Reframeables
Do you feel alone in your own head when it comes to navigating life’s big and small problems? Do you find self-care language a little too self-focused but know you still need to do the work? Join us on Reframeables and eavesdrop your way into some new perspectives — we promise you'll feel less alone as you listen. We are Nat and Bec, two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe some of life's big and small stuff. Nat's a PhD whose favourite phrase is “let’s reframe that!” Bec's an artist who tends more toward “why me?” Through candid, vulnerable yet entertaining conversations with each other, as well as guests, we find a way to meet in the middle each week and offer you, our listeners, new perspectives along the way. From a painful divorce that still needs processing, to grief that sticks around, to the simple day-to-day problems of managing a grumpy teenager, to a dynamic interview with Giller winner Ian Williams or radio personality and co-star of the Jann Arden podcast Caitlin Green sharing her vulnerable story of loss: Join our intimate conversations with authors, actors, activists, and voices from the crowd — those who inspire us to think differently about the world so we can reframe living in it.
Reframeables
Rewind: Reframing Community with Ian Williams
This week, in celebration of Black History Month, we are coming back to one of our favourite interviews with poet, essayist, and novelist Ian Williams, whose brain we really connected with. His book of essays, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, is thought-provoking and beautiful — all the things a book of essays should be.
Ian Williams is the author of six books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His latest book, Disorientation, considers the impact of racial encounters on ordinary people. His novel Reproduction won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was published in Canada, the US, the UK, and Italy. His poetry collection Word Problems converts the ethical and political issues of our time into math and grammar problems. It won the Raymond Souster award.
Link:
For more Ian Williams, take a look at his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram
We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.
If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.
We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.
If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.
Natalie
Hey Reframeables, it’s Nat.
Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.
Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come, let’s reframe something.
Rebecca
This week, in celebration of Black History Month, we are coming back to one of our favourite interviews with poet, essayist, and novelist Ian Williams, whose brain we really connected with.
Natalie
His book of essays, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, is thought-provoking and beautiful — all the things a book of essays should be.
Rebecca
So, here is our conversation with Ian Williams: reframing community.
Ian Williams is the author of six books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His latest book, Disorientation, considers the impact of racial encounters on ordinary people. His novel Reproduction won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was published in Canada, the US, the UK, and Italy. His poetry collection Word Problems converts the ethical and political issues of our time into math and grammar problems. It won the Raymond Souster award.
Natalie
Today we are reframing community, or what we’re summing up as connections and collisions in both writing and living. Welcome, Ian, and thanks so much for being with us.
Ian
Oh, thanks for having me on.
Natalie
We’re not supposed to pull back the curtains, so to speak, but you know what? I think our listeners might find this kind of hilarious, that the three of us are speaking and yet not seeing each other — we’re only seeing ourselves. So this is all feeling really meta, and a little bit slippery. Anyways, ok, I’m going to dive right in with our first question, which is: to you, what is your relationship to (or even a philosophy on) your dealings with critics? To give some context, we just had a recent interview with a fellow writer and chef whose name is Sang Kim. He turned to Nietzsche to work his way through that kind of consideration for himself. So just wondering if there’s a certain voice that you turn to when you navigate some of these connections, but also potential collisions.
Ian
Maybe too many voices, actually. My thing lately is to try to turn some of the noise down. I think I’ve run to the end with this novel that I’m writing — I’ve sort of come up to the end of my reliance or my dependence on these kinds of bigger sort of philosophies and things like that. I’m reading Buddhism right now — I mean, I could have said that right from the beginning and said, “Buddhism, and here’s how it’s useful and helpful,” but it’s only partially satisfying. And I’ve come to this place where I just need to sort let the problem be what it is and not be like sanitized and tidied up and tucked and given recognizable language — and just let it be what it is, struggle with it, and try to arrive at somewhere that feels like an honest attempt at a solution. Yeah, and right now I’m in the midst of just struggle. You’ll probably hear me sighing a lot through our talk here.
Natalie
I really appreciate that honest take. That’s helpful.
Rebecca
Let’s talk titles for a second. How do titles like Reproduction connect in some way to some part of your life beyond the story you have crafted?
Ian
Yeah, the title really is that — it’s a good way of putting it, actually. The title is sort of a link between the fiction and the real, for me. And yeah, it’s that kind of thread that takes me from my daily life of digital devices and stuff into an artistic kind of space. So for the first book, it was You Know Who You Are, right? A poetry collection about identity and trying to find myself and relations to family. You Know Who You Are — but also something kind of punitive and finger-pointing about that title too, right? “You know who you are,” sort of guarding my hurts. And the second title kind of answered that one — Not Anyone’s Anything, and these are just kind of personal things that, you know, one works in their twenties and thirties. The answer to You Know Who You Are is like, you know, you’re not really in any serious relationship, you’re just kind of wandering the world. Following that, there was Personals, right, the attempt to sort of connect. Did you hear that little sigh just now, of struggle? It’s like breathing now.
Natalie
The struggle is real.
Rebecca
But I was going to say, is that because when you think of that work, you remember the struggle? Where did that sigh come from particularly right now?
Ian
It comes from inhabiting that moment again, right, you know — and just it being alive to me again. And then came Personals, an attempt to sort of reach outward in the world and to sort of map relationships across, you know, our tech landscape and stuff. Followed by the novel, right? After Personals came Reproduction. And so this is where your question began. And reproduction really was about me thinking about children as a man in my mid-late thirties, and finding that most people think about this as the concern and the worry of women in their mid-thirties. But I was suddenly gripped by this idea of thinking about genealogy and generation and reproduction and biology and all of these things, and what’s next. And I just followed that all the way to the end of the novel. It was coming from a personal place, but worked through in a fictional space. So the title is a kind of reproduction of the concerns of my life.
Rebecca
Interesting.
Natalie
So in memoir, you the writer, you’re choosing the story you’re going to get to tell — whereas maybe in a novel there’s more interpretive power held by the reader, because the reader then gets to work their way through with these various characters. So we’re really curious, is there one form over the other (since you’ve done both) where you feel either more in control of the story being told, or even more vulnerable?
Ian
Ooh, control and vulnerability, right? I think I feel more vulnerable in nonfiction. That probably comes as no surprise. It’s odd though, because I feel more vulnerable in nonfiction, but I also feel more control in nonfiction. So I think both attributes are stacked in the same genre. Because control for exactly the reason that you said, right? I can determine what story I tell and how I state it. You know, there’s a measure of truth there, right? Something actually happened. So I don’t quite have to go searching for plot or anything — the plot’s there. So the control is really there in shaping and disclosure and all of that. But I guess what I do in nonfiction is this kind of distancing thing, right? And I often have to write my way to the actual vulnerable space. It’s so easy to tell the story as I’ve told it to myself without reexamining it. That makes for quite serviceable nonfiction — tell the story to the world that you’ve been lying to yourself or telling yourself for a very long time.
I think really good nonfiction comes from a place where you go back to that experience and you say, “A-ha, I’ve been telling myself this script and I am fully in control of that script, but what if I tried to relive it or see it afresh or re-examine it now, truthfully, for someone who doesn’t know?” I don’t have to perform this for people who are my friends or whatever, but tell it again truthfully. And so that’s where the vulnerability steps in, right? It kind of tempers the control that wants to dictate the story. And I feel like fiction is just all, oh, there’s so much chaos in fiction, right? So many unknown variables and stuff that I really have to lean on my unconscious to do some of the work — the project is too big. And a lot of good fiction practice for me comes to trusting things that don’t make sense, right? Just sitting with things for a while, waiting for them to congeal, and then kind of trying to transcribe, right, instead of trying to control. So I’m relying on my unconscious quite a bit in fiction and poetry.
Natalie
That strikes me as very vulnerable.
Ian
I don’t know if this happens to you, though, where you come back to something five or ten years later and you feel like you wrote something to your future self. You know, like you thought you got it in the moment that you were writing it, but then later you examine it and you realize, “A-ha, no — it was coded in a way that made its way to the surface at that time in my life. But only now do I understand what I was trying to say.” So yeah, the unconscious is responsible for that kind of feeling.
Rebecca
And then you say, “Ok, now I need to go back and rework it based on what I know now?”
Ian
Well, sometimes it’s already published, right? Sometimes it’s done. But there’s that interpretive work, that interpretive work that you attribute to the reader. When you become a reader of your own work and you step back from it, but you still retain the intimacy of the experience of creating it, you say, “A-ha, I should have listened to myself ten years ago.” Or I saw this recently in an earlier poetry collection — this actually predicts a problem that I’m having right now in my life. And it was always there. It was always there, and it was there crying out for attention — but you did some pretty things with it, Ian, and then you let it go into the world. But, you know, the pretty service of it hasn’t really addressed it. And so working on it again, yeah.
Rebecca
I was laughing a lot reading Reproduction — Armie is such a funny character. I mean, they all are really funny. Armie just says the funniest things. I really love him. But there’s also a real loneliness to them. I mean, it’s a feeling you describe really acutely in Disorientation, in your essay The Only. So where do you kind of find yourself in the midst of funny and lonely? I would imagine that the people in your life probably find you quite funny?
Ian
Oh, that was a question.
Rebecca
Yeah.
Ian
Oh, they do. And they sort of have, like, mock exasperation with me at times. I don’t know. What is humour, right? I don’t even know. It’s not something I work at doing, right — being funny. I find that can be kind of cloying or irritating. I think you’re right about Armie too, right. I really do love this guy, Armie. Yeah, I still think about him and it brings me joy and makes me laugh, and sometimes it’s like, “I wish I could be more like this kid.” But no. I think good humour sometimes has this contrast to it, right? It’s funny because there’s a lining of sadness or whatever to it, and so the lining you picked up on was this loneliness of The Only, and the strangeness of that. But yeah, I think lonely was probably the big adjective of my teens and my childhood and my twenties. I’d be curious to know what your big adjective was, of your early life.
So the loneliness is always there, right? It’s the kind of baseline to everything. Yeah, I was preoccupied with that thematically for a long time. I think in my thirties there was something like… so all of these have always existed, right, but I think some of them rise to the surface. And so I think in my thirties, this kind of curiosity or inquisitiveness kind of became the dominant mode and the loneliness receded a bit. Now in my forties, it’s just disappointment, right, is the big adjective of the decade. Oh, there it is, right? I’ve been working on this project for, you know, about five or six years now, more than that. And it’s really just like working through various forms of disappointment and not letting it eat at me. And I mean, that’s been there from my childhood, right? Like, disappointment with the kids in the playground and like, “Why don’t they want to talk about math at recess?” You know, you live, and then somewhere like right now, it’s just this constant… with service, with everything. Just this disappointment that I’m working through. And that’s actually the title of the present book: Disappointment. But I think I might have to shelve it. I’m a long way from your question, with a probably disappointing kind of answer.
Natalie
No, it’s wonderful.
Ian
But yeah, I think these kinds of competing emotional zones resonate, and so you can hear that — what I guess is my voice, right? Which is like, part funny, and kind of lonely and sad, and these kinds of failures that are converted into clever moments and whatnot. So it’s all there — it’s all there in the noise of my brain.
Rebecca
I think that’s true about Armie — the way he’s clever, he’s lonely, he’s funny, he’s all of those things. And I guess that’s just what makes all those characters so interesting — is the multiplicity of who they are really comes through. So I want to stay with them for a lot longer. I read it quite slowly, yeah.
Ian
Oh, that’s good.
Rebecca
You do such interesting things with structure. There’s also this really interesting part of you that shakes up structure.
Ian
Yeah, structures are beautiful, right? But to get the right structure for everything and for everybody’s unique kind of mode, that’s been the challenge, and so I think I sit with books for a long time. I could write a straight story and just kind of give it to my agent and my editor, but something about me feels like a book isn’t done until it becomes uniquely itself, right? Structurally, it has to make some kind of contribution formally. It’s like getting dressed in the morning too, right? You don’t want to just wear the same black clothes all day every day. I think just like we put on clothes, a book has to put on the right clothing for itself on that particular day. And I just haven’t found a style for the present book in a way that suits it. You know, it wants to do all of these things, but I’m like, “That’s not your body type, Disappointment book. That’s not you. You know, that hairstyle doesn’t suit you.” So I’m constantly trying to find the thing that flatters the content. You were going to say something — were you going to give me your adjective for the twenties?
Natalie
Oh yeah.
Rebecca
Yeah, what is yours, Nat?
Natalie
Oh, I don’t know. That’s a hard one, because in my twenties… I’ve talked about this before on this show, Ian. I was so emotionally closed off. I was like… you know what, I was the girl who was navigating within a structure that kept me very safe in my head, because I think I felt like if I blew outside of it, like if I stepped outside of any lines, that that kind of rebellion would not be well-received. So it took until my late thirties to finally find myself in that. So I don’t know how to describe that process, beyond just being scared.
Ian
Scared and, like, dutiful, right? Yeah.
Natalie
So I definitely am not that now, which I would like about myself. And it’s good — you still like me, Bec, so that means that I’ve done something right.
Rebecca
I was just thinking how it’s kind of fun to name someone else’s — because I’m like, “Yes, dutiful. Nat, that’s you.”
Ian
And what’s yours?
Natalie
What’s you?
Rebecca
Well, yeah, I’m just thinking — and I don’t know if it’s changed. I feel like a word for my whole life is this yearning or wanting and something sort of unsettled. It’s not kind of a good yearning, necessarily. I mean, sometimes it is, but it’s often meaning that I’m kind of clawing at.
Natalie
Like yearning with a little tinge of angst?
Rebecca
Yeah, yearning with angst. Yup, that’s right, Nat.
Ian
That’s good, that’s good. A little cocktail there.
Rebecca
Yeah, it’s a cocktail.
Natalie
It’s a cocktail. Oh, I like that. It’s a cocktail. I’m going with that. Ok, Ian, I have a very specific question again, and it’s kind of going back to that essay. But you describe an exercise that you do with your students around seeing and being seen, and I’m wondering as you get older — and even as we talk about these structures and kind of maneuvering within them and then beyond them, do you feel like seeing and being seen gets easier, or more complex?
Ian
Well, I think everything for me becomes more complex, right, the longer I sit with it. In some ways, you know, I feel like I stopped caring about what other people see. But it’s this self-regard that’s the hard one, right? That’s always been… like even now, my camera’s on here, and I’m not actually making eye contact with myself — I’m actually looking at the ‘N’ and the ‘R’ in your boxes, rather than looking at myself. Because if I start looking at myself, all of those kind of teenage anxieties come back, right? About, “Oh, look at the shape your mouth makes when the voice comes out.” All of those little hang-ups that are so petty and silly, but still really hard to dismiss. So I think what’s hard for me is, like, the being seen by myself. And maybe today is not a very good day or whatever, right? Maybe some days I’m kinder to myself. But I find that hard, right — being seen by myself. Yeah, the emotional mirror rather than the physical mirror. Yeah.
Natalie
That resonates for me, for sure.
Ian
Yeah. We are our own worst critic kind of thing.
Natalie
100%.
Rebecca
It’s too bad, right? Because we’re very good at telling other people to be gentle. I mean, I certainly say that to my daughters, like, “Be gentle on yourself.” But then to model it to oneself is so challenging.
Ian
Especially if you’re ambitious and you want to always do better, right? If you’re always wanting to do better like I am, or to build something better, make something better, then the falls become really kind of evident. So in the present novel that I’m writing, there’s a woman who’s pretty obsessed with cosmetic makeovers of herself, so she does a number of procedures and whatnot, and she really just kind of goes around identifying people by what they need to do, right? Like your friend who needs a haircut, or the woman whose brows are too thin. So she starts seeing the world through all of these falls. And, I mean, that comes from a place inside of me that, you know, at least I’m wise to now, right? That should count for something, awareness. That’s me being cynical about the Buddhism moment that I’m in right now — points for awareness, now?
Rebecca
Points for awareness.
Natalie
Definitely points.
Rebecca
In The Drive Home, you talk about finding a church that practices (and I loved this line so much), “An informed Christianity.” Just kind of dropped that. Our dad is a minister, so we have…
Natalie
People have summed him up as a Buddhist Baptist pastor. So it’s interesting that you’re talking about this.
Rebecca
I feel like we’ve grown up around an informed Christianity, although when he retires, we’re going to have to go out and decide if we can find that. So it’s really a selfish question: have you found anything like that in Toronto?
Ian
I have not. And so for the last few weeks, I don’t know, churches have kind of opened up post-pandemic fairly recently. So I was in Europe for three months, I came back, and so I’ve been back for about six weeks or so. So I’ve been going around to different places for the last six weeks trying to find this thing. And you know, even if you agree with the doctrine of a place or whatever, you’re still searching for a kind of fit to the community, and people who don’t quite glaze over. And so I kind of go there and I’m like, “Who will say good morning to me today?” And, “That’s a bit too much enthusiasm in the welcome. What are they proving?” The challenge, I guess, in finding this thing right now is: how do you move from the outside to the inside, right? And so I’m clearly on the outside from week to week, and partly someone invites you to the inside, and I’m like, “I don’t want to go to the inside with you, particularly, I don’t quite trust your hand,” or whatever. And then partly it is: how can I enter on my own, right? It’s not specific to churches, but any group. How do I now become part of the inside of this thing? And yeah, I haven’t quite found it. I haven’t found it, and I don’t want people to regurgitate platitudes of Christianity to me, and I don’t want to become an object of persuasion either.
The difficulty with religion and Christianity right now is it hits, like, part of me — so I’m really fragmented, in terms of my relations. There are friends that, you know, I go to for intellectual needs and other friends for this. We’re community, right? It’s sort of what you’re interested in. But to find, like, one group that hits all of your needs is really hard. I find myself just kind of spinning in circles so that people will see different sides of me. Almost like rotating on a 24 hour axis, right? So my friend can see my left side, the other person can see my face, someone else can see my right side, but nobody really can see all of me. And the hope is that at some point an informed Christianity that promises this can do it. But I think people themselves, the practitioners or the Christians, we’re just human, right? And so we can’t swallow people like eggs and process all of them. So yeah, no clear solution. No clear answer there. Insert sigh here at this point.
Rebecca
Insert acute disappointment.
Ian
Yet another.
Natalie
That’s funny.
Rebecca
Hey Reframeables: a little housekeeping. Don’t forget to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts if you like what we’re doing here on Reframeables. Your feedback really supports this reframing project of ours. Also, please sign up for our weekly newsletter, which comes with a free delicious recipe from Nat. And we have a new segment for our Patreon subscribers: mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. So check us out over on our Patreon, and consider a donation if these reframing conversations have supported you or someone you know. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Reframeables.
Natalie
My husband is an atheist, and so we’ve been together for ten years, and so when he married the pastor’s daughter, he just thought this was a riot, right? Because he just couldn’t even get over the fact that this was true. And yet he and our dad have become really tight over the years because of their sort of more Buddhist leanings. And so his comment the other day, as he came and visited the church (because he’ll come maybe a couple of times a year), was, “This is like, the only place where I’ve seen essentially an informed Christianity practiced, and it’s because it’s so damn messy.” Which I thought was so interesting.
Ian
Exactly, exactly, exactly. It’s that. Don’t smooth away the mess and don’t pretend it’s not there. And I think when people expect perfection of Christians, then they’re always looking for hypocrisy. Like, “Oh, you guys claim to be this, but in fact you’re that.” But no, just let the mess be, right?
Natalie
Yeah. The mess is.
Rebecca
Yeah, but that’s so hard.
Natalie
Ok. Well, so if you haven’t found necessarily your greatest sense of community in all these various places that you have visited, where has your sort of sense of community shown up in your life?
Ian
Yeah. Different places for different things, right? I guess I was starting to say this just now. So for, like, my spiritual yearnings and needs, yeah, churches are good — and especially if you grow up in one, right, and you see the same people from week to week. There’s a sense of community there just in its repetition. But I mean, I’ve never really left, like, academic spaces, right? I never found a job outside. I mean, there was a summer at Canada’s Wonderland, but I’ve never really found jobs outside of academia. Which was a wonderful summer, actually, come to think of it.
Natalie
They’ll take you back.
Ian
I do like the intellectual satisfaction in community at universities. Just the breadth of it, the various stages of it, hungry students versus, like, aged professors and things. There’s that there. I mean, my personal communities of people who can see two or more sides of me, those tend to be smaller, right. Handfuls of people, pockets of people here and there. I think one of the narratives that I’ve told myself from the time I was a kid was like the lone wolf thing, right — that you don’t need anybody, Ian. Simply because you didn’t have anybody, you don’t need anybody. But I’m kind of rethinking that now or re-feeling it now — that that’s just protective, right? And so it’s ok to need people and have them to support you and still preserve that relationship instead of turning away and saying, “Oh, see, I told you so.” There’s some messy self-discovery that’s happening that will end up in fiction at some point.
Rebecca
That sounds like wisdom — that you can say, “You disappoint me, but I’m not going to run.”
Ian
Yeah. I mean, people’s purpose is not to satisfy me, right? That is not the purpose in their life. Nobody, like, orbits around me to keep me happy. I mean, just their being should not be a disappointment to me, right? Their being is simply their existence. My disappointment arises from something else within me, like expectation or need or trying to do something else. So, yeah, I have good communities around me. I want to honour that, and admit that — they’re not perfect. They’re good, and they’re made up of people who are trying their best, and engaged in their own struggles. And I’m someone who’s disappointed people, like, repeatedly and often. So I’m also on the end of the disappointer.
Natalie
Yeah. I like that language. I think you said, “Pockets of people,” and I think there’s something about that, just who we can gather around us in small little areas. I love that.
Ian
I’m thinking you could label this conversation, like, “A disappointing conversation with Ian Williams.” There you go.
Natalie
“A disappointing conversation with Giller winner Ian Williams.”
Rebecca
Because it’s true — Ian, that might be really interesting for listeners to just understand, because you’re so accomplished. That’s always an interesting thing, to talk with people who are so accomplished and so… I mean, really, your writing is so unique and wonderful. But then to still struggle with these very human things, and to say that this is a disappointment with Ian Williams is hilarious, almost. But is that… so how do you respond to that? Just this weird life, I guess?
Ian
Yeah, it seems one way from the outside, but I fail so much. Right? I fail so much — like, artistically and personally and in all ways. And I sit with this failure and I enjoy my failure a lot more, or I exist with my failure a lot more than I do with my success. And the successes are these kinds of bright peaks and lights and whatnot. Yeah, but the threat of failure is always there. It’s not something that terrifies me, it’s just kind of like a procedural thing — a matter of procedure, something I just have to kind of move through. Yeah, I had bad falafel on Monday, and then on Wednesday I found a different truck and had better falafel, right? You work through these things. So yeah, failure is not a bad thing and disappointment is not a bad thing. I think it gets cast as a bad thing. But my mantra lately has been, “Disappointment strengthens the heart.” You know, it’s kind of like exercise for the heart that teaches me how to rebound and how to be resilient and all of that. So it’s my exercise, right. That’s disappointment. Nothing to sort of avoid.
Rebecca
I like that. I really feel like in Disorientation, I got to know you really well. Now, I don’t know if you would say you showed certain parts of yourself — I mean, I guess you would sort of say that, that we reveal certain parts, but I feel like I’d want to hang out with your mom and your partner and your friend Pierre. But do you feel like you gave a lot of yourself away in that writing, and then now you needed to turn back to fiction to sort of shore up, in some different way, your… I mean, it’s a very vulnerable book. I found it just very generous to reveal these…
Ian
I really like your phrasing here. Yeah. It was a quick book to write, but a hard book to write. And I think I gave a lot of myself, but I’m not sure I gave a lot of myself away, right. Because I don’t think I’ve lost. I don’t think I’ve lost myself by sort of going public, like a company or something. And yeah, I think you’re 100% right that I need to turn back to something else where I can play more, and just where there’s more joy in the process and all of that, like fiction — and so absolutely necessarily the right turn to make right now. But I mean, I will write nonfiction again. I have another project that I’m thinking about after this novel. So it’s a lot — I feel like I give a lot in poetry, too, right. I think that’s also really emotionally raw, to write from that space. But poetry seems to be like… I don’t think my poetry is particularly difficult, but it seems to exist beneath a layer of, I don’t know, technique or flash or something that maybe hides how available I am in poetry. But yeah, we can give ourselves without giving ourselves away.
Rebecca
Right. That seems like something to ponder. Giving ourselves without giving ourselves away.
Natalie
I’m just sitting with that.
Ian
It’s a U2 song, no? At the end? “You gave yourself away… And you give, and you give, and you give yourself away…” I don’t know what song that is, but just got the lyrics.
Natalie
Oh, no. How do none of us know what that is?
Rebecca
Yeah, it’s definitely U2.
Ian
What is that?
Natalie
It’s U2, yeah. It’s definitely U2.
Rebecca
“And you give yourself away.” But they’re not being quite as deep, right? Because he’s saying…
Natalie
Bono’s pretty deep.
Rebecca
Are we saying Bono…? Ok, fine, I guess it’s deep. Bono, we don’t think that was that good.
Natalie
I’m going to tweet that. “My sister thinks that Bono is not deep.” Hot take.
Ian
Right?
Rebecca
Well, I’m just saying he’s just saying he’s giving himself away. He’s not saying…
Natalie
His next steps. I love this. Ok, Ian, we have to end on something really exciting with you.
Ian
What’s that?
Natalie
It’s a very quick little speed round where you have to just answer off the top of your head, and our questions are famously not super-speed roundy. So you just have to go with it. Number one: what is the last new skill you’ve ever learned?
Ian
Last new skill that I’ve learned? It’s probably like something house-related, maybe, but… cutting paint when you paint the borders of something, right? Yeah, some home reno thing.
Rebecca
Wow, nice. Ok. On that note, I feel like I should ask you if you got all your furniture.
Ian
Damaged, but yeah. I got it, yeah.
Rebecca
You have to read his book, Disorientation, to know that — but ok, good. Glad to hear it. Ok, next question: what’s a common myth or something people misunderstand about your profession?
Ian
Ooh. As a writer or as a professor?
Natalie
You choose.
Ian
I think… oh, what a great question. These are not speed round questions at all. I think for the professor part is that, you know, that life is easy because we just teach a few hours of the week — not realizing that there’s so much beneath that iceberg, right? Both in terms of thinking, preparation iceberg, you know, administrative stuff as well. So the time that you actually see a professor in front of a classroom is really just a minuscule amount of the kind of work that we do behind the scenes. For writing… writing, writing, something that people misunderstand about writing. Oh, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a counter-myth to every myth out there, and I think people know it’s not easy now, right? So, yeah, not sure about that. I’ll stick with the professor bit.
Natalie
Ok, what’s the most fun thing you did today?
Ian
Most fun thing I did today… I was listening to, like, oh gosh… oh, this is embarrassing. Oh my gosh, I can’t even say it.
Rebecca
You’ve got to now.
Ian
I’ll give you… ok, so maybe… I was all in my feelings yesterday, and so I brushed my teeth, I stripped down to my pajamas, and I put on a fur coat, and I sat in the dark in that fur coat. That was fun, yesterday — just to feel the fabric and the texture. And this morning I crossed the subway, came into my office, I was listening to a Beyoncé remix of Madonna’s Vogue, and I came in here, and I did a little dance in my office. There you go. It was fun. It was fun.
Rebecca
Yes. Yes.
Natalie
Brilliant.
Rebecca
I love that so much. Actually, it’s so funny, because I was just thinking the other day — I was like, “You know what, when we record podcasts, I’m just going to start wearing crazy things to disturb Natalie.”
Ian
Fur — fake fur, but yeah.
Rebecca
Fur. So yes, thank you. I’m so inspired. Ok, thank you. Ok, how would your siblings or a close friend describe you?
Natalie
In three words.
Rebecca
In three words.
Ian
My brother would probably say, “Thinks too much. Needs to relax.” Their advice would probably be something like, “Just stop, Ian, just stop.” Something like that. Yeah: “Too much.”
Rebecca
Ok.
Natalie
I like that. All right, Ian, what do you need to be creative?
Ian
Oh man. I think I need to be alone. Yeah. Both like, you know, physically (like, in relationships and whatnot), but also kind of existentially alone for a while.
Rebecca
Ok, and then really trivially last question, truly the last one, is: what’s for dinner tonight? Do you know? Have you thought that far?
Ian
Oh, I don’t know. The falafel thing has been… I’ve been searching around for that. I’ve been on a bit of a cabbage kick for the last three days — just, like, various things with cabbage. But I don’t know. I’m going to meet up with a friend later today. There you go. Cabbage and rice lately, so…
Rebecca
Cabbage. Ok.
Ian
There you go. The exciting life of…
Rebecca
The disappointing life of Ian Williams.
Ian
There you go. It’s going to be maybe a disappointing dinner. I don’t know, I’m unsure right now.