Photo: A comic by Lynda Barry featured in The Cooper Point Journal in the 1970s, Marta Tahja-Syrett
Cartoonist, teacher, and Evergreen alumna Lynda Barry has been awarded a $625,000 grant by the MacArthur Fellows Program. According to the MacArthur Foundation, her award is for “inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication.”
“The MacArthur [is] the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Barry in a video on the Foundation’s website, “in terms of being able to facilitate chasing this idea down of what images are, why they exist, and what happens when people finally have access to having them be part of their life again.”
Barry, who graduated from The Evergreen State College (TESC) in 1980, has had a long and remarkable career in cartooning and writing. She has published over 20 books and her illustrated novel The Good Times Are Killing Me was adapted into a successful Off-Broadway musical. She is currently an associate professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin.
“My comics are about childhood and they’re about the kinds of early experiences people have that make them who they are,” Barry stated in a video profile on the MacArthur Foundation’s website. According to an interview she did with David Letterman in the 1980s, Barry’s early childhood experience was a unique one. Born in Wisconsin in 1956, her family moved to Washington when she was young. She is a quarter Filipino and grew up in a diverse neighborhood, which inspired some of the work she went on to create.
When Barry was attending TESC she befriended Matt Groening, the famed creator of The Simpsons, while he was the editor-in-chief of the Cooper Point Journal (CPJ).
“He made this announcement saying that he would print anything that anyone submitted,” she said in “Lynda Barry: Evergreen Cuts Are ‘Cultural Genocide,’” an article published by OLYARTS on June 14, 2018. “I read that and I thought, ‘Really?’ And I tried to come up with stuff that he would not print.” He printed it anyway, and their friendship was born. The two have continually inspired each other throughout their careers, and in 2016 they went on a lecture tour together.
“From the beginning, there was this very friendly, antagonistic relationship that continues constantly,” Barry said in an interview with the Dallas Observer in 2016. “That’s all we do, is give each other shit. It’s our favorite thing in the world.”
While studying at TESC, Barry took classes with Marilyn Frasca, who was a painting and art professor. Frasca was a strong influence in her life. Barry wrote about her admiration for Frasca in her 2008 graphic novel What It Is, describing the influence Frasca’s teaching methods still have on her today.
After graduating, Barry began writing a strip comic called Ernie Pook’s Comeek which was printed in alternative newspapers like the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader, and the L.A. Reader for over two decades. Ernie Pook’s Comeek ran until 2008.
As she was writing and publishing her strip comic, she also wrote and published several illustrated novels, most notably The Good Times Are Killing Me (1988), Cruddy (1999), What It Is (2008), and Syllabus (2014).
As stated in an article by Heidi McDonald for Publisher’s Weekly, themes of Barry’s work include childhood and growing up. She has said that all of her work is related to memory, and while not all of it is autobiographical, a lot of it is heavily influenced by her own life experiences. Throughout her career, she has been praised for her creativity and originality.
In addition to writing and cartooning, Barry has also been a teacher for many years. “I love teaching,” she said in the video on the MacArthur Foundation’s website. “What I’m doing isn’t even teaching, it’s almost like showing people that they already know how to do this stuff. The thing I love the most is to watch them blow their minds with their own minds.”
She is currently teaching what she calls a Drawbridge program, in which she pairs up graduate students with four-year-old children to work together on a visual project.
“Drawbridge is a program I started at the university that’s based on the joy that four-year-olds have about being alive in the world and the misery that graduate students have about being in university,” she said. “And I had this idea if I could bring those two together that something big might happen. That my university students might feel less miserable and my four-year-olds might feel very excited about helping someone get their Ph.D.”
Barry has also maintained a close relationship with TESC and has taught workshops to students and faculty. Around 10 years ago she taught a workshop based on her book What It Is, which Media Arts Professor Julia Zay attended.
“My memory is that it was like a four-hour thing,” she told me when I interviewed her about the experience. “She introduced her whole technique and then led us through maybe four of [her exercises].”
Barry’s writing exercises often include listing something from your past, such as other people’s mothers, and then honing in and getting more specific with a memory that sticks out to you and getting you to capture all of the sensory details of that memory.
“It’s really pleasurable when someone gives you a set of constraints or rules and then you find you can just go wherever you need to go within those parameters, so I really enjoyed that,” Zay told me. “Then also as an experience about connecting to memories…it was really powerful because I started to go places that I hadn’t thought about in years. Oh, my best friend’s mother, what was her station wagon like? What did we do when carpooling? There were so many details that bloomed out of those moments that she asked us to go to. And it was really clear that it was going to be a powerful teaching tool.”
Zay has used this method of writing exercises since then, and she is currently using it in MediaWorks. “I just love that we have all these amazing alumni who have gone here and I totally have this sense of school spirit,” she said. “There’s just a part of it that’s like, that’s our Lynda! I just think so that students know, I’m actually a part of this really interesting and growing body of people in the world, I’m a part of this club, and we are unusual and fantastic people.”
Barry has continually discussed her experience with TESC throughout her career. In an interview with OLYARTS, she spoke out against the budget cuts that have been taking place over the last few years. “This is happening to small liberal arts colleges all over the country and it should be a national story… It really strikes me as a form of cultural genocide.”
Barry’s latest book, Making Comics, was just released on Nov. 5. It is an instructional illustrated novel filled with drawing exercises, similar to her previous publication Syllabus. “Making Comics is all about everything that I’ve learned from teaching for the last eight years,” she said in the video on the MacArthur Foundation’s website. “They’re exercises that are fast, they’re cheap, ‘cause you only need a piece of paper and a pen.”
Barry plans to go on sabbatical soon to work on her next graphic novel. She can be found on Instagram under the username @thenearsightedmonkey.
