What It Is

AUTHOR: Barry, Lynda

ARTIST: Lynda Barry (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2008

Publication History

Lynda Barry’s What It Is was first published in 2008 by Montreal-based comic book publisher Drawn and Quarterly. The large-format, full-color work was released in hardcover in the first and subsequent printings. A well-known writer and artist of comics for many years, Barry initially established herself as a cartoonist with her comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which began in the Chicago Reader in 1979 and ran for nearly thirty years. She published book-length collections of comics and illustrated novels with such companies as Seattle-based Sasquatch Books and Simon and Schuster prior to working with Drawn and Quarterly, also serializing a number of her comics online. Her work, particularly What It Is, is especially noted for crossing genre boundaries.

Plot

What It Is blends memoir and writing exercises, performing as it instructs. As Barry delves deeply into her memory and reflects on the ways she uses images and words to tell stories, she poses questions that invite her readers to do the same. What It Is is as much an art book as it is a storybook and a workbook; artists, readers, and writers are all invited in, especially those who have struggled to overcome obstacles impeding their creativity. Barry’s book is, in large part, about invention, and it discusses issues such as the genesis of ideas and the ways in which ideas can be accessed.

What It Is is roughly divided into two parts. The first part begins with a present-day Barry, under stress, frustrated, and bothered by everything in general and nothing in particular. She has a song stuck in her head, though she cannot remember where she heard it. While walking through a silhouetted forest, she contemplates the origins of thoughts and anxieties and wonders about the differences between the parts of her mind; she also ponders the fact that some ideas, experiences, and memories are immediately available, while others seem buried. Thus begins her journey into her memory, as she recalls childhood and adolescent experiences with drawing, singing, dancing, and writing. Interspersed between these memories and stories are questions about the nature of thought, writing, drawing, and storytelling.

Barry traces her history with art, moving from childhood through college. She recounts her moments of elation and self-doubt, from the thrill of having one of her drawings selected to hang on the wall of her elementary school classroom to her loss of confidence after erasing her work on a test so hard that she tore holes in the paper. She depicts her return to art in middle school and high school, and she recalls her college classes with Marilyn Frasca, a painting teacher whose way of connecting experiences, images, and memories to art greatly influences Barry.

In the second half of What It Is, Barry explains her creative process and poses questions to assist readers in their own explorations and creations. The creative process she outlines begins with lists, asking the reader to list, for example, the first ten cars he or she remembers from childhood. Building upon these lists, she next asks the reader to recall personal experiences, such as riding in one of the cars. She prompts the reader to think about movement within that memory and write down sensory experiences. All of the exercises are timed, creating the sense that What It Is is a writing workshop in book form.

Characters

•Lynda Barry is the author, narrator, and guide. Appearing at various ages, she is first seen as an adult, irritated and aggravated by something she cannot name. Throughout the majority of What It Is, however, she is portrayed as a past version of herself: a daydreaming child who believes that drawings and pictures have lives of their own; a young girl who takes hula lessons and gets lost in songs, stories, and television shows; an adolescent with a love of drawing who gives up after an experience with self-doubt and embarrassment leaves her with overwhelming shame and guilt; a junior high school student who begins to draw again, initially copying other artists’ characters; and a college student studying art and trying to find and develop her own content, characters, and perspective.

•The Gorgon is an imaginary enemy from Barry’s childhood, based on Medusa and developed from a horror movie Barry watched when she was eight years old. Barry suggests that the imaginary Gorgon helped her love her mother. The Gorgon appears to signify both internal and external obstacles.

•Marilyn Frasca is Barry’s college art teacher, from whom she takes a painting class and learns about writing, particularly freewriting and journal keeping. Barry describes Frasca as mysterious, and although she remembers never getting any technical advice from her, she recalls a pivotal moment in which Frasca pointed out the teeth in Giotto’s painting of the Madonna. The method that Barry outlines in What It Is is informed by what she learned with and through Frasca.

Artistic Style

What It Is plays with and pushes the boundaries of the graphic novel form. Some pages are collages; some are cut-and-paste. Identifiable comic panels do appear, but they are rare. Barry merges drawings with stamps and stickers with sketches. Her work is multidimensional, featuring revamped stationary, resituated excerpts from unidentifiable texts, ribbons and pieces of fabric, photographs and handwritten notes, paint, and glitter. The pages are bursting with color, and there are levels and depths of text to read.

Written pieces concerning Barry’s past are printed on yellow legal paper, making them reminiscent of jotted and somewhat informal correspondence. Other words, sometimes relating directly to the rest of the page’s content and sometimes trailing off in another direction as if representing a different thought, are written in cursive or typeset in various colors and inks. The text is surrounded with playful images of all sorts of creatures and objects, from mermaids and octopuses to birds and many-eyed monsters.

The bursting pages are not chaotic, though, and while the bits and pieces that make up the backgrounds and fill the margins may ask the reader to pause, they should not be considered distractions: What It Is encourages readers to let their minds wander, and the structure of the text, the use of images, the questions posed throughout, and the more straightforward directions and writing prompts are similarly encouraging.

Themes

What It Is concerns the accessing of one’s creativity and imagination. The first section of the book chronicles moments from Barry’s childhood and adolescence, tying these moments to themes of play, storytelling, and creativity. She recalls that she once imagined that the pictures taped to the walls of her early childhood home were able to move. She remembers trying to stay still and focus, waiting to see what would change. She further recalls imagining that she saw a picture of a cat blink and notes that this image stuck in her memory. In describing such moments, Barry evokes the realm of imagination, the place in which memory and image meet creation. Play is essential to Barry’s artistic process, and she additionally attempts to change the way she looks at the world, open herself to new experiences, and then remember, write, and draw those experiences.

Attention to vision and images informs the writing practice Barry details in the second half of the book, a workbook she calls “Writing the Unthinkable.” The workbook provides space for readers to practice her method of invention and explore their own creative processes. Barry’s method necessitates connecting with the unconscious creative impulse of childhood and working past the inner critic who tells the would-be artist that he or she is doing something poorly or incorrectly. Barry provides questions and prompts, word banks to draw from, and other sources of inspiration, but what she includes is not exhaustive. Readers can practice her method with any word or memory.

What It Is illuminates the way in which the imagination spirals, interrupting its own musings. The book asks questions of itself and its readers, combining collage with text to express the nature of the artistic process. The arrangements and aesthetics, then, support Barry’s overarching ambition to follow the stream of thought and consciousness, allowing her mind to wander with questions and doodles and inviting readers to witness her creative process but also discover their own.

Impact

While What It Is is a difficult work to classify, its unconventional, genre-crossing blend of the graphic novel, “how-to” book, and memoir forms garnered it a great deal of critical acclaim. In 2009, the book won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work and the R. R. Donnelley Literary Award, awarded by the Wisconsin Library Association in recognition of the highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. Barry has taught classes and workshops across the United States based on the processes and questions she outlines in What It Is. These workshops, generally titled “Writing the Unthinkable,” incorporate many of the sorts of creative exercises found in the book.

In 2010, Barry released Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, also published by Drawn and Quarterly. This follow-up publication uses the same format as What It Is to examine the creative process of drawing, asking why an artist starts and sometimes stops a creative endeavor. Drawn and Quarterly went on to publish additional books by Barry, including Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything (2011), a collection of early works.

Further Reading

Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! (2002).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Picture This (2010).

Kochalka, James. The Cute Manifesto (2005).

Bibliography

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

McCloud, Scott. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. New York: Harper, 2006.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.