Years before Aaron Williams and RC Shaw became published authors, each with a pair of books under their belt, the friends and former University of King’s College classmates had a fever-induced idea one night. It was the winter of 2017. The two were rooming together in New York City for a weeklong authors’ residency. Williams was jet-lagged, and Shaw was sick as a dog. They were supposed to pitch their book ideas to agents the next day. But neither could sleep. So, they talked about the books and writers they loved instead.
“We started joking about having a podcast,” Shaw says, speaking with The Coast.
Flash forward seven years, and what started as a lark has come true: Williams and Shaw are the new co-hosts of Further Reading, a podcast about the craft of writing. In its third season, the King’s-backed project puts writers in conversation with other writers to learn the secrets behind their stories. Past seasons have featured award-winning authors Eternity Martis (They Said This Would Be Fun), Omar Mouallem (Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas) and Charlotte Gray (The Massey Murder).
Shaw and Williams take over the host’s chair(s) from Gillian Turnbull, director of writing and publishing in the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Fiction programs. And while it’s the first podcast venture for both authors, they’re finding their rhythm as a duo. (Full disclosure: They interviewed me about my book. No, not for money. But it means I can write about their co-host personalities with some degree of authority.)
Shaw, the Cow Bay-based author of bike-and-surf-adventure memoirs Louisbourg or Bust and Captain Solitude, has an innate curiosity about form, while Williams, the BC-raised author of wildfire and forestry memoirs Chasing Smoke and The Last Logging Show, loves “stuff like routine and word counts and how many places you’ve submitted to”—the nuts and bolts of working on a book and getting it published.
“For me, the gold standard is [Writers & Company host] Eleanor Wachtel. I’m nowhere near that… but I’ll listen back to how she throws out a question at the right time—in a brief way—and then steps away.” – RC Shaw
It helps that both authors are already fast friends.
“When we’re hanging out, we’re talking about the latest thing we read in the New Yorker and the style of it,” Shaw says.
“That kind of dominates every time we get together for a surf,” Williams adds. “There’s often a long walk or a lull, and it’s really nice when you’re not in a crowd, because we can get really geeky.”
Season three of Further Reading premiered Friday, Dec 20 and features conversations with Elliott Gish, Charlene Carr, Annick MacAskill and Donna Kane. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Soundcloud.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.