COVER

BOOKS Ian Williams takes a deep dive into Disorientation

by Charlie Smith

Ian Williams will speak at two events at the Vancouver Writers Fest, which takes place from October 18 to 24.

Ian Williams reached the pinnacle of Canadian letters by winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, but his new book marks a turn toward nonfiction. Photo by Justin Morris.

Poet and novelist Ian Williams felt there was something missing from public discussions about racial justice when he began writwhite people about their otherness.” The upshot, he added, is that people of colour sometimes process their environment in terms of whether they belong ing Disorientation: Being Black in the World. And that was the “disorientation” that people of colour experience when they’re constantly being made aware of their race.

In the book, he explains that it often begins with a startling realization in childhood that they’re being looked upon differently due to their skin colour—and this can be quite traumatic.

Williams, a University of Toronto associate professor of English, told the Straight that this disorientation can take many forms during life. As an example, he recalled how a woman’s body language tightened when he entered an elevator at Pacific Centre in downtown Vancouver.

“I’m just kind of scrolling through my phone and…something in her freezes,” Williams said. “Some kind of alarm goes off in her, and this happens in her almost involuntarily. Whatever conditioning she has received about Black people is being expressed at that moment.”

Last year, Williams planned to write a novel as a follow-up to his Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning Reproduction. But he couldn’t get his mind off three monumental issues: the exploding international movement for racial justice, which originated in the U.S.; the pandemic; and wildfires, which reinforced the magnitude of the climate crisis.

“I said ‘I’ve got to address this burning world right now—in nonfiction, not through fiction or poetry or anything— directly as possible,’” he said.

Williams told the Straight that he is sometimes reminded of his race when he’s picking up groceries at a farmers market. “The person in line wants to know where you’re from,” he said. “And those kinds of reminders white people don’t get on a daily basis or on a frequent basis. No one keeps badgering there. According to him, the disorienting events impose a psychic toll. “It takes a huge expenditure of emotional energy to keep recentring yourself all the time—to say that I am more than just this category that people keep reminding me of,” Williams said. The former UBC creative-writing prof wrote one essay in his book about being stared at when he’s the only one of his kind in a situation. He calls this the “Look”. “However, when I’m with white people, the Look is negligible, maybe even invisible, to them,” Williams writes. “I read the Look as racialized, they read it as neutral, as looking rather than a look, as a fellow human scanning their environment. “These white people are not insensitive to nuance,” he adds. “If there’s something flirtatious or sexual in a look, they pick up on it. So I wonder whether they actually do not see the racialized Look or whether they are denying it in order to avoid a pending race conversation they see as unnecessary. A long, awkward conversation after a quick look.” Williams was inspired by American novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin, who wrote trailblazing works from the 1940s to the 1980s about racial, sexual, and class differences. When asked if he might one day be considered our generation’s version of Baldwin, Williams humbly replied: “I can’t even be in the same sentence as James Baldwin.” Yet there is a Baldwinlike quality in his eloquent essays, which are deeply personal and offer nuanced observations about race relations across society. For example, he devotes a fair amount of attention to whiteness, which is rarely discussed in the mainstream media. “There is a difference between whiteness and white people,” Williams writes in the book. “Yet, I cannot resolve the difference as neatly as I would like.

“After all, white people uphold whiteness and transfer its crimes to institutions, processes, bureaucracy, to keep their hands clean in the same way that some wealthy people launder their assets,” he continues. “The institution of whiteness is better protected than white people themselves.”

Another example comes in his analysis of social media.

“As a Black person, one grows wary of the discrepancy between what people claim to believe and how they actually respond to one’s existence,” Williams writes. “By the time you reach middle age, quite battered by the accumulation of false claims, you find it hard to trust and forgive, to accept a hopeful prognosis because of a promise.”

In the same essay, Williams outlines his well-considered ethical framework for when and how he discusses racial issues.

“I want to speak as myself,” Williams told the Straight. “I want to speak the truth. And I want to be brave even at the risk of making a mistake.

“Already, I’ve had to toughen up because some people disagree with things in the book.” g

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BOOKS Linwood Barclay’s suspense-thrillers fit for a King

by Steve Newton

Before he became an internationally bestselling thriller writer, Linwood Barclay spent many years in the journalistic trenches, first at the Peterborough Examiner and then at the Toronto Star, where he held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, life-section editor, and humour columnist. He figures that experience helped shape his future as an author in a couple of ways, the first being that when you work at a daily newspaper, it’s like having a crash course in life.

“One day you’re covering a court case,” Barclay says from his home near downtown Toronto, “the next day you’re covering a school board meeting, the next day you’re covering a helicopter crash or something. So kind of by osmosis, you start learning about how everything works; how the world works.

“And the second thing is, it teaches you that writing is a job and not to be all precious about it, you know. This whole business of, ‘Oh, gee, I’ve got writers’ block’—well, writers’ block doesn’t work at a newspaper. Deadlines are drilled into you; you have to get it done. Those presses are gonna roll at 11 o’clock tonight whether you’ve got this thing done or not.”

Of course, to make it in the world of suspense fiction, it also helps if you’re good at coming up with story ideas. Or having them come to you.

“I’ve had one book that came to me in a dream,” he says. “I had another one that I woke up with at five in the morning. But I basically need one really good, great idea a year, ‘cause I’m on a book-a-year schedule. Some years I do two, but you just need one really great hook where you think, ‘Okay, that’s cool enough; that’s good enough and has enough potential that I can turn that into a 400-page book.’ So once I have some kind of an idea for a hook, or some turning point, I work out in my head the big picture of everything that’s happened, and then I start writing.”

The big picture for Barclay’s latest novel, Find You First, revolves around the idea that an extremely wealthy tech-company magnate learns he’s dying and decides he wants to leave his immense fortune to the nine offspring he spawned decades earlier when, down on his luck and desperately in need of money for a computer, he donated to a sperm bank. That plot line did not arrive with the dawn.

“There was an article in a U.S. magazine,” he recalls. “It might have been New York Times Magazine. There was a photo essay of someone who went looking for half-siblings that were all the product of the same sperm donor, and found people across the country. It was kind of a heartwarming human-interest story, and then, of course, as a thriller writer you look at that and go, ‘How could that go horribly wrong?’

“So that situation started sparking an idea where I went, ‘Well, what if you had to find all of these potential heirs and then they all just started vanishing one by one?’ Once I worked out in my head how it was gonna come together, it was a fun one to write.”

While Barclay’s success—he’s written 20 novels and sold millions of copies—has come from his own talent and discipline, it doesn’t hurt that he has literary friends in very high places. None other than Stephen King wrote the 23-word cover blurb for the North American trade edition of Find You First, in which he calls it the best book of

Linwood Barclay’s work was heavily influenced by crime writer Ross Macdonald, inspired by horror master Stephen King, and shaped by newspaper deadlines. Photo by Ellis Parinder.

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Barclay’s career. King also contributed the cover recommendation for the book’s U.K. edition, a plug that is shorter but no less impressive: “A suspense master”.

“I found out about 10 years ago that Stephen King was a fan of my stuff,” Barclay says, “which is very cool. So we actually got to do an event together two weeks ago, digitally. I got to interview him for the Bloody Scotland Crime Fiction Festival, so we had about an hour or more chatting on a screen. I met him a coupla times, and he said he’s a fan, which just blows my mind. I remember years ago when my wife and I went to go see the movie Carrie, and if you had told me then that the guy whose book that was based on would be someone I’d even know, I’d have thought that seems highly unlikely.”

The fanboy feeling is mutual, according to Barclay, who reckons he’s read just about everything the 74-year-old horror master has cranked out.

“Every once in a while I realize there’s some stuff I have missed,” he says. “I haven’t read all of his Dark Tower stuff; I’ve still got gaps in that to fill. But he’s so well known, of course, for the iconic sort of things that are part of our popular culture that came out in the first 10 books or so that he did. I mean, you’ve got Pennywise, you’ve got Cujo, you’ve got Christine. But I think some of his greatest stuff he’s done in the last 10 years. Like his novel The Institute I just think is fantastic. And 11/22/63, his book about the guy who goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination—I just love that book. And his new one, Billy Summers, is great. I’ve never read a book quite so quickly.”

Barclay says that it’s hard to pick his favourite King book, but he feels that as a parent, Pet Sematary is the scariest. Other famous authors he’s loved over the years include Richard Matheson—”Duel was one of my favourite movies ever,” he says of the Steven Spielberg–directed TV-movie adaptation of Matheson’s 1971 short story—and fantasy legend Ray Bradbury. But his alltime favourite is Ross Macdonald, who became a friend and mentor to him.

“I was always reading mysteries as a kid,” the 66-year-old tale spinner recalls, “starting with the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. At the age of 15, I discovered Ross Macdonald, and it was just kind of a revelation to me. I loved his stuff, and he’s still my favourite writer. He brought— at least for me—he brought something new to crime fiction, which was issues like family dysfunction, environmentalism, and alienated youth, all that kinda stuff.

“So I was a huge fan and was also fortunate enough to have a long correspondence with him. When I was 21, I spent an entire evening with him, had dinner with him and everything, which is a long story. But he was very influential to me in two ways: one was that I just was so taken with his work, and the other was that he ended up taking an interest in me and that I wanted to be a writer.”

Back in 1976, seven years before he died of Alzheimer’s disease, Macdonald signed a copy of his 1973 novel Sleeping Beauty for Barclay, with an inscription that read: “For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me.”

“My biggest regret in life is that we don’t have a picture together,” says Barclay, who in more recent years has been blown away by crime writers like James Lee Burke and Lawrence Block. When he’s not putting pen to paper himself, he enjoys hanging out with other authors, as he’ll be doing at the Whistler Writers Festival on October 16. That’s when he takes part in a virtual reading event titled Thrills, Chillls and Authors Who Kill: a Murder Mystery and Discussion With Five Thriller Writers. He’ll be joined by fellow Canadian novelists Joy Fielding, Linden MacIntyre, Bill Deverell, and Gail Anderson-Dargatz. “Joy’s a good friend of mine,” Barclay relates. “Linden MacIntyre I’ve met a few times. I don’t know if I’ve ever met Bill Deverell or not, but I read his new book, Stung, which I thought was terrific. I don’t think I’ve met Gail before, but that should be a fun panel

“And the one I’m particularly looking forward to is the Vancouver Fest chat with [former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada] Beverley McLachlin. I’ve read her memoir, as well as her two novels, and one of the things that struck me when I was reading her memoir is how, in the early ’80s, she was thinking about becoming a full-time writer. Now she’s writing crime novels—legal thrillers—but this sounds like something she has just always wanted to do.”

Barclay’s next novel is scheduled for release in the U.K. in February 2022 and in Canada that May. It’s titled Take Your Breath Away, and like all of his previous bestsellers will be set in the good ol’ US of A. One could be excused for wondering why the longtime Ontario resident—who moved there from the States when he was four—never sets his stories in the Great White North.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he says. “When I was starting out, I couldn’t get a Canadian publisher. But Bantam Books in New York wanted to publish me, and so to some degree it was a case of ‘ya dance with the one that brung ya’. And although my books were distributed up here, I didn’t have a Canadian publisher till book seven. So that was part of it. And also, if you had people doing these horrible things to each other in Canada, nobody’d believe it, because we’re just too polite.” g

Linwood Barclay will make online appearances at the Whistler Writers Festival on October 16 and at the Vancouver Writers Festival on October 23 and 24.

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