Death Valley (by Jake Kennedy and Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff) is a novel written by people from communities within the Okanagan region of British Columbia. One of the driving, thriving, thrilling intrinsics of the process would be the human-to-human, real-world, conversive interactions with a party mix of folk who range from “I’ve written 459 poems, but have never shared them with anyone… would you like to read them, please?” to “I’m not a writer; I’m not creative.” Yet, nearly everyone who listens to the pitch ends up being fucking beautifully open to the idea and participating. That is, people don’t seem to have any hang-ups about busting up bourgeois narrative structure to revel in chance or about subverting the single-author/genius function to celebrate community. They just want in on the fun beauty action!

Inspired by Dada-bits, Fluxus-bits, Toronto Research Group-bits, Sesame Street-bits, we long for an avant-garde as a gathering/empowering force. If you need us to get serious for a moment, we are also fascinated by the “politics” and ideologies of our many donations, including the various race and gender shout-outs. One of our other joys, then, is not to expose our communities as “bigoted” or “uneducated” but rather to collage motifs/limitations of the Western genre and expose certain colonial/imperial/patriarchal legacies against alternative possibilities of hope. In this way, Death Valley might even ambitiously act as perhaps a strange collection of counter-myths maybe that work uneasily against some tidy definitions of simultaneously the “novel” and the “west” and the et cetera! But you can probably already see all of that. Sorry. And thank you!