Five Questions with Jenny Heijun Wills
Canadian writer and professor on promoting BIPOC authors through social media
Jenny Heijun Wills is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and the author of Older Sister, Not Related: A Memoir, which won the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for non-fiction in 2019. While self-isolating, Wills has been posting “booklooks” on social media, along with other Canadian writers, where she does makeup inspired by CanLit covers She recently paired with Terese Mason Pierre for an Instagram Live chat on behalf of the Writer’s Trust of Canada to discuss booklooks and writing. Here, she talks about booklooks, teaching, and life in self-isolation.
Do you think that this pandemic will make your students confront issues of class and race that they might not have witnessed before, and make them able to see more parallels in the course material you teach?
An interesting thing happened at the end of Winter term. Many of us altered final assignments in light of needing to shift our courses online. For my Topics in Race & Ethnicity: Anger course, I encouraged students to write (if they wanted to) about institutionalized racism and other kinds of racial violence in a COVID-19 context.
Many BIPOC students drew on the ways we had been discussing righteous protest and beautiful anger in class as they finished this assignment and I was very impressed. It reiterated how the topics and politics addressed in literature have daily, material connections.
How has posting a new booklook on Twitter each day changed the way you think about or engage with the books themselves?
I think I’m understandably looking more closely at cover art, but of course this has always been important to me regardless. It’s funny, but long before these booklooks started for me (and they were already being done by Domenica Martinello and Terese Mason Pierre, and have since been done by so many others including Nisha Patel, jaye simpson, and Alicia Elliott), I was interested in cover design.
For my own book, the brilliant designer Terri Nimo at Penguin Random House came up with something I would never have imagined, but I love how it looks. Somehow I thought my cover would be purple, but it could not be further from that. Maybe it was prophetic, but when my book art was revealed, Alicia and I joked that it had the same energy of a very popular eyeshadow palette from Summer 2019.
The topics and politics addressed in literature have daily, material connections.
Do you spend a lot of time deciding on which book and how to craft it into booklook, or is it spur-of-the-moment?
I spend more time deciding on which books rather than how I’m going to represent their covers. I only do BIPOC-authored texts, but there are so many, they are so diverse, so beautiful, so important. When I decided to do an extra API booklook for every day in May because it is Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I noticed I was thinking in the ways that I design course syllabi. Having many South and South East Asian authors represented, biracial writers, adoptees, queer and trans writers, writers with disabilities, refugee writers, and all the intersections of these subjectivities and more. And then playwrights, non-fiction/scholarly writers, storyists, poets, graphic novelists; contemporary, speculative, horror, romance . . . .
My greatest shortcoming I know is in YA and young people’s literatures. I’m trying to learn more. Ha, my makeup looks seem more serious and important than they really are, I guess.
What are you most looking forward to when social distancing restrictions are loosened?
Walking my very naughty dog who has not been outside the yard much. He gets so stressed when he sees another dog but then can’t meet it. And of course there is no nose-to-nose contact these days. Our other dog has been on daily walks because she is oblivious to other animals. So it is unfair.
Have you reached the limit of how much you can engage with your audience via social media or are you still finding new ways to make that connection?
I think I’m always getting different opportunities. I’m judging a drawing contest right now through the Writers’ Trust, based on Spring book releases. I’ll run a writing workshop in early June through a festival that I was supposed to take part in, but that was cancelled. Some of my U.S. tour events have gone online, but it’s cool because now we’re thinking of event times so that people in Asia can also participate. And I’m also attending a lot of online readings and book events, which are fabulous.