Product Details
What It Is

What It Is
By Lynda Barry

List Price: $24.95
Price: $16.47 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

41 new or used available from $14.47

Average customer review:

Product Description

“Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+” —Salon
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of 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. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry’s first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: “The ordinary is extraordinary.”

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1900 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-05-13
  • Released on: 2008-05-13
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 209 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
Praise for Lynda Barry:
“Barry is, underneath the wonky handwriting and the quirky, naïve drawings, a great memoirist . . . Like [Tobias] Wolff and [Dave] Eggers, she finds a tone that accommodates self-criticism and self-irony without tipping over into self-loathing . . . but what she is particularly good at is resonance.” —The New York Times
 “Barry is not just a storyteller, she’s an evangelist who urges people to pick up a pen—or a brush . . . and look at their own lives with fresh, forgiving eyes.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 “America’s leading cartoon artist of childhood angst . . . The precise rightness of Barry’s smallest observation puts TV’s The Wonder Years to shame.” —Entertainment Weekly

About the Author
Cartoonist, novelist, and playwright Lynda Barry is the creator behind the
syndicated strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. Her books include One Hundred Demons and The Good Times Are Killing Me.

Customer Reviews

Amazing Book5
I am an artist-teacher, and I wish someone had presented this information to me sooner.

The book has a front section that is sort of an artistic, stream of consciousness, diaristic account of Lynda Barry's own creative life. Followed by a workbook, which I didn't have any specific expectations about, but I was sitting there following the steps, and it was pretty amazing how effective the method Barry advocates is. It took me off guard, and I think I am going to use it next week in the class I teach.

Overall this book ranks somewhere around the best books I have ever read because it sort of snuck up on me, and made realize some stuff about myself and my creative process that I may have resisted in a less charismatic presentation.

what it is5
I recommend this to anyone who loves Linda Barry. This book is supposedto be a condensed version of her wrtining workshop. Mostly, it is L. B. collages and drawings. It explores many of the issues that arise during the creative process.

A guide on remembering5

One of the most important aspects of writing anything-- memoir, fiction, poetry--is the ability to remember. Sounds simple, but we forget so much naturally and are actively encouraged to forget what doesn't suit the needs of any particular group, usually family. Lynda Barry's wonderful primer on how to being to probe the images of your life is just grand
and will doubtless serve many artists and writers as they explore their lives and the lives of others. An exercise as simple as try to recall the earliest phone number you had and try to picture that phone seem so simple, but take you to places that you'd long forgotten.

Like everything by Barry, it's humane and masterful and compassionate and smart. A wonderful addition to any artist's desk.