Ideas - Bonus | 2024 Massey lecturer Ian Williams on courageous conversations and taking risks

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

We've dropped this bonus podcast into the feed to announce that Canadian writer Ian Williams is this year’s Massey lecturer. He spoke with Q host Tom Power to tell us why he’s chosen the topic of 'conversations' for his lecture series, how listening can be a courageous act, and why he believes it’s important to have difficult conversations, even at the risk of offending people.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there. We have a special bonus episode for Idea subscribers.

A conversation with the 2024 CBC Massey lecturer Ian Williams and the host of Q, Tom Power. Have a listen. Hey, I'm Tom Power. Welcome to Q. So this is pretty cool. Not every day you get to start the show with a big old announcement.

So in order to set up the announcement, I need to tell you about something called the Massey Lectures. If you're you about something called the Massey Lectures. If you're not as familiar with the Massey Lectures, it's a really great Canadian tradition that's been going on since the early 60s. Every year, a great Canadian or sometimes international writer or thinker or scholar gives a series of five public lectures in cities across Canada. And they get broadcast on the CBC. And you listen to this thing, you go to the theater, you hear a great mind talk about the subject of their choosing, and it's usually something that Canada needs to hear right now. In the past,

Massey lecturers have been folks like the bestselling author, Ian Williams. Ian Williams is an award-winning writer, poet, and professor at the University of Toronto. His debut novel, Reproduction, won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which is Canada's richest award for fiction. And when Ian's talking, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who's not hanging on his every word. But as you're going to hear, when he came in to talk about his plans for the lecture, he's not really interested in talking by himself these days. He's interested in conversations and why these days it feels harder and more complicated to have them. Here's our conversation. Ian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

How are you doing? I'm doing well. Congratulations are in order. Yeah. I mean, to be a part of that list, right, it's pretty impressive, right, when you read that list. Yeah. What went through your mind when I was reading out those names? right, when you read that list. Yeah.

What went through your mind when I was reading out those names? Yeah, it's, yeah, trying to reconcile myself with these names, right? And these, are these actual people or are these just kind of like the abstractions of people? Like, you know, at what point does Martin Luther King stop being like a human person who needs like oatmeal in the morning and starts being like the champion of civil rights? And so, yeah, maybe we lose ourselves at some point. Yeah. I think about that all the time. In some ways yeah, maybe we lose ourselves at some point. Yeah. I think about that all the time.

In some ways, it's the reason I do the show. I think about that all the time, is that these people like Charlie Chaplin or Martin Luther King or Jane Jacobs, they showered and they went to a convenience store and bought cigarettes and were also geniuses. Yeah, what you do though is like you humanize people, right? So if we have like Beyonce living up on this level,

Beyonce talking to you suddenly, you know, has a wart or a pimple or something, you know? And suddenly she's like- I bring the warts out to people, that's what I'm trying to say. Suddenly you make them human, right? In a way that we forget that these names that are circulating all the time

are people who, you know, do have to buy toothpaste. The worry is for me that if we make these people into gods, then the average person thinks that they can't do that stuff, that they have to be like given some sort of gift from God. I think life's richer when remarkable people are just like you and me. Yeah. I like that. That's actually kind of beautiful. That's all we have time for. The end. My thoughts. You know what?

I'll be doing the lecture next year. Congratulations. What went through your head when you found out? Is it a call you get to do this thing? I think it was a bit of like a couple of soft approaches, I think, at first. Like, might you be interested in or are you thinking about anything lately? I think there were a few of like those kinds of conversations I was having. And I was like, I'm not sure where this is going.

But yeah, I'm thinking about things. Um, yeah. And they're writing nonfiction next and so forth. So yeah, I was just, I think they were feeling me out and I was sort of baffled and just being honest.

Yeah. How did you land on conversations as the topic of the lecture? Yeah, that's tricky. You know, like I did my PhD about like tone and voice, right? So I was interested in like, how do we know what people mean from just the words they say? And I was also sort of fascinated by like, how could we detect who's speaking from a page, right? So a page is pretty neutral, like doctorate was in English lit. And how do you know a black man is writing or like a lesbian woman or whatnot? What clues are there in text? That's 20 years ago, right? I've written like several books in the meantime. All of that has been very useful in sort of constructing voices and whatnot. And sort of the natural evolution for me is this idea of, okay, we know about voice,

we know about tone, we put those things together. And what are our conversations like? But that's one part of it. That's sort of like a theoretical answer for you. But also we're living in a point now where we can barely talk to each other, right? Like it seems incredibly urgent these days with sort of increasing polarization, sort of online forms of talking. And yeah, it seems like really timely that we kind of step back and say, why can't we talk to each other? How can we talk to each other? What do we need to talk about right now in 2024? And create like an environment and a space to make that happen. So I think it's sort of the fabric to make a number of other kinds of important sort of interventions possible.

What have you been learning about our inability to have conversations? I think it's an interesting point because one of the things I was going to bring up to you was having a conversation about conversations right now is a dangerous thing to do. You're right, the fracturing of news media. We are not consuming the same news media. When we're DMing, are we really talking to one another? When we're posting Instagram stories at one another, are we really talking to one another? What have you been gleaning? Right, right.

It gets kind of meta, right, after a point, but I'm trying to keep this as sort of like real as possible. Learning about a lot of things, right? So for instance, I think politeness constrains us. And at the same time, without that politeness, we see like what chaos breaks loose on social media. So what is the sort of appropriate amount of like social policing, right, that we need to be like decent and civil to each other? I've learned that the topics that we say we shouldn't talk about are in fact topics that some segments talk about all the time, right? So when we say like we shouldn't talk about race or people's sexual lives or whatever, like sexual minorities are talking about this all the time, right, with their friends.

Black folks, Indian folks, we're talking about race constantly in our circles. Only certain subjects are off limits to some people, right? So learning like just these little things that we've taken for granted and sort of assume and then realize, no, in fact, this is not the case, right? Yeah. It's an interesting thing you get to do here to kind of talk to the country about this.

Yeah, yeah. And hopefully that we find ways of talking to each other too about this. And like both nationally, right? How to have a national conversation. Harder to do. Yeah. I mean, lots of people involved, lots of perspectives involved. But also like more domestically too, right?

lots of people involved, lots of perspectives involved, but also like more domestically too, right? So how do we sit around a table at Christmas time and talk about gender neutral bathrooms, right? So yeah, both like the scale right from the personal and intimate all the way up to the national. I want to find out a little bit about why this might be interesting to you, but I want to do that through

maybe talking a little bit more about you for people who may not know you. The last time we talked on the show, I've seen you socially, you see at the old Gillers every year and all that kind of stuff. It was when you won the Giller Prize, and we were doing a little bit of research to get ready for this. Born in Trinidad, moved to Canada, how old? I was nine, yeah. What do you remember?

But Trinidad, I mean, what do you? I was nine, yeah. What do you remember? About Trinidad? I mean, what do you remember about nine? It's all pretty clear, right? Like, I feel at nine years old, I could have been pretty much an adult. Yeah, I could have found my way through. I remember a lot about it. I remember sort of, yeah.

It's funny. Like, I remember the childish details. I remember food and playing and my friends and my toys. I remember my airplanes and all of that stuff. But I also remember this kind of atmosphere of something just beyond my grasp in childhood. North America that I see on TV, but they're actually like real people doing things that are very different from what we're doing here. And I'm in relation to that somehow. I'm seeing them, but they're not seeing me. Like little things like that, that you start to sort of realize and come to an awareness with your little child brain. Yeah, those kinds of things, I remember sort of being formed, right? And when you have a big move, a big migration, sort of in your childhood, you get split, right?

You just get divided. You move to where the TV show was. You're moving to where you were looking out the window and you're moving to the outside. That's right. What do you mean by a split? Yeah, it's kind of this way, like you're in the audience for like a sitcom being shot

and then suddenly you're plucked and sort of put on stage there. But you're split in the sense that, you know, you've got a private life and a sort of like early history that's formed by one country and one system. And then you come here

and you realize that, oh, there's a totally other way or a different way, at least, of sort of living and being. And I've got to do both of those things, right? Right, because my parents are committed to say

this form A of living. But if I'm to live the both of those things, right? Because my parents are committed to, say, this form A of living. But if I'm to live the rest of my life out here, I better get used to form B. What do you remember in the practical of coming to Canada for the first time? Was it snowing? I remember the late night flight. It was in the middle of the night. It was as late as we were allowed to stay up. And in those days, I mean, this is the 80s, right?

Late 80s. You had to like dress up to get on a plane, right? It was actually like something. Yeah, there was no pajama pants and socks. No, no. You don't show up like that, right? You just wear like your nice clothes on your flight. There were waving galleries and stuff to sort of say goodbye to folks.

And just the occasion of being on a plane, there weren't discount airlines at all. That was an occasion, right? You know, it was, it was pretty big. And so from a kid, like being on a plane was a big thing, right? Yeah. Toronto, did you land in Toronto? Yeah. I landed at Pearson.

Yeah. And upon landing, you mean like, what was it? I remember snow for the first time. I'm shrugging. I guess you can't see the author. Thank you for the translation, though. I appreciate that. But yeah, not easily wowed even as a kid, right?

One of these stoic kinds of probably little Sheldon kids, yeah. Were there books and reading and writing going on around you? Yeah, all the time. My mom went back to university and I would read her textbooks and stuff like that. What did she go to university for? She went to York and she went back for English. Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah. And so like good books in the house as a result of that. And books with weird covers and things that you know you shouldn't quite be reading, but you're kind of peeking into, yeah. The path one would think is these books are around your house going to university for english you would think oh well he he discovers these books he decides to commit his life to writing not not the case um psychiatry i was reading you were on the path of becoming a

psychiatrist psychologist right right right yeah but it's not i don't think these are super unrelated things right like i mean that's right you're interested in sort of people and language. And I mean, that's all I really, really wanted, right? So you could go sort of the scientific way of sort of getting to know people. Or you could just make them up. I chose the second, yeah. You are aware now that you were interested in language and how people spoke to one another? I knew this like first year university, right?

Like what's important in life? People and communication. How to get to know these people and to talk to these people. My first degree was in psychology and English. All these hypothetical people that you could figure out and then psychology

as a backdrop to that. Were you having a hard time? The reason I ask, and let me offer transference so that you don't think I'm accusing anything. Sometimes I wonder if I do this job because it is a controlled way to talk to somebody. And so I'll just offer that up. I wonder why you were interested in how we talk to one another and converse with one another in early years of university.

Were you having a hard time with that? Yeah, that's really insightful. Really insightful, Tom, for your own life and for mine. Oh, yeah. They're going to put a wing in the therapist's office for me. Don't worry about that. They're going to memorial wing in my name. But I guess, I mean, you can superficially get along with anybody, right?

But the kinds of deep connections that you crave somewhere in your teenage years require a bit more than just, you know, kind of casual contact. And I perhaps was a bit clinical about this and I was a lonely child, right? I was always sort of on the fringes of childhood, right? Always never quite fitting into that time in life, right?

And so I wanted to understand why and how and when will things get better and all of that. Yeah, and so I think that's partly related, right? Yeah. People can't see, but I hope you see my nod of recognition. Were you on the fringes of childhood too? Oh yeah, baby.

And it doesn't mean you're unpopular, right? No, no. It just means like, you know, why are we doing this? And can't we just sort of move on to the next phase? Everyone else seems to be, this seems to be easy for everybody else. It seems a little bit harder for me. Right, right, right. Like how much baseball can you play?

I'm good. You know, I love it. But, you know, can we do something else now? I am, you end up not doing psychiat anymore, and you end up becoming a writer. I was reading you had a fire. Yeah. You had a house fire that everything was gone. Yeah.

Except for the clothes on your back. That's a real deep cut. Where'd you find that out? I mean, that's very true. Wait till I read your credit score. By the way, you're doing great. Besides, you know, this album here. That's really impressive. But yeah, so

I worked in the States for a long, for about seven years, right, after the doctorate. In English, yeah, at University of Toronto. And yeah, partway through my time there, I was in my condo, there was a fire, an electrical fire that spread across the building and down, and just kind of destroyed everything, right? So I was home at the time, I managed to get out, but never quite got back in. I remember, but yeah, I had my phone, my keys, and my cell phone. My phone, my keys, and my wallet I had.

And I was traveling and I needed my passport. I remember that. And so my question at that point in my life was, okay, Ian, you've lost everything except the stuff in your head. And so you need to rebuild everything again. And I had money in the bank, had a job. But where do you want to rebuild? Do you want to stay in Massachusetts and sort of rebuild your life as a potential American? Or do you want to go back to Canada? And so that was one of those sort of hinged moments in a life where you decide, okay, if I've been reset, where do I want to be?

And so move back to Canada, rebuild. The where wasn't what I was thinking about. I was thinking that you had a job. I mean, you're still a professor, but you had a job and you were sort of living in that academic world yeah yeah and you hadn't written a novel yet nope and i was wondering whether you had your book had you published poetry by that point i had i published uh yeah a short story collection and some poetry yeah i i wondered whether after the fire because this happened to a friend of mine who was an actor yeah Yeah. Her house burned down and she went,

well, I'm going to just become an actor. I just lost everything. What was she doing before? What was her job? You know, she was working,

she was part-time-y acting, but you know, kind of doing everything else and not fully committing herself. I wondered whether after that happened, you were like, I'm going to kind of

commit myself more to being a writer and a journalist. I can see that story. I like that story, but yeah, it's, you can have it. No, I'm going to kind of commit myself more to being a writer and a journalist. Yeah, I can see that story. I like that story. But yeah, it's... You can have it. No, I was committed before. I was committed before. But you sort of double down in a different kind of way. Like you realize, not whether I can do this or not, right? But to do it again,

it's like getting that second chance to do it again, what would I do differently? And it's like getting that second chance to do it again. What would I do differently? And so is the sort of American market more important than sort of like rediscovering myself as a Canadian and sort of returning and entrenching myself here? Like those kinds of questions become important. Why was that? I mean, as a writer, you would think, hey, come on, stay in the States. It's a different world, though. And I think aesthetically, I think we think differently, right, between Canada and the

U.S. And so there is a real kind of palpable artistic difference, I think, between the two countries. And you could do it. There's a lot of crossover that's possible and whatnot. It's not a bad thing. I'm not saying, I'm not discouraging it. And your book's sold in the U.S., yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's not an issue. But where are you at home, I think, is the question, right? And so it's here in Canada. The first time we talked was for your first novel, Reproduction. For people who don't know, it was this sort of beautiful, winding love story about family and class and relationships. And also sort of one of my favorite things about it was that it sort of plays with the form of the novel. What do you remember? What was on your mind when you were writing that? Reproduction? It was the big one.

Mid-30s? Yeah. Mid-30s, unmarried, had no kids. And so thinking about all of those things, and the possibility of never doing any of those things too, right? And so if I could do it sort of artistically, I don't actually need to do it in person. And this kind of mystifies my friends about sort of like the pattern of my life. Like, don't you actually want to do this kind of thing or do X or Y? I'm like, you know, if I can think about it and if I can sort of explore it and figure it out, then I'm good. I don't really need to have that sort of real life experience. So reproduction kind of felt like that for me, right? Do you still feel that way? About the present novel

that i'm working on yeah about some of the other things i feel like you can lay some things to bed um without necessarily having the actual lived in the world experience right right yeah you can kind of settle some things settle some things i feel unsettled just work it out i understand yeah so you write this book about these things. Right. And – Make peace. Yeah. Make peace with the whole issue of like, you know, what I should be doing at 37. Yeah.

You – I mean, what's interesting is that that book ends up giving you another path through its success. I mean, I remember I was actually looking a little bit right after you won. And I sort of tried to ask this doe-eyed, you know, like, I just won the Giller Prize person. Like, hey, what does this mean to you? And you're kind of like being very polite, but you're also kind of going like, I don't know. I don't know. It just happened. It just happened like six hours ago. I don't know. I really enjoyed that interview, Tom. I remember it. Yeah. I enjoyed it as well.

Yeah. How did winning the Giller change things for you? Your life, your career, whatever. Yeah. It's incredibly liberating, right? To know that you've achieved something that you don't need to achieve again or you don't need to prove X or Y. And I'm rolling my eyes at this comparison I'm about to make, right? But do you need, like, does Beyonce need to sort of win a Grammy again, right? You know, I feel like there comes a point where, okay, you have been sort of granted permission to do whatever you want to do with your mind and your life.

And that is the greatest gift. I mean, to symbolize it in the form of an award or something, that's one thing. But I wish we could bestow this on people without the actual material award or checks or whatever to say like, hey, you are free to live your life and to do whatever you want with your life. That's sort of big gift of the Giller for me. Help me understand that better. Because if I think you're saying what I think you're saying, if you're saying what I think you're saying,

it's really interesting. So what the Giller gave you, especially for a debut novelist is sort of permission that like, Hey, you got some value here. What you're, you should write, you should do this. And you're saying,

wouldn't it be nice if we all had that without it? Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I guess in different terms, it's like the Giller gave me permission to be more myself, right? Like to be more deeply myself rather than to try to please

or try to do the right thing or all of those other things that really limit our behavior. And it would be great if everybody had permission to actually be themselves, like truly and fully, right? As if they had already won

at their lives, right? Instead of trying to sort of prove at it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, how lovely would that trying to sort of proof at it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, how lovely would that be? I feel like we all... Some people snatch it, right?

Some people just take it. They refuse, they don't wait for it to be sort of awarded on them. And that kind of courage I really admire. But I guess if nobody's giving it to you, you take it. In the latest book of essays, Disorientation, you open the book with a quote

I wanted to read out loud because I thought it might have something to do with the theme you chose for your Massey lecture. It's by Audre Lorde. Do you want me to read it? Yeah. All right. I have come to believe over and over again that what is the most important to me must be spoken, made verbal, and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised and misunderstood. Opening the book with that, it also feels like your lecture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, great, great isolation there. Good, good point.

Hey, I've never felt, my self-esteem has never been higher in an interview in my entire life. Wherever the producers are behind the scenes. Right out there, Caitlin Swan out there, by the way. Yeah, you think I wrote that down? I'm an AI, Ian. I've been trying to tell you that from the very beginning. It's really excellent. Yeah, so Orchard Lord, what she's suggesting

here is that even if people misunderstand you, even if you're going to get cancelled, even if you are saying the wrong thing, it's worth taking the risk to say it. And for me, that's important. That book is about sort of race, right, in the world. And I hadn't really written directly about it. And it's a subject that most people sort of avoid.

And I want to sort of get all of my thoughts in one place about race. And when people kept asking me, this was during, you know, Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, all this, people kept asking me for thoughts and comment and opinion on race. And they were all inside, right? Just not really organized. Your thoughts were inside. Yeah. Where else would they be, right? But not really organized.

I thought you meant the people. I was like, we were all inside also because it was the pandemic and we couldn't go outside. Sure, sure, sure. But not systemically organized and all of that. And I decided to take the risk to write about race, right? Even if I was going to offend people, even if I was going to say the wrong thing. But my commitment was to be as honest to myself

at that particular point, right? Who knows? Like my thinking on some of those points has actually evolved, right, in the last few years. But at that moment, that was true. Yeah, and it was a risk, and I took it. The first part of my conversation with the brilliant Ian Williams, who is the author of Reproduction, which won the Giller Prize in 2019.

We just announced he'll be the Massey Lecturist this year, meaning he'll be traveling across the country giving a talk. His talk will be about conversations. He'll be in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Victoria, BC, and Toronto, Ontario. More of my conversation with Ian coming up. We're going to talk about courage, which we often think of as saying what no one else is going to talk about. I'm just going to say, everyone else is thinking, I'm going to say that's courageous. Ian will talk about how courage can often be listening. Plus Dame Magdalene Odundo

will talk about why she spends more time on the inside of her sculptures than the outside, even though we can't see it. It's after this, I'm cute. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA

and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tom Power. Welcome back to Q. You're in the middle of my conversation with one of the great minds in Canada, the author, poet, and professor Ian Williams.

Ian was the winner of the Giller Prize, Canada's richest literary prize in 2019. And we just announced, and this is pretty cool, that Ian is this year's Massey Lecturist, which is a role in Canada that's been around since the early 60s. I love it. It's like a great thinker travels all across Canada to speak in theaters on a topic of their choosing. Ian will be going to Sydney, Iqaluit, Saskatoon, Victoria, and Toronto. And for Ian's lecture, he's landed on the topic of conversation, which is broad.

But here's how Ian talks about it. He's going to get up there and talk about how to have hard conversations that we need to have with one another, how we actually don't talk to each other anymore. Is digital communication, texting and DMing and all that, is that really conversation, the ability to disagree? And what is courage really? It's fascinating to hear his thoughts on it, in particular around courage in conversations. really, it's fascinating to hear his thoughts on it, in particular around courage in conversations. And, you know, I think oftentimes we think about courage or courage gets talked about in sort of the modern discourse in conversations as, I'm going to say the thing that everyone's thinking.

I'm going to say the thing that everyone's thinking. I got the courage to do it. What about the courage to be silent? What about the courage to actually listen? That's where our conversation picks up. Typically, we think about courage as the act to sort of say something, especially if that's something unpopular and to power, right? But I think, in fact, a number of the positions that we hold right now are not courageous positions. They're sort of popular liberal positions. And we have a whole army of supporters ready to sort of like at our back. There are positions that we can just step into

without forming, right? We can just occupy them without sort of developing them. And I wish that more of us would actually come to a point where we develop our opinions instead of just kind of like receive and then sort of parrot them. So courage normally is for the thing that's sort of spoken, right?

But I think there's something to courageous listening and courageous silence. And I think we ought to realize that one half of our conversations is, in fact, listening. You do this all the time, right? You spend a lot of your time listening. And to sort of flip the script from the person in power or the most important person in a conversation is not the person speaking, but sometimes the person listening. And some groups have been listening for hundreds of years, right? And now they're speaking and people are getting antsy because they're not used to listening. So I mean, there's a kind of paradigm shift that we need to sort of think about what the balance is in a conversation. Is it courageous to speak

or is it courageous to sort of hold your peace until someone else has said something contradictory to you and like not rush in to sort of like contradict them and to sort of prove your point, but to just kind of like listen graciously, to let it settle, to offer no comment or whatever and just let it be. It's a hard thing to learn.

Yeah. I found it hard. Yeah, it's nearly, it's, yeah. But. I found it hard. Yeah. It's nearly. It's, yeah. But it's possible, yeah. And when you can get there, it's. It's revolutionary. Yeah.

It's revolutionary. You're in a conversation. Because all the defenses, all the armor sort of comes down. And we're just kind of like in this free-flowing exploratory space. Have you seen that movie, that trilogy of like Ethan Hawke walking around Paris with Julie Delpy? The Waking. Yeah. Before Sunrise. Before Sunrise. All of that stuff. space have you seen that movie um that trilogy of like ethan hawke walking around paris with uh julie delpy waking yeah before sunrise all of that stuff i haven't seen it my brother talks about it a lot but i've never seen it go see i mean it's old every 10 years they redo it right

but that kind of conversation we could have more of right conversations without agenda conversations without like the intent to persuade and to convert just conversations for the sake of just relating one human being to another. Yeah. Conversations where, and I don't know if you struggle with this the way I do, conversations where while the other person's talking, I'm not thinking about the thing I'm going to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's that scene in Fight Club where they say that, right? Are you listening to me or are you just waiting for your turn to speak? Yeah. And too often it's the second one, right? I'm excited to hear you have these

mass elections well thank you tom i mean i'm looking forward to it um you're going all across the country sydney yeah starting in health yeah sydney keep reading yeah uh in halloween yeah have you been before never been beautiful oh yeah what took you up there uh q we did q up there and uh i mean just the kindest, most wonderful people. And we had a grand old time. What time of year were you there? Oh, geez, Louise. April?

May? Yeah, it was still dark. It was still dark all day. Right, right. And, I mean, I got a real kick out of that. When are you going? October. October?

It'll be late. October. It'll be late. That's okay. Saskatoon? Yeah. Been to Saskatoon? That's the one province I've not been to, actually.

Yeah. So I've flown over Saskatchewan. Looking forward to that. Caitlin Swan out there from, she's a Saskatchewanian. Great. Victoria? Victoria. That's the only major Canadian city I've never been to.

Why not? I mean, it seems. You got stone-faced there. You ask me as if I made the call. As if I was like, I'm never going out there. Pretty obvious place to be. You've been to the island, though, no? I've never been to the island.

I never had an occasion to go out there. I would have, you know, I should. That's your summer plan. I would love to. I'll tell you what, I want to go out to the islands. I want to go to, like, Salt Spring and all that kind of stuff. You done any of that? Yeah, yeah.

I used to live in BC, right? So I did a lot of traveling around there. But I am curious about the minutiae of going on the road in Canada. Whether you have a favorite restaurant you want to check out, that kind of thing. I don't know. That's kind of neat, right? To sort of make a whole thing out of it. Oh, I don't know, man.

I asked Caitlin. She said the Broadway Cafe in Saskatoon. What for? Diner. Diner kind of stuff. Oh, I love diners. Yeah, diner. We seem. What for? Diner, diner kind of stuff. Oh, I love diners. Yeah, diner. You're great.

We seem like you. I love a good diner. Me too. Yeah, you just kind of spread it and you just kind of like, yeah, just eat away. Like a white china cup of coffee. But you need the right person to be in a diner with. Yeah. Like you need good company.

Ian, lovely to talk to you as always. You too, Tom. I love going to diners by myself. Ian Williams is, I don't know what that says about me. Ian Williams is an author and professor at the University of Toronto. He has been chosen as this year's Massey Lecturist, which means he'll be traveling across Canada speaking about how to have conversations with one another. Canada, speaking about how to have conversations with one another. He'll be in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Victoria, BC, Toronto, Ontario.

These lectures will be broadcast as part of CBC's Ideas. So when you walk into a museum, and it could be any kind of museum, modern art, historic art, natural history, the one thing you see, and I only realized that in this interview, in all these different types of museums, is ceramics or pottery. Think about it. When was the last time you went to a museum and you didn't see ceramics or pottery in some way? And it makes sense because since the beginning of civilization, they've been a big part of our lives, whether eating out of them, storing food in them, or making art out of them. And that last part, making art out of them, well, ceramics has not necessarily always been taken seriously as an art form. And that's been changing thanks to the works of artists like Dame Magdalene Odundo, who has been called one of the greatest living ceramicists, and her work's been shown in some of the biggest collections in the world. Now, listen, it's hard

to describe Dame Magdalene's pottery and do justice on the radio. So we put some of the photos up of her pottery at CBCQ on Instagram, if you want to follow along and have a look at them while you're listening to this conversation. But yeah, we talk a little bit about pottery. We talk a little bit about why the insides of her pieces, even though you can't see them, are maybe more important than the outside. But I wanted to start with when she fell in love with clay. Hi, how are you? Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. I want to start by talking a little bit about Clay.

You say that the first time you encountered Clay, you fell in love with it. What happened? Where were you? What did you fall in love with? Gosh, that's 45 years on. Not yesterday is what you're saying. Not yesterday. A good question.

I think the sensation of the material just moving into one's hand and just the recognition of being able to manipulate the clay was really a life changer, really, because up to then I had never worked in a plastic material. I had only worked as a graphic designer and worked in advertising. And I just think I probably had started in the wrong business. And so when I touched clay, I think there was a feeling of finding myself. How do you end up doing it in the first place? If you were studying more graphic things, how do you end up putting your hands in a bunch of clay to begin with? I just ended up, I worked and trained in commercial art and advertising in Nairobi, in Kenya.

And then I had this opportunity to come to England and to go and do a foundation course. And I happened to go into the ceramics department and met this wonderful woman who was quietly sat in a corner and showing students how to build work using coils and also throwing on the wheel. And I just thought, I stared at her and all the other students who were much more competent in the work, and I just thought how magical to be able to form a piece of work from the beginning to the end.

to form a piece of work from the beginning to the end. And it did have, it kind of, you know, sort of had this natural human quality to it. And I remember the sensation, the feeling of elation and the joy that I kind of received the material. But I'm not really sure. I can't describe the physical experience of remembering, as it were. Help me understand this better too. There was a couple of times so far in our conversation, and in the reading I did to get ready for this conversation, where you talked a little bit about the connections between clay, ceramics, and humans, like the human form.

Can you help me understand that? What do you mean by that? What are the parallels there? Potters have, you know, for centuries referred to what they made in terms of the human body. the human body because a vessel to a potter a vessel or a figurine has a body has feet has a waist has a neck a lid which can act as the head and quite often you hear potters refer to a lip because they're forming a jug and the the terminology used by potters reference the body now you know i'm not sure philosophically whether I can actually explain that, but, you know, whether those terminology are as long as man has lived or whether they are biblical and, you know, sort of the terms I used in a lot of literature as well. But it is just a natural thing to say you are throwing a mug for argument's sake and the mug has a body because it is a vessel and a human being is a vessel that contains what it is, makes us human. And a mug will contain liquid that nourishes and you need that

nourishment to nourish your body and therefore you have a handle that you handle the mug with and you have a lip you have to pay attention to the lip on the mug because it's going to come into contact with your lips. So, I think the terminologies have always referenced the body. Now, I am not, as I say, I'm not a philosopher. I wouldn't be able to tell you why. But everything I've read, whether it's been in beliefs, religious beliefs, or philosophical thinking, has always ended up with associating clay with the body. And the body is the greatest muse for a potter anyway. How about you? muse for a potter anyway. How about you?

Is the body the muse for you in your work? Yes. And for me, I think one of the, realizing how important the body, the human body was to my making, my whole future of being a ceramicist was just standing around watching people moving up and down a staircase at a railway station. I was waiting for my train and just looking bodies, you know, around us are just fascinating and movement, you know, everybody has a movement that says something that leads them to somewhere that spells out what they are feeling, the emotions they are feeling. It's very, very interesting. And I just remember watching this amazing young woman, about five foot six or something like that, walking up.

She'd just come off a train walking up the staircase. She was very pregnant, carrying the stuff that she was going to need perhaps you know 24 hours later and in the the highest high heel shoes i'd ever seen but with her hair tied at the back you know in a ponytail and i just thought how beautiful she was a vessel she was carrying some life within that body she was already caring for it because she was already shopping for for this creature but everything that was about her was about containment and happiness and everything that is the best of us as human beings. We have other sides as well, which I'm not going to. I understand what you mean now.

I mean, that's beautiful. I want to close off by playing something for you from this video you made for the exhibition in Canada. And you said something in it that struck us here, and I wanted to ask you about it. So let me just play it for you right now so people can hear it. My thinking process, my being, and who I am is defined by the inside of those pieces. The outside is the show that I present to the public and to the owner of the work. So talk to me a little bit about that. What do you mean by that?

Did I really say that? What I mean by that is, you know, when you're making something or when you're painting or doing whatever it is, you're manifesting a lot of thoughts within yourself into this piece of work. to say a painting or a ceramic that has a lot of glazing and narrative on it is that you can't really see what it is what is important in my work which is the interior side in the inside of the work because the literal inside of the work is the literal inside of the work is important. The literal inside of the work. Which I can't really see. I mean, I tried to peer in, but I can't really see. No, and you're not allowed to in the museum, unfortunately. Try and stop me.

But hold on. Explain. That's the meaningful part to you, the inside of this work? I think the inside of the work is very important. And the inside of me and you as a person is really what is important, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, what kind of fashion you dress up in, that outer bit of yours, it's just show. It's what we carry. That's why that young pregnant woman, for me, remains my muse forever.

Because what was contained in that wonderful body was going to kind of be let out and be let loose. But it was really precious. And the inside of the pieces for me have to be as carefully and tenderly made as the outside. And I think without the inside, the outside has no meaning. The beauty of clay is that it has this capacity to breathe, especially because I don't fire my work very high, so they still breathe in and out. There's a process of osmosis going in and they both are important to each other, but it is important that the inside informs the outside. Dame Magdalene Odundo, the renowned ceramicist.

You can see her exhibition, A Dialogue with Objects, at Toronto's Gardner Museum until April 21st. If you want to see the images of Magdalene's pottery that she was just talking about, go to our Instagram page at CBCQ. If tomorrow on the show, if the only thing Mike Post did was compose this, the Rock Profiles theme, legacy cemented, right?

But instead, he played guitar on I Got You, Babe by Cher. He produced Classical Gas. He discovered Kenny Rogers. And he composed the Dun Dun for Law & Order, a conversation with one of the most important figures in music history that you may have never heard of, Mike Post, tomorrow on the show. And that is it for us today. Eid Mubarak to all those celebrating the end of Ramadan. We'll see you tomorrow on the show. Later on.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.