Lynda Barry

 

After many years, we have finally addressed a deficiency in our book selection. It is one of many, of course, but this one seems especially egregious because Lynda Barry is a creative hero of mine.

 

We now have a bunch of her books available in the shop, and I recommend them highly to anyone who is hoping to be more creative, who likes drawing, who doesn’t think they can draw, who wants to write more, who enjoys using their stationery, who has stacks of unused notebooks on their shelves, who is looking for inspiration, who doesn’t have time for making things, who is looking for something to do.

 

At a journaling workshop, once, someone once shared that they received a handwritten postcard back from Lynda Barry and we all sighed and gasped appropriately. My recollection is a bit fuzzy (the fact of it alone so shocking), so I hope my details, vague as they are, are correct.

 

 

When we first got them in last week, I dug my own copies out and spent an hour in the bath with them. I remember testing out some of these exercises on some of my own students, using them in my own journaling, admiring the neatness of her handwriting, the life, the brightness of her colours on that distinctive yellow paper.

 

After I was done with my bath, I heaved the whole stack into Caleb’s room and told him to start with What It Is, which is part memoir, part instruction manual, and also mainly just a philosophy of life and creativity, but you could start anywhere, basically on any page, and find something to chew on, something to bring home into your own journals and notebooks.

 

She talks about discipline, about coming to the page over and over again and trusting that things will come from your pen on the paper if you just get it moving consistently, about noticing, paying attention. She has practical doodling strategies, daily writing exercises, anecdotes and life stories, and she asks you to slow down and open your minds. As we all know, we who are drawn to pens and bottles of ink, there is something different about creativity when we use our fingers, when we cut and paste with scissors and glue instead of Ctrl+C, when we can heft a notebook around in our hands. In this age when it seems like our days are jam-packed, things are glitching brighter and louder to keep our focus and attention as our eyes flicker from screen to screen, these lessons come as a relief.

 

In any case, there’s no way to sum up Lynda Barry, so I’ll leave you with a few samples of some of the pages in these books, and also my best wishes for your own creative endeavours as we all try to heave ourselves through the day, with or without Lynda Barry as our life’s guru.