Cartoonist, teacher - and Granfalloon keynote speaker - Lynda Barry (Courtesy of Lynda Barry)
The keynote speaker for this year's Vonnegut-inspired Granfalloon festival and a guest of the Indiana Writers Conference is a visual artist, novelist, and educator whose creative excellence has been recognized by the eminent MacArthur Fellowship. Lynda Barry is the author of the widely syndicated comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, as well as 21 books, including two illustrated novels, Cruddy and The Good Times are Killing Me, which she adapted into a long-running off Broadway play, and several books about accessing one’s creativity. Now Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Lynda Barry spoke with WFIU’s Yaël Ksander in anticipation of Lynda’s June visit. An excerpt of their conversation follows:
Before cell phones and the internet, alternative weekly newspapers were a primary source of information and entertainment in cities across the country. They were where you could reliably find a pair of quirky, subversive cartoons a universe apart from Garfield: Life in Hell and Ernie Pook’s Comeek. The strips had shared origins at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where Lynda Barry met Matt Groening.
"He became the editor of our school paper,” Barry explained, “and he put out this announcement that he would print any comic anybody submitted, and I thought, ‘Really?’ So, I kept trying to come up with the worst comics, the worst drawn, the stupidest stuff, and he’d print ‘em. And it got to the point where we just became really good friends. We had kind of the same sense of humor. And then, when the alternative papers happened, I’d get in a paper and then I’d tell them about Matt, or Matt would get in a paper and tell them about me. It's his comic Life in Hell that led right to “The Simpsons.”
Barry's strip ran in 70 weeklies for almost three decades. An achingly vulnerable account of teenage girlhood, the strip – like everything she draws--communicated in a unique visual vernacular. Take for instance, the illustrations to her novel Cruddy, which are actually finger paintings. Not to mention, she wrote the entire novel with a paintbrush.
Eschewing convention has had its hazards. One publisher dropped her because he considered the work “remedial.”
“People insult me quite a lot,” Barry recounts. “Most people assume that if you can draw in a draftsmanlike way, why would you draw any other way? But think about comics--you wouldn’t want to see Charlie Brown in a hyperrealist pose. It would be a horror show! The cartoonist’s line is a mutual line. There’s the cartoonist making it and then there’s the person looking at it. Charlie Brown is a very simple character that leaves a lot of room for the person who’s looking at it.”
Deciphering visual communication and empowering others to find their own voice is at the heart of Barry’s enterprise these days, in her work with students at the University of Wisconsin.
“I’m curious about why people are scared of drawing,” she says, “and what happens when I can set the situation where they see drawing as something other than ‘I made a good picture or I didn’t,’ but rather, a way of thinking, a way of getting an idea, that the act of drawing itself can give you an idea.”
Barry’s passion for teaching hearkens back to her difficult childhood within an extended Filipino immigrant family. Her father, “a white guy from Wisconsin” as she describes him, left the family early in her childhood. “There were all kinds of problems,” she recalls “-- alcoholism, poverty. The thing that saved my life was public school. The teachers in public school showed me that there was this other world, and there was a library, and there was drawing. There were six hours of the day that no one was going to beat me up. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a teacher more than anything, but I had no chance. I didn’t go to a traditional college. I couldn’t spell, there was just no way I could be a teacher.”
Funny how things turn out. Lynda and her college buddy often reflect on that.
“Matt and I always joke that when we look at each other’s lives we make that Edvard Munch The Scream face,” she says. “You know I think my career confused him quite a bit. I remember one time he said, ‘You know, I really respect you, because you never make a decision that advances your career.’ And I said, ‘This is my career!’”
Lynda Barry offers the Granfalloon keynote Thursday June 5 at 7 pm at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater in Bloomington. More at granfalloon.indiana.edu.