Evan Williams : part one

Evan Williams is a Chicago-based writer thinking about surrealism, masculinity, and the anthropocene. His work has been published in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Joyland, X-R-A-Y Lit, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. He wrote the chapbook Claustrophobia, Surprise! (HAD Chaps, 2022). Along with Ben Nespodziany and Evan Nicholls, he is one-third of the temporary prose poetry braintrust known as Obliterat. He can be found on Twitter.

What are you working on?

I wrote a novella in 49 days loosely about the idea of motion as a form of love, and love as a kind of motion. It has a rattlesnake that opens itself up into a river of blood, a narrator in conversation with his maximally sad sadness (which takes physical form), and a baby made by two people the narrator once loved. I’m turning it into verse right now, just in case it’s better that way. It’s my favorite project right now.

I’m also drafting another long fiction project tentatively called Nuns Out, Guns Out about a band of bodybuilding nuns who want to stage a coup at the Vatican. I was Catholic growing up, then left the Church and did bodybuilding for a bit (the two aren’t correlated, though wouldn’t it be fun if they were?), so this is an act of superimposing one thing that caused me a lot of pain over another thing that caused me a lot of pain in an effort to create something heartwarmingly absurd that upends the negativity in both.

I often find myself writing what are basically cento poems, but using my own body of work as a source text. I want to publish a book of them one day—I think that as a concept it would be really fun to read, just an author riffing on and reinventing their own work. The poems all have, by nature, a similar tone and rhythm to their original versions, but offer a never ending series of small (and large) surprises. It’s like seeing my body of work in an alternate universe that’s marginally distinct from my own. 

In my spare time I write book reviews. I’m increasingly interested in what I think of as processual reviews, and have written one about Nicholson Baker’s book U and I (coming soon in Hobart). The idea is to read a book in a given number of days, and to each day write something brief about the experience of the particular chunk of reading. It’s been a way for me to legitimize expectations, misinterpretations, and the personal context(s) of reading as forms of criticism. The best part of it is that it often lets me (and leads me to) be wrong, which undercuts in a satisfying way the pretense of the book reviewer’s position of authority.