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In advance of his much-anticipated Munroe Beattie Lecture at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University this fall, acclaimed winner and University of Toronto creative writing professor sat down with English PhD student Mekyle Qadir to discuss his writing, what inspires him, and where the world of writing seems to be moving alongside the shifting social conditions of Canada.

Their conversation revealed not just the diversity of genre and form that spans , but also his negotiations between the process of writing and being an academic in English literature.

Mekyle Qadir: What writers have inspired you? And in your case, I’ll tweak the question a bit and ask what artists — musicians or maybe visual artists — have inspired you? 

Ian Williams: That question is dependent on the project. For the last project, it was Samuel Beckett, the playwright. For a couple of reasons. I like the sort of nihilism and the hopelessness and the humor that’s really bleak there. But I also wanted to strip down and do something much cleaner and simpler than the previous novel. And so You’ve Changed is a much tighter story than Reproduction. So he was in my head. Like, less, Ian, less, can you do less?

Musically, I was listening to a whole bunch of soupy ballads and jazz standards from the mid-20th century and the 70s and so there was that feeling that was circulating, like Sinatra and lots of sweepy violins and good strings. 

And I kept a couple of images on my wall. I kept something by Norman Rockwell, I know people think he’s kitschy or whatnot, but there was an image there that really stuck with me, and I kept that on my wall for the duration of writing [You’ve Changed]. And in my head, I thought from George Balanchine, there’s a position in Agon, it’s at the front of the book, where the dancers seem entwined with each other and almost monstrous. They’re both organic and inhuman  in that particular frozen moment. George Balanchine is known for iconic postures but also rapid movement, so it has that really still, monstrous kind of center there. 

I really treat writing kind of like food. Like, I can’t tell you what I ate two days ago because it gets so absorbed into me.

Mekyle Qadir: In your work as the director of the MA in creative writing [at UofT], have you noticed any changes in what you’ve seen from the students? Are there trends that come up?

Ian Williams: I think the self is at the center for sure. And I think issues of identity have given way a bit to issues of trauma.

I’m fascinated by the ways that we abstract ourselves. Like when you need to put an application together, or you’re trying to create a project, on what terms do you abstract yourself? It’s no longer a question across these demographic markers of race and gender or transness and sexuality. Still there, to a degree. But that’s now been crossed more intensely with the political and also issues of trauma. That’s what I’m noticing right now. But it’s still so fresh and emerging that I’m not sure what I’m seeing. 

Mekyle Qadir: That’s on our minds as English students, especially. What is happening to writing, what is happening to literary criticism alongside that? 

Ian Williams: And I also like to think, too, about how scholarship is going to change. So, at UofT, we’re right at that intersection of creative and critical. And so what elements of the self can be acceptably brought into critical writing? And how much intellectualizing can happen in a creative space before it starts to feel contrived or misplaced. We’re dealing with these issues of stitching together hemispheres of our brain.

Mekyle Qadir: How much of those issues went into it when you wrote What I Mean To Say? Is that intersection similar to what you were getting at? Because that book addresses so many symptoms that are so relevant, but also very difficult to pinpoint.

Ian Williams: Right. So my sample size for What I Mean To Say was not like my teaching background. It wasn’t the student-university setting because that’s a skewed demographic. This is just observations of being in the world. Yes, my job is part of that, but simply your interactions with someone on Kijiji and someone in an airport and encounters with strangers of various types.

I’m really fascinated by strangers because they do expand beyond what we’re comfortable with and who we’re comfortable approaching. And they tap into all sorts of preconceptions that we walk through the world with. So the pool was just bigger for What I Mean To Say. It was the . It was intended for a national audience. And so I had to treat it in terms of Canadian representation.

Mekyle Qadir: And did you find the responses to be more like, ‘oh, yeah, this is what I do’? Or was it more sort of combative? Like, ‘no, I don’t talk like that.’

Ian Williams: I found people were generally really relieved for the subject and said, ‘oh, I’ve noticed this too, and I’m glad that you said it.’ There’s a kind of legitimizing that happens when people see themselves in text or in media or art. Generally it was quite positive and well received. Folks felt seen and heard.

And once someone articulates that, then you have the language for it yourself. And then you’re at a different point in the relationship with yourself.

Mekyle Qadir: I’m going further back now in your career to Disorientation, because you talked about hearing ‘someone else’s words,’ and of course the words you got there were James Baldwin. How did Baldwin inspire you, particularly as a writer, not just the social figure he was?

Ian Williams: It’s kind of neat. There’s some lifelong voices that are always with you, but definitely Baldwin was there because he wrote the kind of essay that I think is important and that has impact. We know the scholarly essay is important, does work among specialists, easy to be cynical about it. And then there’s the BuzzFeed clickbait kind of article, right? Our poles are much further, I think, than when Baldwin was writing. But yet, he’s able to write this essay that seemed, at once, immediate, fully present and situated in his moment and at the same time, this observation and sometimes indictment of human nature generally. And so, I wanted the essays to feel both rooted in time and timeless, and so all of them have this aspect of dialoguing with our moment, but also work that I hope in 100 years somebody could read and say, yeah, that’s being human. He was a master at that.

Mekyle Qadir: How has your relation to the poetic changed? Not necessarily poetry, like your collection Personals, but you have a short story collection as well where you played with form in such a unique way.

Ian Williams: The poetic is never too far away from anything that I write. It’s always pretty much infusing all my formal decisions. Poetry is a place where I can work out these ideas on a small scale. It’s not a service genre, but it’s definitely a genre that’s nutrient-dense in terms of transferring to other kinds of genres.

And so you’ll see small formal experiments in the poetry that either can be transferred or scaled up, or does something else more important, which is it gives me courage and permission to do something weird in a different genre. And in each genre, I’m looking for some kind of poetic sensibility to run through it. That’s where the real energy lies, formally.

In “Word Problems,” there’s that poem that goes all the way across the book, the top line just runs all the way across and then all the way down. And in You’ve Changed, you’ve got the text that fades in or fades out, and that’s not standard prose behavior. A little bit of blackout, erasure stuff happening, too. And the nonfiction is generally better behaved than fiction because you don’t want it to be distracting, but for Disorientation, [for instance] one has to change one’s position to the page, in that essay particularly.

In What I Mean To Say, the Massey lectures, the question was how to get elements of an oral form into a printed text. And there are pieces of conversation and scripts and dialogue and there’s static images and all of that. So to think about the lecture as not just a monologue but to think about a lecture as a kind of conversation with writers and thinkers of the past, and also with strangers in the present, and loved ones. So I guess I’m always looking for relations of some sort, right? Connections and relations of some sort, both formally and in content. 

Mekyle Qadir: So it gives you this method of play or it puts you in the space of experimentation. 

Ian Williams: That’s it, that’s important to me. The space to experiment. And I think in a medium that’s used for transmitting ideas, if we were to talk about non-fiction prose, people want the language to disappear and just have this kind of pure thought-to-thought communion between the writer and the reader, but if we do that I think we’re missing a layer of beauty. 

And it’s both visible and disappears. It’s like looking through a tinted window. The way that I approach writing is how sometimes we hang a curtain in front of a window or we have the blinds open partway or not at all raised, slanted. Sometimes the window is tinted, sometimes there’s stained glass on it. There’s so many things that we could do to alter our perception. So why not take advantage of some of those options from time to time? For a harsh and hot subject like race, I think a little bit of tint is necessary and good.

Mekyle Qadir: As both a writer and a professor at probably the biggest English department in Canada, in your opinion, what kind of books or texts do you think we are not reading enough, and what do you think, if anything, are we reading too much?

Ian Williams: I would say I would like to read more plays, more drama. Because I think the play is to the screen what poetry is to literature. 

The thing that we’re consuming too much of is just general media and quite a lot of slop, things meant to titillate and to entertain and in fact, it’s rotting us out. But somewhere, if you could trace a genealogy far enough back, I think the old-fashioned play has morphed into TV and cinema that we’re still consuming and I think there’s something pure and probably more poetic happening in the play universe, the world of drama. And what we’re seeing is a kind of derivative of it. So I’m also hoping that in consuming more drama by playwrights, there’s also a corrective to our consumption of screen modes, right?

And when you think about it, like the WhatsApp chat and all of these kinds of dialogic methods, the text message, these quick rapid fire things, there are kinds of plays that have emerged. There’s something there that has been translated and abused. And I would like to get back to that kernel that feels more artistic and authentic to me. 

And what we’re consuming too much of, it’s too easy an answer to say screens. I mean, I spend a lot of time typing to loved ones but I mean the addictive kind of scroll, the doomscroll, the sense that there’s always something better at the next flick of the finger. Yeah, it troubles me that we’ve invested so much hope in that very curated, destructively curated world. What we need to do is read the stuff that is not coming to us on our phones, right? The stuff that people think we won’t like, or is boring for us. My assignment for my grad class last week was to spend some time doing something, an activity you think of as boring. You are just going to hunker down. You’re not gonna have your headphones in or whatever, you’re just gonna go out into the world on a walk, whatever it is you choose, and you do that boring thing. And I think more of that is necessary as a kind of antidote.