Happy Friday friends!
Today, you’re in for a treat, as we have the brilliant and very funny best-selling author Gary Barwin joining us in this space for a delightful, and inspiring Q & A.
Happy reading…
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. He is the author of 31 books including Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Vine Award, and was chosen for Hamilton Reads 2023. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was long listed for Canada Reads. His 2022 poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. A PhD in music composition, he has been writer-in-residence and taught at many universities, colleges and libraries. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com
“There are few voices in Canadian writing as original as Barwin’s.” —Toronto Star
Why I Write: Gary Barwin
Describe your writing space.
The inside of my head? It’s so cluttered and what’s that: Ferns? Regret? But I have several places where I write at home both inside and outside. Sometimes I write on a treadmill upstairs, sometimes at a cluttered desk. Often on the porch or in the backyard. If I can’t change myself, I can always change my location for a new view on the work.
How important is it to have ‘a room of one’s own’?
I think what’s important is to be able to have the time and space to concentrate and so to be able to follow the writing. Toni Morrison began by writing on the subway. So it’s about being able to create that time and space where you are free to create. That might include physical time and space, but also the money to be able to have that time and space and, in Woolf’s sense, the sense of being entitled to be yourself, to have some place where you have room to realize who you are.
Any ‘rules’ for when you’re in this space?
I don’t have “rules,” but I do have some habits or goals. I try (try!) not to be hard on myself and believe in the process. I try to go with the inevitable distraction—especially if it means I end up harnessing the energy of procrastination to create something else. The writing isn’t necessarily made up of the one writing session. It’s a process which evolves over time and constantly changes, stops, starts, renews. Being a writer, for me, is about knowing or at least trusting one’s own impulses, one’s brain. You have to have an understanding of your own psychology or at least learn to work with it.
“The idea that your own mind is the thing most perfectly suited to creating the work that you are creating.”
Do you quantify your process by word count or hours spent writing?
I like to make stuff. It feels satisfying, centering, energizing to create work. That’s really the test. I only really quantify things when I’m working on a novel. Sometimes I make goals for myself. For example, I’m going to write this essay and then send it to such and such a place or person. Sometimes I set myself a goal of 500 words a day—the idea is that whether they’re good or bad at least I’ve done something quantifiable. It helps me keep going. I have a chart and mark my word count so I can see the novel getting toward a goal of 60,000 or 80,000 words. It helps me not give-up or despair at how slow it is. Sometimes I make up another kind of goal. Every now and then I say it is “Ampersand Week” and then create art related to ampersands each day for a week. Also, I frequently write on a treadmill so that even if the writing isn’t good, at least I get exercise. I have friends who do this also and so track their progress in kilometres. I’m not that hardcore. Yet.
What is your creative process like?
Crosslegged, I sit at a crossroads, open my third eye and my vintage Happy Meal, hold aloft my miniature copy of Franz Kafka’s parables and wait for the coruscated beefsteak of inspiration to alight upon my waiting pate and gift me the peppercorn-infused iron-rich succulence of language. Other than that, I believe in creative play, deliberately ill-defined goals that are open to constant evaluation, trust in error, happenstance and coincidence, and the faith that “the writing knows more than I do. I create many different kinds of things—poetry, fiction, visuals, music, multimedia and the process of creating them spill into each another so my process is messy. Inconsistent. Persistent. Frequent.
What is the easiest and most difficult part of the process for you?
Writing a lot. Not writing more. Or better.
Why do you write? What do you love about writing?
Honestly, I don’t think I could help myself. It is like another sense organ. An extension of my awareness, my exploration of the world, my understanding of what is around me, what was, and myself. Those are the same reasons I love writing, but I also love that I have access to this vast, surprising, mysterious, hilarious, human-making, mind and heart expanding technology right in my brain. Even when it is duplicitous, a trickster, a con artist, I eventually catch on and learn something. Mostly.
How do you manage writing with other demands on your time?
I have had the great privilege to have been able to make time for my writing. Not so much a room of [my] own, but a room shared with family (and particularly my wife) where we share responsibilities and which has enabled me to be able to write and create work. I’m not precious about writing time in that I’ll write anytime and anywhere. (I can be overwrought and a diva anywhere, also!)
What has influenced you most as a writer?
I would say that I’ve had the economic and emotional privilege. My children encouraged creativity and my parents made sure I had the opportunity to follow my interests as well as get an education. The other thing was—and perhaps this is common with many writers—I was always somewhat of an outsider, not one thing or another, in whatever context I was in. As a kid in Ireland, my parents were immigrants and we were Jewish. And I was whatever kind of neurodivergent an artsy kid is. Similarly, when I moved to Canada, my experience was very different than that of my peers. I was aware that my grandparents were from Lithuania, my parents from South Africa, I grew up in Northern Ireland and then I moved to Canada. And I was interested in classical music, jazz, art, books, and so on. It felt like cosplay to wear jeans or running shoes. Or to eat burgers. My dad, a gynaecologist, had a Gynny the Vagina model which he used for teaching in the front room of our house. Seeing everything as marvellous strange—the world around me, language, culture, everything. I think all of these things were huge influences.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
I feel that I let the connections between books take care of themselves. I just keep making things and trying to be an inventive, honest, earnest, explorer of the possible. And not to catch my fingers in the paper cutter.
Best advice you’ve ever been given.
Don’t get your fingers caught in the paper cutter. Also, as Austrialian writer Peter Carey once told me he was advised by an Aboriginal Indigenous Elder, “Don’t be a dick.”
What does success look like to you?
Firstly, being able to keep making things. Secondly, being able to do it as part of a community—of friends, family, writers, trees. I would, however, not mind being carried through the streets of my city, hoisted on the petards of fellow citizens while they chant my name to the tune of their favourite Britney Spears’ song.
Tell us a few things that would surprise us to learn about you: the person, the writer.
In terms of my internal organs, I’m situs solitus, though once in mirror, I was mistaken as situs inversus. I used to work as my wife’s legal assistant in her criminal law practice though I made sure I wasn’t very good so I got let go. There was this one client that I drove to the rehab centre. As we drove, he rolled down the window and shook his fist at the sky saying, “God, you’re a fucker, but I love you.” Once, as part of a literary festival, I read to a protester sitting high up in a tall tree but only after being chased by the police.
What can books teach us? How do they change us?
To me, the thing that books—or all art—can teach us is to know our own imaginative and creative self. We have an imagination! We have creativity! We have a brain! Feelings! Perspective! We can apprehend! Consider! Experience! We humans, wow! Language! Humour! Emotions! Absurdity! Consciousness! Sub- and unconsciousness!
What was a transformative book for you in your life?
I don’t know that I ever read anything as intensively and immersively as Lord of the Rings. I spent a middle school summer by lamplight in my dad’s smoking jacket-like dressing gown, sucking on a plastic pipe filled with oregano (in order to simulate being a hobbit reading ancient lore.) It transformed how I thought about language and the natural world. Everything had resonance, a history, a past, consciousness (i.e. trees). Language and story could carry everything. I think the Gormenghast trilogy was a close second. The other book that transformed me was reading Kafka. How the inner and outer world spoke to each other. How folk tale, parable, tall tale, animal tale, allegory, essay and aphorism could be braided and could speak to contemporary experience.
Which authors, living or dead, would you most like to discuss writing with?
In music grad school, I studied with some truly great composers, however, some of them were terrible teachers, so though it’s tempting to want to say that I’d like to discuss writing with some of those whom I think are great, I don’t know how it might go. I remember once I went for a lesson with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and he pointed at a whole note in a bar and said, “THAT is a bourgeois whole note.” Ok. Now what? I turned it into two working class half notes. Better? I don’t know.
I did study with bpNichol for a couple of years in undergrad. He truly has been the most influential writer that I’ve known, both as a literary citizen and as a writer. His teaching and work were transformative to me. It was tragic that he’d died at 44— this year, he would have been 80. I’d love to be able to talk to him now. For one thing because it’d mean he’d still be alive.
Who are your favourite writers writing today?
Whenever I hear “favourite,” I kind of shut down. Because so many writers are my favourite and at different times and for different reasons. However, I’ve been on a Percival Everett kick for a while. So many of his novels are knockout. Hilarious, incisive, moving, surprising and shocking. An early one is God’s Country is remarkable. His latest, James does all the things.
What books are you currently loving?
I’ve been loving the work of Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov lately. She’s been creating really stunning poems the last few years. Similarly, Michigan poet Michael Sikkema. I’ve been dipping into Cecilia Vicuña’s Deer Book the design of which is remarkable as is the work. I also loved Geoffrey D. Morrison’s novel Falling Hour. I heard some great poetry lately from Zane Koss and James Lindsay. Aednan by Linnea Axelsson, a novel in poems carried me away. I’d never read The City and The City by China Miéville (it’s the name of one of the great bookstores in Hamilton) and was blown away.
If you were a bookseller what 5 books would you hand-sell to readers and why?
I think it depends on the reader—not every book will connect with every reader at every time in their life. I think I’d talk to the customer and try to give them something that would either entirely resonate and reinforce their experience, or contrarily, be something they couldn’t have imagined. I love the line from Dylan Thomas, “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.” I’d like my readers to have their eyes shooting out of their skull like a cartoon while their brain lights up the sky.
What advice do you have for writers?
Don’t get your fingers caught in the paper cutter. I like what Seamus Heaney writes in “North”: “Keep your eye clear/as the bleb of the icicle/trust the feel of what nubbed treasure/your hands have known” as long as it also means allowing your eye to get cloudy and glacial, and also trusting and mistrusting not only what your hands know, but your brain and your fuzzy mind. I do like to tell writers that, as I said above, “the writing knows more than you do,” so trust what is emerging on the page before you. And write what really, truly interests you, not what you think should interest you. It’s really difficult to do this, but I thing that that’s not only key to being a good writer but to being one who can find satisfaction and a sense of being centred.
Thank you Gary for sharing with us your thoughts and wisdom on creating, writing, and art.
Gary’s newest book is Scandal at the Alphorn Factory, released September 3rd by Assembly Press.
Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024–1984 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457. Known as a “whiz-bang storyteller” who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin’s trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can’t-miss collection of short fiction.
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