The Short of It: Gary Barwin & Scandal at the Alphorn Factory

For Short Story Month, one author will join us every Friday to answer five questions about their work and share an excerpt from their short story collection.

All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection in a few short sentences.

Gary Barwin: Scandal at the Alphorn Factory gathers a selection of 40 years of my short fiction, some never published, some which appeared previously in books, journals, or chapbooks. It’s fascinating to see what has changed, what has stayed the same from when I was but a mere wisp of 20 to when I attained the steady light of pure wisdom at age 60. What are the stories about? Oh, you know, the strange marvellous painful beautiful absurdity of being human; how our experiences, emotions, relations with the word/world create and recreate the word/world.

ALU: How do you approach writing a short story—do you start with an image, a character, or something else?

Gary Barwin: One of the most exciting things about writing is that both the process and result is so unpredictable and changeable. (You know, like making spaghetti.) Sometimes a word, an image, a character, an idea for plot or structure suggests itself to me, sometimes I just dive in and try to figure out in what underwater world I’ve found myself in and in what way it resembles or doesn’t resemble what I might consider as “real life.” I always try to trust the process of a story developing. Sometimes it’s a slow clarification, like a Polaroid image, sometimes it’s a long process of knitting together, like a sweater or a spiderweb or computer code. Sometimes it’s like that time when I was about eight and was trying to convince a friend that this little book I kept in my schoolboy blazer pocket was the secret handbook to a secret organization I was part of and that the bearded guy in the front illustration was our leader. It was a leather-bound copy of Great Expectations and the guy was Dickens. So, really, not so far from the truth.

ALU: What do you love about the short story form?

Gary Barwin: It’s not really one thing but many. It’s like saying “what do you like about walking?” That could mean going to the store, the fridge, or hiking the Cabot trail. But there is a sense of it being a single handful of sometimes many things in that the form feels like you can gather the entire work in one place, unlike many novels which feel much more like trying to hold an entire blanket in one hand (thus, I recommend, calling a novel a novel and using two hands to hold it. War AND Peace. The Life AND Opinions of Tristram Shandy.) I love that the short story can be a speech, a confession, a set of instructions, a tale, an interconnected universe, a dialogue, a script, the text on a cereal box, a series of text messages, a scientific paper. Anything really. I love that at its edges it can be a prose poem or a novel. But it has no edges.

ALU: Who are some of your favourite short story writers?

Gary Barwin: I always turn to Beckett, Calvino, Borges, and especially Kafka. The four Powerpuff Girls of postmodern fiction. (And yes, there was a fourth Powerpuff Girl – Bliss. I just checked Wikipedia.)

Franz is my Jesus, my Ronald McDonald, my Christopher Marlowe, my Mary Ruefle, MAC Farrant, my Anne Carson. But lately, I’ve heard some of Hamiltonian Jaclyn Desforges’s new stories and really love them. The weirdo microfictions of Benjamin Niespodziany always surprise me. And Kathryn Mockler’s Anecdotes is a really fantastic book. Plus its cover (designed by Malcolm Sutton) has a picture of a Maxi Pad on the cover. Also, I’d like to shout-out to the title story of What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander, an older story which navigates the complexity of Jewish identity in a remarkable way, often with painful and insightful humour.

ALU: What are three things on your writing desk/place of writing?

Gary Barwin: I write in many places. Coffee shops, bed, the porch, on a treadmill set up like a desk, in front of the fire in our living room. But mostly, I write in my study and on a computer. This computer. (Hello, computer!) You’ll see from the photo that I have recording gear and instruments around me. I like to switch modes of making throughout the day. Sometimes art, sometimes writing, sometimes music, sometimes the fine art of avoidance. I also have stones and bits of trees (bark, sticks). I’m not certain why. They are talismanic in some way. I don’t think it makes a whit of difference to the writing, but I am aware of the light—from lamps, from the outside. Likewise, I don’t think where I write makes a difference. I’ve written as effectively and movingly in a food court or in a waiting room as I have in a famous library or ensconced at an atmospherically lit desk. Richard Wagner supposedly used to compose in a scented bath, but then again, they said his music was often better than it sounds. I think that being able to get into the writing is a moveable feast. I think it is a learned and practised skill: to be able to focus and find interest and excitement in the writing unfolding in front of you. Beautiful places are, of course, beautiful, but they don’t necessarily mean the writing will be more beautiful. I think of a Buddhist monk. They can meditate at a crossroads, in a mall, or while bungee jumping. I haven’t yet tried writing while leaping off a cliff, though sometimes it feels like that. With writing as with leaping off a cliff, I think the important thing is just to start. Did I mention three things on my desk? Not really.

Night. I was waiting on a bench. On the sidewalk. In the fog. Toronto: Eglinton, near
Dufferin. Outside a music store, its window filled with accordions, lurid red plastic
trumpets, and a Que Sera, Sera LP leaning against some maracas.
It was a fitting theme song for the students who passed through
the little backroom, taking lessons with Pasquale, at least in
terms of the uncertain melodies they produced with their ner-
vous, ill-prepared fingers. But kids—who knew what those fin-
gers were capable of now? The future’s not ours to see, after all.
It may possibly be filled with skilled accordionists.

Night and fog. The music store mute. I watched him walk
down the street, moving between clouds of lamplit luminosity
and obscurity. Wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat, like Magritte
or the men in his paintings. Like me.

Kidding. In a bowler hat, I’d look more like an aging droog.
He moved toward me with no expression on his face, but I saw
he was a form of regret made manifest. One of my many regrets.
Usually, they’re not so dapper.

My golem.

I hadn’t seen him for years. We’d lost touch and, in a way, I was
surprised I recognized him. Surprised he was still alive. I didn’t
think golems could live so long.

We had been close once. Twins. Lovers of a kind, even.
No. We never were. I know nothing of his viscera. I do not
know if golems can love. Or if they can make love. With another
golem. With anything. All that clay. Might gum up the works.
It’s said that, like Adam, we’re all born as golems. Guileless
mammal-forms. That misfortune shapes us into the complex
humans we are. But I’ve met breadboxes more capable of love
than many of the misfortune-moulded walking Freud couches
I’ve encountered.

“My dreidel,” I said to the Golem. “I made you out of clay.”
But how do you make a golem? I didn’t know, so I googled
it. It is said that you harvest a bathtub’s worth of clay exhumed
from a grave by a riverbed, enough to fill a body bag. You take
it home and form a colossal, three-dimensional gingerbread man
with your mortal hands. You are tender and stern. You do this at
night while weeping, praying, while drunk.

Then you write the name for God on the skin of a woman who
has died in childbirth, skin the span of a baby’s chest. Or you
ask for and are given a hymen on which you write Elohim. You
write Shem, a name of God, and a magic formula on a piece of
parchment, a slip of paper—even a Post-it note—and place in
it in the golem’s mouth. You write אמת, emet, the Hebrew word
for truth, on its forehead. When you wish to undo the life of the
creature, the creature who was only a certain kind of alive, you
erase the first letter, aleph, leaving מת, met, the Hebrew word for
dead. If you do not know Hebrew, you write something else. You
freewrite. You edit. You take the name of God from its mouth.
The creature returns to being earth only, can be used to make
pots, or coffee mugs, or terracotta tiles.

How had I made the golem?

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist, the author of 31 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. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Photo of Gary by George Qua-Enoo.