The award-winning writer and academic Jenny Heijun Wills discusses her new collection of essays Everything and Nothing At All (Knopf, 2024), with Joseph Planta.

Everything and Nothing At All by Jenny Heijun Wills (Knopf, 2024). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Everything and Nothing At All

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

One of the important books of the year is the new collection of essays by Jenny Heijun Wills, Everything and Nothing at All. She writes of herself in the context of the world around her and within her. As a transnational adoptee, she writes of race and ethnicity not only from her perspective, but she looks critically at how others might see her then as now. In her discussions of mental illness, self-harm, queerness, polyamory, and eating disorder, she is frank and honest. Her ability to convey her own feelings as well as invite the reader to think critically of their own on a variety of subjects is so necessary in today’s culture. Take for example how she contends with how she perceived abuse, and how she might have tolerated or rationalised it in the past, and how her view changes because of a myriad of issues, like maturing or being a parent. The wisdom brims in the book, as it’s more than personal history but also literary criticism. Her ability to provide cultural context on a variety of issues is often informative and surprising. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Seoul, South Korea, and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern Ontario. She wrote about a lot of her experiences in her critically acclaimed and prize-winning Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related. It was the recipient of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize in 2019, and the Manitoba Book Awards Best First Book Prize in 2020. This new book, from Knopf, is already a 2024 finalist for the Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. She is a Fulbright Alum (Harvard), and in 2015 was a visiting Scholar at Stanford University. She holds two BA-Hons degrees, an MA, and a PhD. She currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg. We taped this interview in late August, with Jenny joining me from Toronto. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Jenny Heijun Wills; Professor Wills,  good morning.

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