A Story with Origins in Dreams and Stars: Interview with Jessica Johns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eerie opening line of Jessica Johns’s debut novel, Bad Cree (2024), might seem like business as usual in a North American Gothic novel, but it soon becomes clear that that image and the coming horror it foreshadows are steeped in Johns’s Cree culture. After a creative writing professor advised her never to write about dreams in her fiction, Johns pushed back against that advice and penned the short story that she would later expand into this novel, where the Cree understanding of dreams figures prominently. The result is a story that contains the shadowy ghosts and monstrous beings that are hallmarks of the North American Gothic, while also showing how the forces of colonization, polluting industries, and greed haunt the First Nations of Bad Cree’s Northern Alberta landscape.Bad Cree is about a young Nehiyawak (Cree) woman named Mackenzie, who has isolated herself from her family while grieving the loss of a younger sister. She has been having vivid and terrifying “darkness dreams,” as she calls them, which start bleeding into and bending her waking reality. As she carries the crow’s head and other items from her nightmares into the physical world, she knows they’re a warning that something is coming for her—something that will force her to face her grief and confront the things that are haunting her.Johns is a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Northern Alberta’s Treaty 8 territory. She describes herself as “a queer Nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry.” Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published in multiple outlets, including Fiddlehead, the Globe and Mail, and Red Rising Magazine. Her short story “Bad Cree” won the Journey Prize in 2020 from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. After earning starred reviews from Publishers’ Weekly and Booklist, her novel Bad Cree won the American Library Association’s Alex Award for adult fiction that also holds special appeal to young adult readers ages twelve through eighteen, earned Canada’s MacEwan Book of the Year award presented by MacEwan University for contemporary Canadian fiction, and was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award in 2024.Find her online at https://jessicasbjohns.com.—TFRENGAGEMENTS: Have thoughts about this column? American Gothic Studies invites responses to this and other essays published in the journal in the form of Engagements. These short pieces (250–1000 words) are meant to encourage dialogue between writers for and readers of American Gothic Studies. They should respond to an article, interview, provocation, or exhumation published in a prior issue of the journal. They can be complimentary, critical, supplemental, or some combination of the three. Engagements should be submitted through the submission portal on the American Gothic Studies website. Please use the same formatting instructions as for journal articles. If you have questions, please contact the section editor, Christina Connor, at cconnor@hccfl.edu.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".