The CBC Massey Lectures are back.

This year, novelist and poet Ian Williams wants to start a conversation about conversations. He says we need to address how civic and civil discourse has deteriorated.

"On the civic side, we speak to each other as if we have all become two-dimensional profiles, without history, family, or feelings. On the civil side, our leaders speak to us, goad us, with incendiary rhetoric," Williams said.

His 2024 Massey Lectures are called What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation In Our Time.

Both serious and playful at the same time, Williams suggests that 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?

Williams argues our differences, whether it be cultures, perspectives or values can no longer be ignored.

"Silenced people are speaking. Oppressed groups are pressing. Our increased contact with difference is urging us to actively negotiate our relationships to each other and to the space, both physical and ideological, that we share."

Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, director of the Creative Writing program, and academic advisor for the Massey College William Southam Journalism Fellowship.

In October, Williams visited five Canadian provinces for live recordings of his Massey Lectures. The cities were: Sydney, Iqaluit, Saskatoon, Victoria and Toronto.

The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures are also available as a book, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation In Our Time, from House of Anansi Press.

During the week of November 18th, the Massey Lectures will be broadcast on CBC Radio's IDEAS and be made available as a podcast and on CBC Listen.

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