What It Is [Paperback]

Lynda Barrys 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 Barrys compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Barrys 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 Barrys signature legal paper. Barrys award winning book is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: The ordinary is extraordinary.The collages in legendary cartoonist Lynda Barrys What It Is are a bathysphere-like odyssey through the depths of her funky subconscious. Vanity Fair

What It Is is equal parts cartoon memoir, collage album, scrapbook, and Zen roadmap. Written and drawn in a chaotic but riveting style, it offers itself as a guide to creative self-ignition. The Boston Globe

The magic of that moment and of all Barry's self-examinations is that her ideas apply to just about everybody. OprahLynda 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, Barryl“0