What It Is

Lynda Barry’s bestselling treatise on creativity, What It Is, is now available in paperback

How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? What is an image? What is the past? For decades, these questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry’s compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Barry’s What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive mind who wishes to write or to remember.

In this exploratory workbook, confessional, and memoir each page is a full-color collage that is a gentle guide to the creative process packed full ofswirling collaged images with pen and ink drawings on Barry’s signature legal paper. Barry’s award winning book is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: ＂The ordinary is extraordinary.＂

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin Madison. In 2019, she received the ＂Genius grant＂ from the MacArthurs Fellows program.

In addition to What It Is, Barry has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels, What It Is; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor; and Making Comics. Her seminal comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, features Marlys, Maybonne, and Freddie and was collected into The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, The Freddie Stories, Come Over Come Over, My Perfect Life, and It’s So Magic. Her other books include One! Hundred! Demons!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, and The Good Times are Killing Me.