“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”
Something about red-headed girls in glasses.
Lynda Barry has always seemed to be a kindred spirit.
Kindred as a little weird sister who brings you joy and I only wish I had her energetic sparkle.
Do have so many of her books, because every page is a magic friend who prods and provokes.
You can learn a lot about creativity and fun and neurotic females and girl parts and childhood and fear and discovery from Lynda Barry.
Sometimes in a single comic strip.
So happy to see her back in the spotlight.
A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous
By David Marchese for The New York Times. September 2, 2022
For nearly 30 years, the cartoonist Lynda Barry published her adored comic strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which told the whimsical, hardscrabble story of the young sisters Marlys and Maybonne, in alternative papers across the country. (An anthology, “It’s So Magic,” was published earlier this month.) She has since written acclaimed plays and novels and even a beloved book on making comics. (That would be the straightforwardly titled “Making Comics,” from 2019.) For the last two decades, she has often led drawing, writing and creativity workshops in prisons, at schools, online — wherever will have her.
And since 2012, Barry, a 66-year-old who in 2019 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius grant — has been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has held various positions and now does cross-disciplinary teaching on creativity. So when it comes to self-expression, to making art, it’s fair to say that she’s an expert.
But in many ways, not nearly as much of an expert as your average little kid, which is something Barry has been thinking about a lot lately. “Adults think that kids playing is some nothing thing,” she says. “But play is a different state of mind, and it can help us do so many things if we just allow ourselves to get back to it.”
For a lot of people, being creative and making things can be a helpful way to deal with uncertainty, and college students today have to deal with so much uncertainty. Not just about where their lives might go after they finish school but also about things like the future of our politics and our planet. How do you see your students1 responding?
I know what you’re talking about. These kids are also feeling that every choice should have some utility, and everybody’s freaked out about how they’re going to make a living. Plus, they have $60,000 in debt. How does someone get out from under that? But here’s the big difference I’ve seen over the last few years in the people I work with: They don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper.2 You keep the scissors there and you move the paper like this, and they’re like, “What?!” There’s so much dexterity that they, by and large, do not have.
Barry demonstrated her technique, which is to hold the scissors in place and move the paper in a circular motion. For whatever it’s worth, it was new to me, too.
Is that because of phones?
Yeah, and kids start keyboarding in kindergarten. Handwriting, that thing that we think is no big deal, there’s so much dexterity in it. Not just in the hand you’re writing with, but the nondominant hand is always in action, moving the paper, paying attention. I mean, there’s a reason people gesture while they talk. If somebody is trying to explain something complicated, and they have to sit on their hands, it’s much harder for them to explain it.
But is something important being lost if students lack a certain kind of manual dexterity, or is that just a change in how they move through the world? Maybe it’s not bad, just different.
No! It’s really sad. The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.
I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc go by! But he never looked up!
Then later I told him, and he’s like, “That didn’t happen!” It totally did happen! So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price. You miss the orc.
I know that you’ve done work on pairing Ph.D. students with kindergartners so that the children can help the graduate students with problem-solving. What does that look like in practice?
They’re Ph.D. students from almost any discipline and 4-year-olds or 3-year-olds. It started because I noticed that whenever I was in some big creative jam, it was an interaction with a kid that got me out of it. They can really help you when you get stuck. When I started teaching at the university, I couldn’t understand why all the grad students were so miserable. I could pick out the grad students just by the way they walked in the room, you know? These are people that are at the top of their game. They’ve already shown that they want to work. They’re interested in something. Why is it acceptable that they’re all miserable? I was trying to figure out what the misery was.
Then I thought, it is this laser focus on getting one particular thing done. This feeling that unless you’re working on it at all times, things are going to be bad. That kind of focus doesn’t set the conditions for insight or discovery. It’s like somebody yelling: “Relax! Relax!” It’s never going to work. But the kids could shift the students’ perspectives in really helpful ways. I had my students copy what the kids were doing, or I got the kids to draw the answer to questions like, “What are microbes?” And my students had to be on the floor with them working together. They had to try to get into their mind-set. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. After you spend about 90 minutes with them, you just find that something has loosened up. You get away from that laser-focused, worrisome way of being.
I’ll bet there’s a not insignificant number of people in the world — in my head, I picture some no-nonsense businessman — who thinks that playing around on the floor is all well and good for kids, but it’s not really something for adults to be doing. Is there any way to persuade those people of the value of trying to access that childlike mind-set?
Why try?
Because those people run the world.
I know! The reason they run the world is because of the way they were built. But it’s not going to help that person. If you don’t have a need to do it, you don’t get anywhere. Those guys, they don’t have a need. I mean, I think they need it. You think they need it. They don’t think they need it. So there’s not a lot we can do, and that’s the hardest thing to accept.
When I first started teaching, maybe I’d have 32 students in two classes. There would always be three or four who were dragging their tailpipes. I spent so much time on those students. I don’t anymore. I don’t crawl toward them with a glass of water like, Please, take this! It took me a long time to say I’m not going to be able to change somebody who doesn’t want to try or doesn’t need this. I’ve had fantasies of kidnapping one of these people. But what if I heard them saying that about me? That’d be the worst. “I want to kidnap that creativity chick and show her what being a Lutheran is all about.”
You used the phrase “the way they were built.” When it comes to playfulness, can a person change how he or she is built?
Whatever man we’re imagining, if you hand them their 8-month-old grandson, that man will dance, sing, tell stories. We still all can communicate that way. But there’s such profound amnesia about what kids are actually doing. There’s total amnesia of the experience of deep play. When you’re an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid’s doing that and there’s nothing else to it. But from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them. It’s interactive. There’s amnesia about the deepness of that interchange and amnesia about how when you’re making a story or making a painting it’s that same sort of interchange, and having that is what you’re born to do.
Your own childhood was pretty rough, and art helped you get through it. Is there a connection between that and your ongoing interest in kids and their creativity?
People often ask me why my protagonists are so often children or teenagers.3 I can make a top-of-the-mind answer for that, which is that children or teenagers are protagonists who can’t drive away by themselves out of a situation. It’s just easier to write about.
In addition to the decades’ worth of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” strips, Barry’s work featuring child or teenaged protagonists includes the great novels “Cruddy” and “The Good Times Are Killing Me.” She has called her book “One! Hundred! Demons!,” which largely focuses on adolescent travails, a work of “autobiofictionalography.”
So childhood is a central subject for you because of the narrative possibilities rather than any working out of your own issues?
Well, they can’t be pulled apart necessarily. I’m not trying to work on but the tough stuff of my life the tough stuff of my life,4 gets worked on. Depression is a big problem for me. I’ve always struggled with it, and the things that helped me from the time I was little were reading, drawing, stories, movies, songs. I remember seeing coal plants driving in the country late at night and flames coming out. It looks like a castle when you’re a kid! It’s just an alive way of being in the world, and learning how to access that — I did have a rough childhood. But you don’t need to. I have students who will tell me: “My life’s been good. My parents are so nice. I don’t have anything to write about.” Yes, you do.
Barry grew up mostly in Seattle in a chaotic household where lack of money was a real and ongoing concern. Her father abandoned the family when she was 12, and she describes her mother as being both physically and mentally abusive.
You never wanted children of your own?
No, I never did.
Why not?
I wondered that too! I love kids, and I am the ultimate godmother, but I never had fantasies about it. Some people need it. I never did. I feel like my life, that curve from when you’re a little kid and then you grow up — the pandemic introduced something that I had always fantasized about from the time I was little, which was being marooned. I would mourn the fact that I was never going to experience that. Then the pandemic happened, and as awful as it was, I got to do that. I got to make a pretend train compartment on my couch, and I decided I was going to read all of Dickens on it.
I rode that train by myself for months.5
It was fantastic! I feel like something happened to me then. I felt — not like a kid again, but I surely wasn’t in my 60s. I didn’t feel young. I felt out of time. I still feel that way.
Barry lives in rural Wisconsin with her husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie-restoration expert.
I’m not quite following. Are you saying you didn’t want to have kids because you wanted to protect your solitude and your imaginative time?
My answer was garbled and not answering your question at all! Maybe I was trying to say that I am still that kid. Or maybe I didn’t want to turn into a mom. That makes more sense. My mom was incredibly problematic. The terror that I would become her and do to my kids what she did to us? Or the terror that I might give birth to her. Can you imagine? Coming out: “Recognize me?” Ahhhh! It’s like a bad science-fiction movie.
Earlier you said depression was a big problem for you. Does finding ways to be creative still help you deal with it?
Absolutely, and that’s been true from the beginning of my life. We’re born into a world that’s full of stories and characters that are right there for us. God, “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” saved my ass. It’s the impulse to seek those things and then, because you’re seeking them when you’re a kid, the impulse to make them. Yeah, I’ve always had trouble with depression. Part of it is a difficult childhood, part of it is probably my nature. I’ve found that engaging in this kind of work — anything that adults call art and that kids might call a toy; that contains something alive — seems to make me feel that life is worth living.
It’s a thing I always say to my students: Art is a public-health concern because it keeps you from killing yourself and others. [Laughs.] It’s not going to work for everyone. I’ve thought about that person we imagined who might look down on adults playing, and the truth is the person I thought of was Trump and how much he loves the song “Memory” from “Cats.” Apparently, when he was losing his mind, one of his staff would put it on.6 That blows my mind. That guy, who I think is outside the human sphere a little bit — still, “Cats” can get to him.
The former Trump aide Stephanie Grisham, in her book “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” wrote that an official was tasked with playing President Trump’s favorite show tunes, including “Memory,” to calm him down when he lost his temper.
But I don’t think art has any saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.
“When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.” – Lynda Barry.
Do the work. Keep doing it. Nothing might follow. Keep doing it.
Let’s be artists, man.
How the Hell Did Lynda Barry Get Forgotten?
BY LIBBY COPELAND for Slate.com. OCT 28, 2011
Whatever happened to Lynda Barry? The ugly, eccentric, and misunderstood figures in her cartoons formed the backdrop to my adolescence; they made it okay to be all of the above. Her sensibility was dark – much darker, I think, than the work of her contemporary Matt Groening, who was writing Life in Hell while she was writing Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Barry’s settings were domestic and her plots filled with mundane details, but those qualities only made her cartoons more relatable. She wrote about sadness, about regret, about missed chances, about being less of a good human being than you wanted to be. She wrote about big issues in little ways. There was little redemption, little nobility in Barry’s drawn world.
The New York Times Magazine has a story about what happened to Lynda Barry, which is only a little weird because the newspaper carried a rather similar story in 2008. But anyway, it sounds like times are tough for her. The money for her alt-weekly strip dried up, and she stopped drawing it in 2008, after nearly 30 years. She’s written some books, and she sells her art on eBay. (By contrast, her buddy Groening, of course, became the hugely successful creator of The Simpsons.) Barry also teaches an unorthodox class on creativity and writing at Miami Dade College, pushing her students to let go of narrative conventions; to write and think simply and with attention to detail, like children. It sounds like pre-school for adults. It sounds wonderful.
At one point in Dan Kois’ profile, Barry tells her class about why she loves creative work so much. “I mean, I don’t have health insurance,” she says, “and dental work is really an issue, but the feeling that life is worth living? Being in this class gives me that in spades.”
When you’re a child you just assume that people are rewarded for their talents; that those who contribute beautiful, poignant things to the world are valued in such a way that allows them to, say, get their teeth fixed. But man, if the ruthlessness of becoming an adult doesn’t knock that naivete straight out of you.
Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself
By Dan Kois for The New York Times. October 27, 2011
Dorie Cox left her little house by the Fort Lauderdale airport at 7:15 a.m. on a Wednesday morning this past summer to take a three-train journey to Miami. The Tri-Rail zipped along beside I-95 into the city; the Metrorail took her past the hospital where her best friend died; the elevated Metromover looped, conductorless, around downtown and dropped her off at Miami Dade College.
Around the same time, Vanessa Moss caught the No. 95 express bus from Golden Glades. Each trip to and from the four-day creative-writing workshop she signed up for would cost $2.35. So the previous day, she went to the credit union and asked the teller for eight allotments of $2.35.
Moss, a divorced postal clerk with a grown daughter, had never heard of Lynda Barry until the local NPR station mentioned her seminar “Writing the Unthinkable.” She’d always thought she could be a writer — she has ideas about food and faith and romance — so she wanted to figure out, through Barry’s course, whether it was something she could even consider.
Cox works at a monthly trade journal about megayachts. She has been reading Barry’s cartoons since the early 1980s, often clipping and trading with her best friend from high school, Sandie Brown. Last year, Brown died of dengue fever, and Cox got a small tattoo on her left rib: a telephone, copied from Barry’s comics, in remembrance of the hours the friends spent talking to each other. Now she hoped to write about that friendship.
In a drab fourth-floor classroom at Miami Dade, the two women, each in her late 40s, joined the 33 other students assembled — mostly women, mostly middle-aged and mostly creatively frustrated. At the front of the class, Barry wore an Emily Dickinson T-shirt, a red bandanna knotted atop her head. She was preparing to sing. “Singin’ ’s the scariest thing you can do in front of people,” she told her new students. “I figure I’m already nervous” — indeed, her deep voice shook a bit — “so what the hell.”
“I hope you’re nervous, too,” she added. When someone nodded, Barry broke into a grin. “Good!” she exclaimed. “I want you to be terrified.”
She closed her eyes and sang to the tune of “Coal Miner’s Daughter”: “I was born a meat cutter’s daughter/My mom was from the Philippines; she was a janitor/I ate TV dinners at night/I grew up by the TV light/While Dad drank vodka in the basement and Mom hollered.”
Barry opened her eyes and smiled. “I’m gonna work you like mules on the Erie Canal,” she said.
Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”
Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”
In most writing workshops, very little actual writing happens in class. Instead, students write at home and submit work for the class to critique. Sometimes the teacher takes an active role in leading the discussion; sometimes she offers a few trenchant thoughts on the writer’s craft.
Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft. She’s more interested in where ideas come from — and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity.
“Kids don’t plan to play,” she told her class in the first day. “They don’t go: ‘Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It’s gonna be a three-act.’ ” Narrative, Barry believes, is so hard-wired into human beings that creativity can come as naturally to adults as it does to children. They need only to access the deep part of the brain that controls that storytelling instinct. Barry calls that state of mind “the image world” and feels it’s as central to a person’s well-being as the immune system.
To explain, she told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.
So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left arm. “And Ramachandran said, ‘Open your hands.’ And the patient saw this” — Barry opened two clenched fists in unison. “That’s what I think images do.
“I think that in the course of human life,” she continued softly, “we have events that cause” — she clenched her fist and held it up, inspecting it from all angles. “Losing your parents might cause it. Or a war. Or things going bad in a family.”
The only way to open that fist, she said, is to see your own trouble reflected in an image, as the patient saw his hand reflected in a mirror. It might be a story you write, or a book you read, or a song that means the world to you. “And then?” She opened her hand and waved.
In Barry’s class, every writing exercise is a repeated ritual. At the beginning of each one, for example, students slowly draw a spiral on a sheet of paper. While everyone did that, Barry recited a poem. It’s the same poem every time, by Rumi, and Barry recited it quickly, her head down, her fingers tented before her. “You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,” she intoned, “yet you’re wind.”
“Think back to early days,” she went on. “Write on a clean sheet of paper the first 10 images that come to mind when I say, ‘Money.’ ”
After two minutes of silence, she continued. “Choose an image that has some kind of trouble attached to it,” she said. “Or if you’re feeling wild, just choose No. 2.” Then she asked a series of questions meant to spur recollection of detail: “Is it day or night in this image?” “What’s behind you?” “What’s beyond what’s behind you?”
“Now you’re going to describe this image as if it’s happening right now. If you get stuck, don’t go like this” — she made Rodin’s Thinker pose — “or look over what you wrote. Just go back to your spiral. Keep your pen moving. I’ll be back in eight minutes.”
When Barry asked for volunteers to read, Dorie Cox raised her hand. Barry ran over, crouched on the floor, bowed her head and listened while Cox read a funny remembrance of the cash-filled birthday cards her grandmother used to send. When Cox finished, Barry said: “Good! Good! Good!” and looked for another reader. She didn’t comment on Cox’s work. No one may comment on Cox’s work.
Over the four days in Miami, every student would write 16 pieces and read aloud at least once. In one class, a student wept through a story about being told she couldn’t play with the black children in her neighborhood. “Good! Good, good, good,” Barry exclaimed. “That’s O.K, that’s normal. Another reader?”
A former stockbroker read a harrowing story about standing underneath the World Trade Center as the bodies started to fall. “Good, good, good,” Barry said, then touched another student who raised her hand earlier. “Five, four” —
“After that story?” the student squeaked.
“Do it bravely!” Barry barked. “Three, two, one.” The woman read, bravely.
Students’ work is meant to stand on its own, without criticism, revision or, in fact, revisitation. Barry insists that students not reread their writing until the entire course has concluded. “While you’re writing, you’re having this experience,” Barry explained. “But when you read it, all you can think about is, Is my baby defective?” Sometimes, she said, babies just need time to open their eyes.
At the end of Day 2, a buoyant Barry told the class: “I can’t wait for tomorrow. I like you guys so much, and not just as a friend.”
I ate lunch that day with Vanessa Moss, the postal clerk who heard about the workshop on NPR. “There’s so much creativity here!” she marveled. “It’s so good to meet people. Sometimes I think I’m the craziest person on the planet. My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie. I don’t want to be famous famous. I just want to do that.”
Was this the first writing class she’d ever taken? “Oh, yes,” she replied. “It’s wonderful so far. Lynda Barry is the teacher, but I’m a teacher, you’re a teacher — we all are. The student is always us also.”
Barry’s parents divorced when she was 12, the same year she dropped acid for the first time and changed the I in her first name to a Y. By the time she was 16, though, she’d quit drugs and taken a seven-night-a-week job as a janitor at a Seattle hospital. Her parents didn’t attend her high-school graduation. Her mother appears frequently in her cartoons and stories, but never in the present tense.
I asked her if she’s still in touch with her parents. Usually when you ask Barry a question, she responds with wide-eyed enthusiasm, cartoonish but evidently sincere, summoning a story from the vaults. This time she closed her eyes, tilted her head back a long while and finally said, “I think I don’t want to talk about that.”
So we talked about her cartooning career, which began in 1977, when she slipped comic strips under the door of a friend in hopes he might run them in the Evergreen State College newspaper. Over the next decade, that friend, Matt Groening, and Barry became stars of the alternative-comics world, with his strip, “Life in Hell,” and hers, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” appearing in weeklies across the country.
Barry drew cartoons for Esquire and published a series of books. She appeared half a dozen times on “Late Night With David Letterman,” telling wry stories about her love life. She married a carpenter in 1986 and divorced a year later; she told Letterman she knew the marriage was doomed on her honeymoon, when her new husband took one look at the Grand Canyon and said, “I thought it would be bigger.” Then he turned to her. “It’s your fault for hypin’ it up.”
Her comics changed. Once about relationships, now they focused on childhood — a fictionalized version of her own, starring pigtailed Marlys, her sister, Maybonne, and a block full of characters in extremis. She wrote two well-reviewed novels featuring young people in trouble.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Barry foundered creatively. She and her second husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie-restoration expert, moved from Evanston, Ill., to a 15-acre farm in rural Wisconsin. Kawula, an affable bear of a man — “Everybody else loves Han Solo,” she told me, “but I always wanted Chewbacca” — built Barry a free-standing, sun-filled studio overstuffed with scrap paper, art supplies and knickknacks given to her by students. (In Miami, a puppeteer named Hannah made a little Marlys marionette, complete with polka-dot underpants.)
By 2008, the consolidation of the alt-weekly world meant that “Ernie Pook’s” was appearing in only four papers, and Barry was earning just $155 a week drawing it. Stuck in a draining battle with wind developers over plans to build turbines in her town — “they’re the S.U.V. of renewable energy,” she said — she decided to shutter the strip months shy of its 30th anniversary.
Now she sells original art on eBay and has been buoyed by the modest success of “What It Is,” her 2008 book about writing, and its follow-up in 2010, “Picture This,” about art. But it’s the classes, which Barry began teaching to share the techniques she learned from a drawing professor at Evergreen, that spark her enthusiasm. She conducts around 15 workshops a year, from two-hour minisessions with college students to long multiday seminars at writers’ conferences like this one.
On the afternoon after the third class, we sat in a hotel bar drinking Tsingtaos. “Now I can take this off,” Barry said, untying her bandanna and dropping it in her bag. That day started out rough. “For an hour, it was hellish,” Barry said. The workshop can seem haphazard but is actually carefully planned. “I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I’m not doing that at all. I have stories that I know will make ’em laugh and forget. I have others that are more about: think about this. And then the ones that are really important to me, like the story about ‘The Family Circus.’ ”
She told that story at the end of the session. “I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble,” she said. “As much trouble as you could imagine. In the daily paper, there were all these comic strips, and there was one that was a circle. It seemed like things were pretty good on the other side of the circle. No one’s getting hit. No one’s yelling.”
Once, at a comics convention, she shook hands with Bil Keane’s son, Jeff — Jeffy — who now inks the strip. Barry instantly burst into tears. She told the class why: “Because when he put his hand out and I touched it, I realized I had stepped through the circle. I was on the other side of the circle, the place where I wanted to be. And how I got there was I drew a picture.” She smiled and held her arms out. “The reason I’m standing here in Florida in 2011 is because I drew a picture and wrote some words. The reason you all are here is because you’re interested in doing the same thing. When I think about all the things that this image world has brought me. . . . I mean, I don’t have health insurance, and dental work is really an issue, but the feeling that life is worth living? Being in this class gives me that in spades.”
On the last day of class, a part-time social-sciences professor named Margaret Stott sat next to me. “God, you should write a story about the people at my table at lunch,” she said. “WRITERS. With a capital W.” She acted out their conversation. “ ‘What’s your workshop like?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s accessing your creativity,’ and they looked at me like, Is this a writing workshop, or not?”
Barry marched in singing a song about underpants. (It was from “South Park.”) She danced the hula with Hannah’s marionette. Then she said there would be no break today, there’s no time, there’s too much writing to do.
Cox wrote about sitting with her friend Sandie in the high-school cafeteria, how they used to watch out for each other — each warning the other if her hair was askew or if her minipad was showing. She’d told Barry about Sandie and even showed her the tattoo (Barry, too, had dengue fever, in fact almost died from it in 1994), and when she finished reading aloud, Barry patted her shoulder gently. “Good, good, good.”
Vanessa Moss read a story, rich with detail, about gossiping co-workers sorting the mail. “That’s perfect!” Barry shouted. “Perfect! I mean good, good! I had to remember I can only say good. Good good good good good.”
At the end of class, Barry put her hands on her hips. “Well, you little bad asses. How about that?”
Moss told me that Barry’s encouragement had convinced her she could write. At first, she “felt like a kid at kindergarten level, in a room full of high-schoolers.” But little by little, she gained confidence. Now she wants to write a book. “I don’t know whether it would be fiction or nonfiction, but that’s my goal. I feel now that I could do it. That it’s possible.”
The day after the workshop, Dorie Cox set her kitchen timer for eight minutes and wrote about the image of being in Barry’s class. “I would like to have class in Lynda Barry’s messy kitchen in the country,” she wrote. “I will have to control my own time, space and mind for my health, wealth, productivity. For my personal survival.”
“Somebody said to me one time, ‘This class is like therapy,’ ” Barry said. She shook her head. “No. Therapy is like this. And this is very old.” The seminar finished, I’d driven us to dinner at a Cuban restaurant she’d visited once before, during the Miami Book Fair. “I saw Jonathan Franzen at that fair. I hate Jonathan Franzen so much. I hate that guy.” To her, turning down Oprah Winfrey revealed a disdain for viewers who look to Winfrey for advice. “When I saw him, I felt sick.” But then, she said, she realized there’s no difference between what she viewed as Franzen’s dismissal of lowbrow readers and her dismissal of highbrow Franzen. “It’s just I’m doing it from below, and he’s doing it from above.”
Do Writers, with a capital W, look down on her students? “Absolutely. I have a real chip on my shoulder about that — the idea that some things aren’t art. It’s from growing up poor. You run into that your whole life — people of my background and education can’t participate.
“Why does it matter?” she asked. “It’s like me saying, ‘I’m beautiful.’ Compared to other women, I’m not. But who does it hurt for me to say so?”
