Thunder Through My Veins
a memoir by Gregory Scofield
THE HEARTBREAKINGLY BEAUTIFUL MEMOIR OF AWARD-WINNING MÉTIS POET GREGORY SCOFIELD AS HE CHRONICLES HIS JOURNEY TOWARD SELF-DISCOVERY AND ACCEPTANCE
“Gregory Scofield is the literary uncle to all of Indigenous Lit…. The return of Thunder Through My Veins marks an important shift in thinking about the cyclical nature of how our stories weave through time.”— JOSHUA WHITEHEAD, author of Jonny Appleseed
“How privileged I am to be Indigenous, to be Métis, to be a part of the community [Scofield] refuses to compromise on, that he carries with him through each word and every line.”— CHERIE DIMALINE, author of The Marrow Thieves
Few people can justify a memoir at the age of thirty-three. Gregory Scofield is the exception, a young man who has inhabited several lives in the time most of us can manage only one. Born into a Métis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent but never told of his heritage, Gregory knew he was different. His father disappeared after he was born, and at five he was separated from his mother and sent to live with strangers and extended family.
There began a childhood marked by constant loss, poverty, violence and self-hatred. Only his love for his sensitive but battered mother and his Aunty Georgina, a neighbor who befriended him, kept him alive.
Unflinching in its detail, devastating in its emotional impact, and breathtaking in the exactness and beauty of its prose, Thunder Though My Veins is the story of a young man’s quest for identity and belonging.
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272 pages trade paperback
Final book available September 2019
RIGHTS SOLD
Canada: Anchor Canada, September 2019
ABOUT GREGORY SCOFIELD
(Photo: Stacey Laland)
Gregory Scofield is Red River Métis of Cree, Scottish and European descent, whose ancestry can be traced to the fur trade and to the Métis community of Kinesota, Manitoba. He has taught First Nations and Métis Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the Alberta College of Art and Design. He is currently Associate Professor in the English department at Laurentian University in Sudbury, where he teaches Creative Writing. Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stories for the Medicine Wheel, and has since published seven further volumes of poetry as well as a memoir, Thunder through My Veins (1999). In 2016 he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for his lifetime body of work. Scofield has served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and Memorial University.