Life Outside the Box: An Interview with Nadya Williams

Rediscovering creativity, cultivating community, and receiving unexpected gifts

Mar 21, 2024

Welcome to Life Outside the Box, where we celebrate living as whole people and not just a one-dimensional job title.

The overwhelmingly positive response to my essay, Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All, suggested to me that there are a lot of women (and men) who are keen to set aside the societal pressure to hustle hard and put all their energies and decades of life exclusively into one single career box.

This series offers interviews with those who have chosen a life outside the box, in a variety of ways. It’s my hope that in getting to peek into the lives of others, we’ll all be inspired to step outside the pressure chambers we may feel stuck in - even if our lives are very different in practice from those shared here.

Encouragement, permission, examples - I hope whatever it is you need to step outside the box, you’ll find it here.

Nadya Williams joins us for this interview, sharing her wisdom and experience of home(un)schooling, leaving a tenured position in favour of more creative pursuits, and reflecting on the crucial nature of having community.

I hope you’ll be as encouraged by her story as I was!

(1) What does your life outside the box currently look like? Tell us about a day/ week in your life.

It is funny to think about my life now as "outside the box," but I suppose this does describe it well! Although perhaps it's time to redefine the box--or just trash it altogether. Build your own box from what's available in your life. But that is scary! Rules, boundaries, boxes feel oddly comforting, protective.

As of summer 2023, I am a full-time homeschooling mom and a writer. I walked away from academia after fifteen years (wrote about it here). So now, we are in full homeschooling-unschooling mode, where each day a variety of educational things happen, but aside from math and Greek, which require a structured curriculum, it is rather unpredictable. On the free admission days at the local botanical gardens, we are always there with bells on. We have an annual pass to the zoo, so we try to get there at least once a month. If it's a nice day (nice = good snowfall and/or sunny), we're playing outside--a lot! And there is always a read-aloud book in progress, to which we turn multiple times throughout the day, whenever it seems good to have a "downtime" kind of activity. We do not own a television and generally live a low-tech kind of life, so the kids find creative ways to entertain themselves.

Alongside these more important things, my first book came out in November 2023, my second book (on redeeming the priceless value of children and mothers in a world that doesn't value them) is forthcoming this October from IVP Academic, and my third book (a guide for Christians on reading Greco-Roman Classics) is now under contract, due to the publisher on August 1 of this year. Classical ed friends, this one is for you! Anyway, it seems that walking away from a highly toxic academic job freed me up to think and write more--and faster. I also freelance, writing essays regularly for a variety of venues.

Last but not least, I am Book Review Editor at Current, a really wonderful and welcoming online magazine of culture, religion, and politics. I run a group blog, The Arena, at Current as well. This means that in any given week, I'm communicating with possible reviewers/bloggers, keeping track of interesting books that I'd like us to review, editing one or two review essays for publication, and editing and scheduling blog posts.

The writing and editing happens in the evenings. After dinner, my husband spends time with the kids, while I take a couple of hours to work. Later at night, especially if ideas are flowing, I might keep writing after everyone in the house is asleep.

(2) How did you get there? What intentional choices did you make?

The truth is, I didn't realize that this is where I would end up right now, and so many factors were decidedly external, but I am very happy to be in this phase. For fifteen years, I was a full-time college professor, but I was also a homeschooling mom all along. What got sacrificed was all creative activity, and I didn't even realize just how much I missed it until the Spring 2020 shutdown. Remember that March, when we all thought we were going to die, Bubonic plague style?

Anyway, that spring, for the first time ever, I asked my husband to take the kids for one hour each afternoon and give me quiet time to think, because otherwise, I was worried I might go insane. So, from 4pm to 5pm each day that spring and summer, I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop, and I wrote two very academic articles--one of them about a very deadly plague in the Roman Empire (I guess we all had plagues on the brain that year). And then, as I kept up the habit of writing for one hour a day, almost a year later I started writing short essays and sending them to various places. Finally, I wrote my first book. I realized that while I like research, I really love the creative sort of writing that bridges the academic and the popular. I love trying to bring the ancient world alive for non-expert readers, and I especially love writing for the church.

As I was experiencing this creative flourishing in my writing, the secular state university where I was teaching experienced horrific leadership shakedown and mismanagement. The result: student enrollment crashed, faculty started leaving in droves, but there were also layoffs, and everyone's teaching load went up overnight. Make a lot more bricks AND bring your own straw too! My job as a tenured full professor would have been safe for a while longer, but I handed in my resignation last spring, realizing that I just could not work at a place like this. My husband, who taught there as well, got another job, so this past summer, we moved half-way across the country.

So, overall, it felt like while I did make some intentional choices of my own--blocking off some daily time for writing, starting four years ago--a lot of what happened felt very much outside of my control, but in really beautiful God-given ways. Sometimes in life you just pray for a gift, and then you gratefully accept the gift, even if sometimes it doesn't even look like a gift you wanted or imagined.

(3) What are you intentionally choosing to say “yes” and (maybe more importantly!) “no” to in this season of your life?

For the first time ever, lately I have been receiving invitations for speaking engagements. This is exciting and energizing--it's an opportunity to teach and say something helpful and useful (I hope) based on all the research and thinking I have done over the years. On the other hand, traveling overnight away from family is tricky, and I do not want to do it too often. I have a few trips planned this spring and fall, so we'll test this out and see what is realistic.

It really is a gift to be in a situation where you can say "no" to some things. Ironically, I am getting so many more invitations to write, speak, etc. now that I'm not in academia than when I was an academic! It makes no sense, but it is a gift. But I'm getting to a point where I have to turn some things down. For instance, after writing for the Anxious Bench blog on Patheos for two years, I finally stepped off that commitment. I also said "no" to adjuncting this spring at a college nearby, and it seemed like an obvious and easy "no." It made no sense economically, and it would have inconvenienced the family.

(4) When you were a child/ younger, what vision did you have for your life? Did you always want to live outside the box, or did it come later? Was it a surprise to you?

I'm really fascinated with the psychology of birth order. In a nutshell, I'm such a typical firstborn--hard-working, rule-following, eager to please. I'm also very creative and definitely a "dreamer." This combination means that I dream of doing experimental and creative things much more than carrying through with such dreams.

All of this said, my family also had an unusual and very "outside the box" journey, immigrating from the Soviet Union to Israel and then to the US. So it seems like we have a hereditary pattern of waiting things out until it looks like a disaster is looming, and then finding a creative solution to exit the disaster zone. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing the parallel between my wait-and-see approach to leaving academia, finally jumping off what felt like a burning train, and my parents' decision to leave the USSR just months before it collapsed.

(5) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills helped you cultivate the life you have now?

It's not nearly as much about skills, I'm convinced. It's more about the people in our lives. The only reason that I was able to leave academia and become a freelance writer with a very much part-time income is because I have a wonderfully supportive husband who enjoys his work and is happy to be the main provider. But it's also about location, location, location. We moved from a reasonably affordable town in GA to a super affordable small town in OH. Not enough people pay attention to cost of living, but it makes a huge difference for the life we are able to live. Put simply, if I were not married and/or if we did not move somewhere this affordable, I'm not sure we would have been able to pull this off as a family. Homeschooling and spending so much time with my kids while they are little is a beautiful, wonderful luxury. Being able to just freelance and write for joy is a luxury. Yet more gifts to accept with gratitude.

Sure, we each have skills and attitudes--staying organized with my time and various tasks is essential! But someone else with all of my skills and dispositions--and even more--might not be able to replicate my life, if not given the same support structure. It is an important reminder that none of us are islands unto ourselves. We have been created for community, and whether we are married or single, parenting or not, we need to cultivate our community, and allow our community to cultivate us too.

(6) Where can people find you online?

I write a weekly newsletter, so this is probably the best place to learn more about my work. In addition, I cannot say enough good things about Current!

I love Nadya’s honesty about how her family makes it work, and her idea of “trashing the box altogether” or “building your own box from what’s available in your life.”

Let’s discuss! Have you ever walked away from something significant only to find new and surprising paths opening up in ways that don’t make sense? Is there anything you’d like to try doing for an hour a day? What does / could creating community look like for you?

Cultivating Clarity

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