The Month in Which We Hype Our Heroes
Part 4: Lynda Barry
Tomorrow, Balderdash! will turn one year old. Like most toddlers, we’re deeply conscious of all that you’ve done for us and immensely grateful for all of the support we’ve gotten during our brief existence. We plan to continue sharing all kinds of weird things with you. But we’ve got some new ideas in the works as well! Thank you. And stay tuned!
We wrap up our month-long look at the artists and writers who inspire Balderdash! with a tribute to the brilliant, amazing, wonderful, zany Lynda Barry.
You might know Lynda Barry’s work. She’s a cartoonist, educator, and creator of the most generative books of prompts and creativity I know. I first encountered her work when I was about 13. She had a story in an old copy of RAW (Vol. 2, No. 2) that I had snuck into my bag at one of those big used book sales at our local library. That little book was a turning point in a lot of my thinking about art and creativity and comics (this was the first time I saw a snippet of Spiegelman’s Maus), but Lynda Barry’s story was the first in the collection. And thus, her work was my first introduction to weird, personal, beautifully-strangely drawn, truthful comics.
Lynda Barry entered my life in an even bigger way in college where I read What It Is in an undergraduate fiction workshop. I quickly realized that the book was going to be even more useful to me in thinking about poetry. While many of the nudges in the book call for narrative responses, there is also a significant call to think lyrically.
Barry’s questions, prompts, and encouragements throughout the book not only help guide creative activity but also offer ideas about what a creative life might look like. It was while reading What It Is that I started to give serious thought to what a messy, chaotic, dreamy, but rigorous routine might look like as I wrote and drew in my sketchbook.
Barry’s books followed me to graduate school and continued to help me creatively. But I was also teaching composition, creative writing, and literature classes. And it was then that Barry transformed from a creative mentor into a fellow pedagogue who had amazing ideas about how to engage with students and push them to experiment with new ways of seeing and making things. Making Comics and Syllabus: Notes From An Accidental Professor are brilliant guides to shaping classroom communities around creative, critical thinking. I used pieces and parts of her books somewhere in every class I taught.
Right now, I’m trying to finish the construction of my own book of creative writing prompts (with doodles, of course). And Lynda Barry has hovered around the entire process. In a moment where things like AI-generated “art” represent a slide into something horrific—an insult to our cosmic duty to experience the universe and create things with our own imaginations and individual skills in response to that experience—prompts toward more tactile experiments in creativity feel particularly important. Barry’s work serves as a beautiful reminder that the process IS part of the art, that the process IS the point of creating.
Grab some paper. Find something to write and draw with. Here are a few more Lynda Barry invitations. Get going.
