Welcome Gary Barwin to our Power Q & A! Gary is, most recently, the author of Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023). This transfixing collection of personal essays offers a wide-eyed exploration of identity, language, belonging, and the unruly wonder of our existence. Gary’s writing is a timely and vital antidote to the desensitization of the news cycle, and a reminder of the importance of belonging—a topic as relevant now as ever.
We’re chuffed to have Gary here today to talk with us about what inspired this wondrous book.
Q: How did this collection of essays come to you? Did you always know it was going to be a book or did it just start with one essay, then another, then a theme began to take shape? Or something else entirely?
Bring home Imagining Imagining.
A: I was tricked, I tell you. I was tricked! I submitted an MS of poems with illustrations to Wolsak & Wynn publisher Noelle Allen and she agreed to publish it if I interleaved some essays between the poems. She’d been trying to convince me to write a book of essays for a few years but I never really felt the impulse. But poet me, blinded by the opportunity of publication, immediately agreed to her proposal. I had just submitted a draft of a novel to my agents and had a few months of waiting before they would report back, and so I began writing about whatever energized me. It was a revelation! I had so much to say, or rather, as soon as I began, I realized how much the act of writing, of being curious, of following the unfolding of the essays revealed to me. Connections that I had only vaguely intuited emerged. The energy of the language, of the possibilities of creative non-fiction, of form, captured my imagination and writing brain. And as I wrote more essays, I realized that I was making next-level connections between the different essays: in the way they were written as well as in their themes.
Of course, Noelle being an astute editor and a great judge of writers, knew that this would happen. Very quickly, I understood that I should ditch the poems (which weren’t that good anyway) because the essay collection had become its own thing. I also realized that I had some past writing (some speeches and some non-fiction) that belonged with the new work. I rewrote them in light of the just-written essays and then the entire book felt like it came from the same place, that it was defining its own book-space, its own essay-world. There were a few essays that Noelle wisely suggested that I omit, and I agreed with her. You know that thing when you show your writing to someone, secretly knowing that it isn’t that good, but, hoping against hope, that they will tell you it is marvelous and you’re a genius. I might have been tricked into writing these essays, but Noelle wasn’t tricked into including all of them. I’m so grateful that Noelle steered me toward the essay. I’m so thrilled to discover what it helped me discover, what new part of my writing self it brings out, how it facilitates such compelling exploration and discussion, how I have the opportunity as a writer to engage with readers in a new way.
Gary Barwin, Canadian icon!
More about Imagining Imagining:
In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.
More about Gary:
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary, artist and the author of thirty books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. 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. It was also optioned for TV by the Jim Henson Company. Barwin is a PhD in music and publishes and performs his work internationally.