Phillip B. Williams establishes that his lyrical gifts, which work so well in poetry, have the strength to support a nearly six-hundred-page tome in his debut novel, Ours (Viking, 2024), Oprah Daily’s most anticipated title of 2024. The story follows an enigmatic conjurer, Saint, and the town she creates and populates with former slaves she liberates from plantations throughout the American landscape. Ours is a novel that touches several centuries, exploring the nature of freedom, the limitations of safety, and the ways that love traps and frees a soul.
Williams is the author of two poetry collections: Thief in the Interior, winner of the Lambda Literary and Whiting Awards, and Mutiny, which won the 2022 American Book Award. His poetry spans the deep chasms between continents that ought not touch—loneliness and desire, love and violence—spinning gossamer threads that weave together and pull opposing forces toward each other until they form something new in the space that had kept them separate.
In the weeks leading up to his publication date, Williams and I caught up with each other online, passing notes back and forth on rootwork, the challenges of male intimacy, and how he learned to take care of himself as a writer.
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The Rumpus: How did your background in poetry inform your process?
Phillip B. Williams: I wrote fiction and poetry together, always. Though the order of the books would appear to prove otherwise, I thought my first book would be a novel as it was, in my mind, the first genre I took seriously as a writer. Looking back on earlier drafts, as far as 2008 to 2009, I had always had a propensity for lyricism in my prose. It is in me to write this way, and thank goodness.
Rumpus: Keeping that lyricism in mind, I’m curious: how have readings from the book gone so far? What have been your favorite scenes to read or perform?
Williams: They have gone well! I have read the entirety of chapter one, which is only two and a half pages. I’ve read the river bathing scene from chapter two. There are a few ceremonies in the book, actually, and I have read excerpts that included most, if not all of them. They have an incredible flow of language that can assist with enrapturing listeners in a way where something more plot-driven could lose an audience. After my readings, people often comment on the musicality of what they have heard. One writer even said that I wrote a six-hundred-page book of poems, which is a high compliment.
Rumpus: Because we see her through many poetically rendered lenses throughout the book, Saint is a tantalizing enigma. She’s not just mysterious to the reader but also to her allies—I am reluctant to call anyone in her life a friend—and especially to herself. How did this character first reveal herself to you?
Williams: While I worked on the short story in undergrad that became the novel Ours, Saint appeared as more of a side character, briefly in and out with a purpose that was much less intense than how she appears in the novel. Over the years, she started to want more attention, more presence in the novel and took up space in my imagination in ways that Frances, who was originally the center of the novel, had been failing to do. Where that version of Frances had no weaknesses, Saint had many, flaws determined to build up a person from hackneyed to nuanced. Once I surrendered to her desire to become more central, my writing took off.
Rumpus: How often and at what times do your characters’ desires influence the shape your process takes?
Williams: While writing Ours, I found myself constantly in awe and sometimes horrified by some of the decisions that characters made. A question I remember asking myself aloud while writing was, “You really about to do this?” And, of course, I had to get out of the way and let them go on and live the life their desires had put into place. Then, it was my job to assist them in navigating the aftermath of those decisions.
Rumpus: In a town founded by formerly enslaved people and largely protected from intruders from the outside world, love appears to feed the residents’ greatest anxieties and appears to be the thing Saint is least equipped to handle. She at one point tells Frances, “You do violence with the same heart you do love with” and throughout the text, love and violence twist in each other’s shadows. What do you hope readers will take away from watching Saint travel this arc?
Williams: I can say what I take away from Saint’s journey, and that is the risk to love outweighs love’s potential failure. Violence and love come from the same vessel; they do not necessarily come from the same intentions. One can decide if they will cause harm or harness love, and we can decide to love again after love has let us down. Saint comes to her own conclusions by the end, but these are my own takeaways. I want my readers to get whatever comes to their hearts and minds as they read the novel. I have few hopes, of which the most important is that readers take Ours seriously and read it with much patience.
Rumpus: Franklin, one of the original Ouhmey [residents of Saint’s town], lives in the town of Ours in an easy but uncomfortable and aromantic partnership with Thylias. In many ways, Franklin is undone by his love for Foster, a character from outside the town. How did these characters make their way into your story, and what did you draw from to flesh out their story?
Williams: Franklin originally did not have the plot point involving Foster. I had a completely different character carry that story within a story, but that character’s existence (I can’t even remember what his name was) felt extraneous in a book that already had almost two dozen characters weaving through the complex timeline. So I merged him with Franklin, which made sense not only because of Franklin’s loneliness but also his trauma around male bonding.
There is a recent report from PBS NewsHour called “Why a growing number of American men say they are in a ‘friendship recession’” that I think speaks to the difficulty many men have with forging and maintaining intimate connections with other men, especially as we age. Franklin’s childhood experiences frame his inability to build these connections in Ours, going so far as to follow him into what could have been the most important and arguably most formative relation he would have. Despite how enriching Foster’s presence is in his life, Franklin cannot sustain the bond, much like men in our contemporary moment have been shamed, beaten, shunned, and persecuted away from intimacy with one another.
Rumpus: I’m glad you brought up the issue of male friendship and companionship. You capture so well the strange gray areas friendships between men can fall into when there aren’t many real-world examples of how to navigate such a bond. Take the relationship between Luther-Phillip and Justice [characters who live in Ours], theirs is a carefully rendered slow burn that didn’t follow patterns or adhere to strict binaries that serve as a shorthand in other media. What was your inspiration for this pairing?
Williams: Originally, these two had a version of themselves that were Joy’s sons, named Raven and Cheesecake, older and younger respectively. When I decided to completely rewrite the story, the boys were separated into two characters of roughly the same age. In that earlier story, the boys were still part of the first generation of those who had not experienced slavery firsthand, which I think is an immense part of Ours’s exploration of freedom. I imagine there would have been certain protections set up for the later generations by the elders to keep them aware but not burdened by the weight of having been enslaved. But with this generational and experiential divide, how one imagines freedom, performs it, embraces it, understands it, conceptualizes it, and so forth cannot be at all the same any more than I can compare my imagining of my grandmothers’ lived experiences to my own empirical knowledge. The boys represent possibility and discovery. What can happen when people are left alone to figure out how to bond and refuse to bond with others? In the freedom there is a lack of surveillance, the boys both thrived and fumbled. In turn, they were changed in surprising ways that I hope the novel makes believable.
Rumpus: What have been some of the biggest or most surprising changes that took place as you moved from draft to completed novel?
Williams: One of the most surprising changes that happened during writing the novel is how quickly the outline I had written became useless. I had the story mapped out by the chapter, and by the time I made it to chapter five, I realized I had ignored everything from that outline. I ended up freewriting the entire book, sending my agent Bill Clegg chapters as I completed them. In this way, he read the book as a serial novel, old school like how they used to publish novels serially in newspapers. It was the most freeing experience.
Rumpus: Did your relationship with your editor change your relationship with Ours?
Williams: Not really. There was only enthusiasm from my editor from beginning to end, and I carried that into our relationship. We had great synergy, and Paul Slovak trusted my vision from the start.
Rumpus: What are some things your characters taught you about yourself as you worked with them?
Williams: From Luther-Philip, I learned that vulnerability requires a want to be connected with other people for the sake of their growth, not just my own. I learned from Justice that love requires balance, that self-sacrifice can take many forms and none of them are foolproof. I learned the importance of setting boundaries from Aba [one of Saint’s oldest associates in Ours, alternately blessed and cursed by her conjure]. And from Thylias [an Ouhmey who lives in quiet peace with Franklin, the two of them “exhausted by a past that lacked privacy and were inspired, now, by selves they suddenly had time to get to learn”], I learned how imperative it is to become a mentor.
I learned from the experience of writing the book how exhausting it is to write a novel and how through that exhaustion a luminescence occurs where everything outside of the novel is better lit. My life became clearer to me in many ways, one that led me to reading more about attachment styles, building better friendships, and getting proper rest. I think it is because I was hyper focused on the book in a meditative daze. I spent a lot of time alone with myself and my characters, fascinated by their relentless drive toward love against all opposition.
Rumpus: Who in your community was able to help with that exhaustion, boost you when you needed it, or provide some welcome distractions or insights?
Williams: You know, I didn’t really seek community for reprieve in that way. I did, however, have a select few who I shared snippets of the novel with as I was writing and editing. I rarely ever emailed excerpts, but I did read some of it over the phone to folks to make sure it sounded fine and that I could actually read it. Sometimes I would catch a typo or a very clunky sentence that made little to no sense grammatically. Reading it to people helped remedy those challenges.
Later in the process, I finally found a therapist who helped me navigate challenges outside of writing. The problem wasn’t the writing process but that I needed to talk to someone about other things going on in my life that I hadn’t had time to process while teaching full-time, which I loved but discovered during the first COVID lockdown was unsustainable. So really taking care of myself outside of writing—and by this time I was pretty much done writing the novel—did more for me than changing my writing practice.
Rumpus: The character Frances might be described as trans, nonbinary, or genderfluid in today’s language. The way they move through the world in the nineteenth century feels at times freer and at others more restricted than the way they might exist in 2024. How did the historical setting of the novel shape the way you portrayed their gender?
Williams: I didn’t think about it in this way. There were people alive during that time who defied gender in ways some would argue are more complicated than our contemporary understandings of gender. It is colonialism that managed to disrupt free expressions of selfhood in many regards, gender being only one victim of imperialism. The labels of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid did not exist in this time, so for me it was less about representation and more about writing these ways of being as though they were occurrences that required no special taxonomy. They simply were. William Dorsey Swann is a great example of this way of being free.
Rumpus: In a book where magic is a mundane fact of the world—everyone in town knows what a watermelon might do in the wrong hands—your use of metaphor makes everything feel supernatural, possibly dangerous, all things brimming with power. What sort of research went into how the supernatural would work in your novel?
Williams: I have books on all types of African and Black spiritual traditions, books I didn’t even know would become important to me as an adult, such as Her Stories by Virginia Hamilton and The Black Book, edited by Toni Morrison. Some rootwork I picked up from hearsay while others came from Zora Neale Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America” from The Journal of American Folklore, published in 1931. I also have had conversations with spiritual practitioners who have shared different methods with me. Much of the research, then, was a life lived near and sometimes even in the world of rootwork.
Rumpus: How involved were you with the cover design? The work of Damilola Opedun often seems to compress past, present, and future into a single expansive moment, much like the centuries long story of Ours. Additionally, characters are often paired throughout the book navigating complex relationships over time, and the two figures depicted on the cover could stand in for almost any of them. I cannot wait to hold a final copy of this gorgeous thing you’ve made.
Williams: Thank you! I love the artwork of Damilola Opedun and the cover design from Lynn Buckley. She painted the watercolor of the title and my name. Lynn had sent me about six or seven amazing options, and I chose two. The cover would have been something different if I had not changed my mind. There was another piece that caught my eye, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about the couple that Damilola painted and assumed others would feel that magnetism as well. What’s funny is how both my press and agent secretly hoped I would pick Damilola’s painting and cheered when I came to my senses. It was the obvious choice and felt perfect for the very reasons you described: it is timeless, intimate, and covers a range of relationships in the book.
Rumpus: Now that the novel is done and entering the world as a published object, as you move on to future projects, what are you going to do differently? How are you going to better care of yourself and your work?
Williams: I’ll tell you this: I’m going to sleep when I want and say “no” when I need to.
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Author photograph courtesy of Phillip B. Williams
