Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity

NOVEMBER 14, 2023
200 pages | ISBN 978-1-989496-79-4

Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. 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.

Articles

What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall 2023 (Hamilton Review of Books, 05/09/2023)
It's great to see Gary's book on this list from the Hamilton Review of Books.

Our books editor on the 30 (plus!) new reads we can’t wait to cosy up with this fall (Toronto Star, 02/09/2023)
Gary's book makes another great list.

46 works of Canadian nonfiction to read in fall 2023 (CBC Books, 24/08/2023)
It's wonderful to see Gary's essay collection Imagining Imagining on this list.

About the Author

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-six 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.

Barwin has been writer-in-residence at University of Toronto (Scarborough), Laurier, Western University, McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, Sheridan College and Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, to at-risk youth in Hamilton through the ArtForms program and currently mentors through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. His writing has been published in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally and his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and at garybarwin.com.

Other Titles by This Author

For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems (2019)

No TV for Woodpeckers (2017)