Thinking Will

Priya Jay and Will Daddario think through the connections of grief, race, gender, oppression, and joy.

Christen Rinaldi and Will talk about the fusion of clinical mental health counseling and Reiki.

Ash Canty of Sovereign Spirit Death Care talks with will about his/their calling as a Death Walker, the bigness of the One, and the beauty of all the things we can barely understand.

Kicking off Season 2, Will thinks with the extraordinary poet, performer, and sound artist Jonah Mixon-Webster. Beginning with a recent comment made about the expression of anger in Mixon-Webster’s highly awarded Stereo(TYPE), the conversation catches the wind and explores a wide range of territory, from the politics of blackness to the creation of new worlds through fiction to the fabrication of the NFT.

Jonah Mixon-Webster is a poet-educator, scholar, and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, MI.

His debut poetry collection, Stereo(TYPE), won the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is an alumnus of Eastern Michigan University and Illinois State University. He is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Images & Voices of Hope, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including Obsidian, Harper’s, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Callaloo, Pennsound, Best New Poets, and Best American Experimental Writing. 

In the 10th episode of Thinking Will, I speak with scholar Pannill Camp, Chair of Performing Arts at Washington University. Our topic takes us into the intellectual foundations of Pannill’s current book project, which deals with the social theoretical underpinnings of the discipline of performance studies. Scholars of theatre and performance will find this especially interesting.

In this edition of “Thinking Will, Thinking With,” Gloria Imseih Petrelli brings an amazing assemblage of ideas to the conversation:

• Desire-centered, trauma-informed research (via Eve Tuck, and in reference to an earlier episode of Thinking Will) and its relation to Gloria’s ongoing work as an artist and activist fighting for Palestinian Liberation

• The function of “poetic knowledge” in Robin D. G. Kelley’s thinking on The Black Radical Imagination

• The HBO Series The Sopranos

By the end of the conversation, we’ve devised a complete concept for an audio-driven piece of street theatre and performance art that could very well pop up in the streets of Chicago.

Buckle up and join us on this edition of “Thinking Will, Thinking With”

This is episode 7 of “Thinking Will,” but it is also the first part of a new series called “Thinking With.” Here, I think with Gregory Hicks about this question: how can we get to a place where we feel sadness each time another person is hurt (regardless of that person’s race, class, or cultural background)? Obviously, if we are asking this question then we are currently living in a time when this doesn’t happen. In the recent wake caused by the failure to hold Breonna Taylor’s killers accountable for their actions, the pain of our current reality is palpable and raw. Greg and I think through this reality together and work toward a list of activities that people can try to help us arrive at a place of greater empathy and caring.

Aligned with the international organization Performance Philosophy, Will helps explain the upcoming conference’s key theme: Problems. A problem is not something to be solved. Rather, it is something like the generative matrix that continues to inform all scholarly thought and/or artistic expression.

How do we make space to engage in meaningful conversation with people with whom we don’t agree? What is the role of listening in these kinds of conversation? What even is listening?