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What I Mean to Say

Enough small talk. Let’s get right to it: Why can’t we talk to each other anymore? What makes good communication? And how do we restore the lost art of conversation?


What I Mean To Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time


In contemporary society, much of our communication exists in a new dimension, the online space, and it’s changing how we regard each other and how we converse. In the digital realm, we can be anonymous, we can make false and hurtful comments yet evade consequences in a hurried scroll of clicks and swipes. But a good conversation takes time and patience, courage, even. We need to realize that one-half of our conversations is, in fact, listening. And aren’t the best conversationalists—like the best musicians—good listeners?

With What I Mean to Say, award-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams seeks to ignite a conversation about conversation, to confront the deterioration of civic and civil discourse, and to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings. Alternately serious and playful, Williams nimbly leaps between topics of discussion and, along the way, is discursive, digressive, and endlessly generous—like any great conversationalist.

 

Google alerts, 2

As I’ve mentioned before, my agent occasionally sends me Google alerts of what I and other Ian Williamses are up to.

Google Alerts
Ian Williams Daily update ⋅ March 15, 2019
NEWS
Ian Williams thrives on stylistic daring in debut novel Reproduction Straight.com Reproduction, the debut novel by acclaimed poet Ian Williams, looks at how love, ambition, and sorrow recur in the families we both inherit and …Flag as irrelevant
Man arrested for allegedly hitting a child with a leather belt WKRG News 5 The boy told her he was punished by 30-year-old Ian Williams for his actions at school. The arrest report states the alleged abuse happened on …Flag as irrelevant

$165 000 US or $218 790 CAD

David Chariandy won the Windham-Campbell prize for Brother.

He’s won, or been close to winning, a lot of prizes. Definitely, the book has made him over a quarter million dollars in prize money alone. For part of an afternoon, a few of my writer friends and I fantasized about what we’d do with the money.

I had just come back from playing tennis so I was thinking I might spend more of my time doing that. In the short term, I might get a new racket (I dislike that spelling but, alas, I’m giving in). That would leave $218 600 to spend on tennis balls.

A colleague at the Peter Wall Institute, younger than me, said she sometimes takes a day off and pretends that she’s retired. She informed me that one needs 1.3 million dollars to retire comfortably off the interest.

Anyway, Twitter showered David with love, although he’s not on it.

Reading Zadie Smith’s Feel Free

Here are some highlights from Feel Free, via my Twitter self.

The book trailer for Reproduction

Have you seen this yet? I strut in slow motion down Queen West in Toronto. I look pretty tough. I appear to be thinking, I run these streets out here, y’all.

Then I write some poetry into a yellow notebook.

My favourite sentence is the last one, starting at 1:16, where I lean in and get all serious. That’s about as intense as I get, believe it or not.