Jacky Tollestrup’s writing is an excavation of the space between who people are and who the world allows them to be, blending raw memoir with sharp sociopolitical critique. Across her body of work—from early visceral poetry in Orange Eater (1998) and Scattered Scars (2005) to the counter-hegemonic academic inquiries of her 2006 article and 2009 Master’s thesis on masculinity—Tollestrup consistently subverts dominant narratives of gender and power. In recent contributions for SNAPLine, such as “Labels & Liberation” (2025) and “Listening to the Medicine” (2026), she explores the linguistic and psychedelic frontiers of queer identity, advocating for a multilingual approach to gender and the healing of generational trauma. This career-long fascination with self-determination will be undertaken again in the historical novel Dancing Creek, set in 1884 Alberta District. Here, Tollestrup weaves a high-stakes alliance between Eli, a ranch hand fleeing a fundamentalist past, and Victoria, an underground surgeon, against the backdrop of the North-West Resistance. By grounding the narrative in the strategic devaluations of history—from the erasure of Métis land rights to the hidden networks of queer care—Tollestrup’s prose serves as both a reflection for the marginalised and a fire set to the monolithic structures of past and present oppression.