Drew Hayden Taylor is an Ojibwe Canadian playwright, novelist, and journalist. He proudly refers to himself as part of the Native Literary Renascence. Of his celebration of Native life and humor, he says “A good chunk of contemporary native literature deals with the dark, bleak, sad and angry prospect of indigenous life. Almost all of the characters coming out of contemporary literature are oppressed, depressed or suppressed. I have been very lucky to have traveled to over 140 native communities in Canada and the States, and everywhere I’ve been, I’ve been greeted with a laugh, a smile and a joke, and I wasn’t seeing this in a lot of literature.”
Taylor lived in Curve Lake until he was 18. He attended Seneca College in Toronto and received a degree in radio and television broadcasting. His first major writing credit was for a television show called The Beach Combers in 1987. Writing hadn’t been something he thought he could really make a living at until his twenties. He explained in an interview, “It wasn’t a matter of me tracking down and conquering my art, my art literally had to track me down and remind me that I am a writer. And I always liked being a writer. You create short stories or a play. You are essentially creating a universe. And the thing I discovered that I thought was really cool as a teenager, was that I had more control over the universe I created than the universe I lived in. And that appealed to me. It was a bizarre series of circumstances. I was writing an article and adapting native stories for television, and a producer suggested I submit story ideas. I did, and they bought my first one”.
Taylor was the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts from 1994-1997 (he had also been the playwright-in-residence from 1988-1989). He has also been a writer-in-residence at Carhoots Theatre, the University of Michigan, the University of Western Ontario, the Blyth Festival, and several others. He has served on the jury for Indigenous Arts and Stories, which offers competitions for young people of Indigenous descent.
Taylor’s nonfiction work includes Funny, You Don't Look Like One (1998), Further Adventures of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway: Funny, You Don’t Look Like One #2 (1999), Furious Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway: Funny, You Don’t Look Like One #3 (2002), and Futile Observations of the Blue-Eyed Ojibway: Funny, You Don’t Look Like One #4 (2004). His fiction includes The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel (2007), Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (2010), and Take Us To Your Chief: and Other Stories (2016). His plays, which span the years 1989 to 2018, include Girl Who Loved All Her Horses (1995), Raven Stole the Sun (2004), Three Tricksters (2009), and Spirit Horse (2016). Taylor has received numerous awards, including the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Award, Ontario Premier’s Award for Creative Arts and Design, and Victoria Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement in Theatre.
Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles and Sweetgrass is a novel that largely follows Virgil Second, a thirteen-year-old boy who realizes that the mysterious stranger his mother is dating is Nanabush, a legendary Trickster god with suspicious...
