healing.” 

That, he says, is why he continues to inject humour into all his work—even morbid murder mysteries set in miserable downtown Toronto.

After a few more remarks, a reading from the new novel which I’ll not here spoil, and a brief Q&A session, the crowd scatters from their seats, picking up cups of coffee on their way to join the queue to have their newly purchased books signed.

While I’m waiting for attendees to trickle out to ask Taylor for the photograph for this article, Take Cover’s Sean Fitzpatrick dutifully informs me that he “has something for [me].” It’s moments like these—when at the launch of one the most respected Indigenous and Canadian authors working today, the proprietors of the store hosting it are able to bequeath me an order I made weeks ago precisely because we share such an amicable relationship—that emphasize the value of small community bookstores. 

Moreover, it’s the privilege of being able to hear Taylor speak in the company of many of his friends and family, in a space where I can strike up easy conversations with the person sitting next to me, which overwhelms me with gratitude for spaces such as these, and the authors who see the value in gracing them—even if it Taylor himself is keen to tell the Fitzpatrick brothers that “you need more chairs!”

When finally I get the chance to speak to Taylor, he asks me who to make out the autograph for. “Evan,” I reply, showing him my name tag, and he laughs.

I watch as he scribbles “Best wishes, and enjoy the book!” in thick Sharpie strokes which give even my shorthand a run for its money. As Taylor finishes the final “r” of his name with a flourish, I ask for a picture.

“I write for Trent University’s student newspaper,” I quickly explain.

“What’s the name of that, again?” he prompts.

“Arthur.”

He smiles to himself, and nods sagely.

“Of course it is.”