Interview with 2022 contest judge Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 26 books of fiction, poetry and numerous chapbooks. His latest books include a new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for fiction, and the poetry collections, Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime) and The Fabulous Op (with Gregory Betts). His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was longlisted for Canada Reads. He has taught and been writer-in-residence at many universities, colleges, and libraries. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com.

Scheduling your writing around the demands of daily life can be challenging. How do you find time in your day to write?

If you skip personal hygiene and all relationship responsibilities you can easily find time to write. Also I tend to skip sleeping and eating. Need to ensure there’s time to scroll social media as well as complete the magnum opus. But really, I find the slow accumulation of regular writing works for me. When I’m writing a novel, I aim for 500 words a day. This includes figuring out what is happening in the story as well as the actual writing.) Rather than aiming for marathon writing sessions—not that I don’t sometimes do that—regularly setting smaller goals and regularly accomplishing them works best for me. Also they’re easier to fit in around other things like brushing your teeth or breathing.

Do you thrive in the solitude of a writer’s life, or do you flourish when you are around other writers, like as part of a writers’ group for example?

I like all kinds of ways of being a writer. I do lots of writing alone (or alone with my own delusions of grandeur or worthlessness.) But I also do many collaborations with other writers and creators. I love how it surprises, extends and challenges me. Also, it’s very sociable. I haven’t been part of a writer’s group, but I understand that they are really productive for some. I just joined a children’s writing group (writing for children not with children—though that would be an awesome thing to do) and I hope to learn more about writing for kids from this very smart and experienced group of writers. This is a first for me, so I’ll report back.

Are you comfortable sharing a detail or two about your current writing project(s)?

Imagine Hermann Goering in the bath with Brittany Spears and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Imagine Justin Trudeau dressed as a coffee cup. Imagine weeping while shaving a dog. None of those things apply to my latest project. The big project that I’m currently working on is a new novel, called, at the moment, DEATH WRITES A NOVEL. In it, Death is actually writing a novel. He’s writing about how he’s asked a washed-up stand-up comedian to go down to the underworld, like Orpheus, to try to sweet-talk the Fates into allowing Death’s son who has committed suicide--to come back to earth to try to heal. Death has PTSD (or something like it) and he's asked this comedian, with griefs and regrets of his own, to do this metaphysical stand-up because he’s not able to.

What are some of the elements that really make you say “WOW” when you are reading through a story?

I think the thing that makes me go “Wow” the most is surprise. Whatever terms the story sets up, a deft turn or change in what I expected makes me exclaim, “wow,” or something similar. “Scissors! Jellyfish! Alice Munro!" Suddenly something is revealed or my expectations for how the story works shifts. It’s a kind of magic trick. The tablecloth is pulled out from below the china tea set. A dove appears. A rabbit is pulled out of a hat. But wait! It’s not really a rabbit or a hat. Something about rabbitness or hatness or magic itself is presented and I didn’t expect it. Wow. Look at me and my expectations. Look at stories and how they can go beyond the business as usual. How new ways of thinking and feeling or of talking about thinking and feeling are revealed. The fabulous armature of language. The armoire of saying. The army of the tongue. The armour of speech. This is not about any particular style but rather about what the story does with the conventions it sets up. Or how it speaks to other conventions or expectations. Of course, brilliantly written prose makes me go “wow,” also, but I’d say that it offers unanticipated marvels too, on the level of the sentence.

Do you have any advice for contest entrants?

I think that generally my advice to writers is that you shouldn’t write what you think you should write, but what really, genuinely excites you. Makes you feel electric. Perhaps something fits nicely together and feels like it has real skill. It’s accomplished. But are there ways of writing the story that surprise you, that blow the top of your head off, that make you tingle, that take a new route along the network of synapses in your writing brain? The writing should feel fresh to you. Not so much, “that went well,” but “wow,” or “I’d never thought of it like that,” or “that blows open my thinking of what’s possible in writing.” It doesn’t have to be wild, crazed, or even extravert, can, even in a quiet way, feel fresh and vivid, alive and vital. Also, contests are strange beasts. It means something to win, but it doesn’t mean anything necessarily, not to win. There is always an element of taste, of the writing arriving at a particular moment, a whole combination of things which doesn’t necessarily reflect on the value of the writing. As a judge, I really do try to read and evaluate the work on its own terms and not just value the things that I value in my own writing or reading, but, oh we fallible and fickle humans, don’t always get it right, or see outside the narrow tunnels of our vision. Lastly, if you see me, give me a briefcase full of unmarked $100 bills. That tends to help.