Award-winning poet and author Ian Williams recently published his debut novel Reproduction, on the shortlist for the 2019 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.

Reproduction tells the story of Felicia, a teenager and immigrant from an unrecognized and unnamed Caribbean island. “I not from anywhere,” she tells Edgar, an older white guy from a wealthy German family. They meet in hospital where their mothers are seriously ill and their lives become intertwined over generations.

The story continues with Felicia and their son Army living in the basement of a home owned by Oliver, a divorced man of Portuguese descent. He has two kids and together they form a loose family set-up. Fourteen-year-old Army becomes fascinated with his absent father—and his father’s wealth. Odd gifts from Edgar begin to show up, much to Felicia’s annoyance.

Reproduction is an engaging and thoughtful novel that explores racism, male entitlement, and non-traditional family arrangements. It’s set mostly in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto where Williams himself was raised. His family moved to Canada when he was just nine years old. He is currently assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Alison Bate met up with Williams at a coffee shop on Main in Vancouver, after he’d just finished a game of tennis.

You’ve been travelling across Canada a lot recently and bounced around quite a few different cities. Do you like to keep moving or are you a homebody?

In my daily life, I’m a homebody, for sure. Out of necessity for the academic market, and the new reality of global citizenship, we have to keep moving. I think very few of my friends are in the place where they grew up.

When did you bounce into Vancouver?

I moved here to start a job at UBC in January 2017. I was on my last draft of the novel when I moved here, so a big life moment.

How does Vancouver compare with other cities you’ve lived in in Canada, like Toronto, Brampton, etc?

It feels like home now. This last stint of travelling, I was in Athens and Dublin and then Toronto and Banff and then back here. But I kept looking forward to coming back to Vancouver, partly for the tennis [laughs].

Maybe it’s the collision of the right time in my life (39, turning 40 in a few months) and settling into a job where I’m happy, a community where I’m happy, a professional place where I’m happy and all those things happened to happen in Vancouver, right? So maybe psychically I was moving toward home and that home coincided with my arrival here in Vancouver.

In Reproduction, you portray a loose family set-up with Oliver and company, somewhat like house-sharing. Is that a set-up you’d like to live in or do you prefer to live alone?

I prefer to live alone, to be honest. The irony of all my books is that they seem like a diametric opposition to how I actually live. I’m a pretty solitary guy, I guess partly out of necessity, so I can hear myself clearly in the morning.

So you’re not like Army [Felicia’s gregarious teenage son, who runs a store out of the garage]?

No! Hordes of people around all the time. I prefer a few deep relationships than many superficial ones…something of substance.

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   I don’t think this book irritates. It might provoke—and other books where I’ve dealt with racism, there’s a provocation. But there’s also an affability. I think the combination of those two things — yes I’m gonna speak the truth and I’m gonna keep smiling through it—doesn’t mean I’m any less serious.  

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One of your phrases has Edgar [an entitled white German] later on in life asking himself: “Could he really end up with a black woman?” Canada’s a country founded on colonialism, genocide, and racism.

Yep.

Is it still as bad as it was?

Hmm. That’s the project I’m working on now! But to answer your question, I wasn’t around in the ’60s when the really transformative revolutions were taking place, but one of the differences I perceive right now is we have a quotient of intelligent people of color who are unafraid to speak.

They have both the intelligence and the boldness, and the sense of right to take up space, to voice discontent, to call out things as they see them as racism, even if it irritates the white majority, even if renders them as troublemakers or unpopular. That energy has been really disruptive and important, I think.

Do you feel you irritate people with your writing or speaking?

No. I don’t think this book irritates. It might provoke—and other books where I’ve dealt with racism, there’s a provocation. But there’s also an affability. I think the combination of those two things — yes I’m gonna speak the truth and I’m gonna keep smiling through it—doesn’t mean I’m any less serious. But it does mean I’m genuinely engaged and genuinely interested in our relationship.

It might get fractured for a while, as we work through these uncomfortable moments, but I don’t mean you ill and I’d like to believe that you don’t mean me ill. It might be ignorance or it might be deliberate.

It sounds awfully pacifist and it may not be as hard a line as some of the younger writers, but it’s in line and in keeping with my temperament. You know, I’m not a fighter. My parents divorced and so I’m conditioned away from fighting and confrontation and all of that. I don’t need to scream.

Your two older male characters [Edgar and Oliver] are supremely entitled and not very likeable, from a female perspective anyway. Was it difficult to write characters like this, with so many flaws?

There are moments when you can feel a whiff of tenderness for Edgar. Nobody wants to eat M&Ms, up on a hill on Christmas Day in a hotel, watching TV and drinking. There’s a terrible, terrible loneliness that’s the cost of his wealth and his cruelty.

Oliver is like a little boy who never grows up. I can feel a little bit of affection. But I don’t really need to like people in order to take them seriously.

And Felicia?

She was probably the most difficult of them all to write. First of all, it’s hard to write someone who’s generally been excluded from a literary tradition. You don’t see Charles Dickens writing about Felicia, right? Black women. So there are not a lot of models—Toni Morrison and other great writers—but not a lot. And because she’s introverted. She endures and persists: she’s a complex character.

Your book is set in Canada, mainly in Brampton, but it could easily be set in the States, don’t you think?

Yep, in one of the earlier drafts, it was set in small-town Massachusetts, where Heather [one of the characters in Reproduction] grew up. I tried a few different things, it was in Calgary at one point…

This is your first full novel. How hard was it for you to switch over from poetry?

The switching wasn’t too bad. I feel really comfortable in both universes. But the sustained effort, that’s the hard part, and staying in the story. [Reproduction took six years and 12 drafts, start to finish.]

And what are you working on now?

Two things: a poetry project and a novel. The poetry project Word Problems uses mathematical language to investigate ethical problems. “Jimmy paints a fence in three hours, etc.” We rely on science and mathematics to give us solutions and a vision of our universe, and we really see the limits of that kind of thinking.

I’m also on draft four of my novel, Disappointment. It looks at three things: race relations, body modifications, and religious enlightenment. As in: what are the things a black woman is willing to do to her body in order to make her race more palatable? Then what can she do to her body to transcend her body altogether, to have a kind of religious detachment from it? The tension between the body and the spirit and all that.

Note: This interview was condensed and edited.

Author publicity photo courtesy of Penguin Random House. Outdoor photo by Alison Bate.

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Reproduction is published by Penguin Random House Canada, and will be published by Europa Editions in the US later this year. Ian Williams is also the author of Personals, shortlisted for two poetry awards, Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry.

Alison Bate is an experienced journalist and former magazine editor based in Vancouver, B.C. She worked at The Vancouver Sun for nine years, and before that on newspapers in England.