Lynda Barry
Issue #36
The artist extraordinaire pencils us to chat about how eBay saved her career, her newest book What It Is, and one memorable crying jag over Easter
By Mairead Case
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 10:15am
Lynda Barry works in a variety of mediums. Best known for Ernie Pook’s Comeek, the nationally syndicated comic strip loosely centered around a trio of preteen girls, Barry also has published novels like the acclaimed Cruddy and naked-lady trading cards. She never really knows what form a particular story will take.
Her latest book, What It Is, is something new entirely. Essentially a workbook for storytellers, it’s thick with Barry’s serpentine handwriting, jewel-tone collage, and fantastic monsters. She took a break from fighting a turbine industrial wind farm to lobby e-mails back and forth with us.
Hi Lynda! How are you? Where are you?
I am sitting at an old banker’s desk in my living room in my shoebox-shaped house on the side of a hill on a farm in Southern Wisconsin. My husband and I are baking bread tonight. We are also fighting a 67-turbine industrial wind farm that could go in 1,000 feet from our door.
Yikes.
They aren’t the benign things you see on TV with a jazz flute playing. They make noise, they kill birds and bats, and they even rely on a power plant to operate. I run a Web site about it all (betterplan.squarespace.com). OK! Enough about turbines!
A banker’s desk! That’s rad. What else do you need to work?
I like a black surface. It takes all the drips, looks solid, and sets off anything I’m working on like it’s in a frame. I also use two lamps, one on either side of me, because they cancel out the shadows my hand casts when I work. I picked this up from my dentist. I like a cup of coffee or tea, and a tin of Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Tobacco. How I love tobacco. But I also love not having cancer. So it’s a struggle.
Where did you get your collage materials? And all the ghosts, birds, monkeys, and bunnies you draw?
All of the stuff in What It Is is from the trash. It had to be garbage before I would use it. The animal and ghost drawings started after 9/11. I couldn’t stop drawing really, really cute animals. It was the opposite of the nightmare.
You’ve mentioned feeling anxious or sad about your work, sometimes paralytically so. Any tips on how to work through that?
I wish I could turn into stone and have it done with. In the last six or so years, things have gotten better. I got dropped by my publisher and nearly every newspaper I was in. The only way I could make a living was to sell pictures on eBay. It turned out to be a wonderful thing! All of a sudden, no one seemed to want anything I did. And if no one wants what you do, there are no expectations. My work got interesting to me again. So I really owe a lot to eBay. I would have had to get a job otherwise. I also owe a lot to my belief in this one simple secret to happiness: low overhead and no debt.
As an artist, how do you talk with editors who might not always hear what you’re saying?
As long as other people are involved, there’s a good chance things are going to be a drag. Part of the drag is self-consciousness and second-guessing. I don’t know if it can be avoided. It’s like the transformations a bug has to go through, a lot of splitting of skins, until you either believe there is an “art world” or you don’t believe it because it is no longer your experience. This will bring you closer to what things were like when you were a kid, when you could fall in love with an object not because it was an admirable object, but because you couldn’t help yourself from wanting to carry it around and interact with it. When my work is going well, that’s what it feels like. When it’s going badly, it’s just like waiting in a line for three hours to get your driver’s license.
You talk a lot about your awesome teachers.
The few times I’ve had a chance to see any of them since we worked together, I always burst into tears.
Sad tears? Happy tears?
Man, I cry over anything. Over Easter, I took a walk to a park where there were all kinds of drag queens dressed as nuns, and people dressed as giant pink bunnies and yellow fluffy chicks, and people in deep beautiful Easter drag with big hats. I cried like a baby. I was so happy and grateful to be there and see the “Hunky Jesus” beauty contest. That’s when I cry, when I’m feeling very thankful.
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