During the (still-in-progress) move, I came across these doodles that Lynda sent me as part of a letter. Everything she does inspires me to create, so I thought I’d share these.
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LYNDA BARRY AT OBERLIN
“You two are GETTING MARRIED??? Oh man, I LOVE being married!!!”
Long story short, we took a detour on our way back home last night and ended up at a bar with Lynda Barry, Dan, and a bunch of other nice Oberlin folks, talking about marriage, writing, world-building, video games, ink sticks, George Saunders, smoking, and Skoal rings.
Lynda gave a downright marvelous talk and reading of her novel CRUDDY to a packed lecture hall at the Oberlin Science Center. “I feel like this must be the Make A Wish Foundation,” she said, admiring the audience. “I have a tumor right?”
Lynda lives in rural, southern Wisconsin. “I’m the daughter of a meat cutter and a Filipino house cleaner. Most people look at me funny when I say I’m half Filipino, but Norwegian blood will suck the color out of anything.”
There was little talk of comics, and a lot of talk about writing. For her, telling a story in images is the most important thing. “When you’re in that image state, the language takes care of itself.” She outlined a process of telling the story of your life with an image–a car, for example–focusing on that image, and then describing the world around it. I mentioned to her my ideas about worldbuilding and she said, “People ask me if my stories are autobiographical. I say, ‘my stories aren’t, but my settings are.'”
She talked about “the state of play,” and the importance of play in our creative endeavors. “I love kids, man. They can teach us so much.” She said its essential to recapture that youthful, unfettered creativity that we all possess as children. On English class: “There’s nothing wrong with taking apart stories, but for the longest time I thought that was how you put them together.” On that pesky editing monkey on the writer’s shoulder: “When did the asshole become the voice of reason?”
She’s wary of computers and a champion of drawing and writing by hand. “In the digital age…don’t lose your digits!” She said when writing her second novel, the computer was a burden, making it too easy to delete things. After ten years of working on it, she decided to start writing the novel with her Japanese brush, and it worked like magic.
Later on, I told her I worked on the computer to do my woodcut-styled comics. “Yeah, but you use a Wacom tablet,” she said, “so at least you’re still drawing.”
I mentioned to her that James Kochalka, another great cartoonist, also emphasizes the importance of play, but that his emphasis comes from his love of video games. “I don’t know about video games, man. But I trust young people. That many young people can’t be wrong.”
What else can I tell you about the woman? She spent an hour signing books and talking with her fans. She likes to sing. She can even sing with her mouth closed.
Awesome night.
No such thing as waste
Today’s newsletter is about understanding perfectionism, and how I misunderstood perfectionism for the longest time, so I wasn’t able to detect it in myself.
But the letter really began with this image:
I built this collage around a drawing that my son wadded up in frustration before running out of the studio in tears. In the past, this is what I thought perfectionism was: an inability to deal with the disconnect between what a drawing looked like in your head and how it came out of your hand. I thought perfectionism was a problem for the uptight, for big babies who can’t just loosen up and let ‘er rip.
You can read the rest of the newsletter here.
Something I wasn’t able to weave into the newsletter — because it’s not really about perfectionism, it just got me thinking about it — was this instagram post by Lynda Barry about “drawing with four year olds and being there to see how they figure something out”:
I often find drawings begun and then abandoned… Something is not quite right and they need to start over. Then comes the issue of wasting paper. And of finishing what they started. But what if we were…talking about a kind learning to play the trumpet, trying to play a certain note by repeating it… Getting the hang of it, making it natural. Would we say they are easing notes? It took 12 index cards to come to this image. The kid who drew it said “He bites the people” when they finished.
…I would have been told to stop wasting paper and I may have said the same thing to this kid if I wasn’t really paying attention to how this drawing came about. It reminds me of an archer— there is no wasting of arrows when you’re learning to shoot.
Lynda really got me to internalize this idea with my kids — there was no such thing as wasting paper or markers. We encouraged them to use up as many materials as they had.
As I mentioned in another letter, there were days that Jules filled so many pages that we’d sweep them up at the end of the day with a broom:
One of the things I’ve been playing with in my head is: What if we treated ourselves with the tenderness (and yes, the discipline) that we show our children?
For years, I wanted to write a book about how much I learned from watching my kids work, but what I’m starting to realize is that what I’ve really learned is how to set up the conditions for creativity to happen. If you can do it for a four-year-old, maybe you can do it for yourself…
And one of the great lessons is: Believe that there is no such thing as waste. Creative work is the residue of time “wasted.” Of materials “wasted.”
At the same time, the whole reason I made the collage is so I could “save” that drawing from the wastebasket! And Lynda, too, in that post, is saving those drawings, repurposing the “waste” into something worth saving…
So maybe one has to make without regard to waste, without fear, and save and share what you can’t stand to see wasted…
A journal is a magic space to hang out
A reader sent me this video of artist Debra Frasier talking about how she creates a picture book:
Towards the middle of the video, she talks about how critical her journal is to her process, how it’s “this active space where a kind of magic happens… it’s not a scrapbook, it’s not a diary, it’s this place.”
She learned to think about journaling this way from her mentor, the artist Paulus Berensohn, a dancer who turned to pottery. (He wrote a popular book called Finding One’s Way With Clay.)
There’s a documentary about Berensohn called To Spring From The Hand, and the website is full of all kinds of interesting stuff about his life and work.
In the mini documentary, Soul’s Kitchen, Berensohn talking about his journal and bookmaking workshops. He says:
The journal is not so much a way of diarizing one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out, with your imagination, your intuition, your inspiration.
His emphasis on the journal as a place reminded me so much of what I’ve learned from Lynda Barry: that the page is a place where you go wandering around. (Because I don’t believe in coincidence: I wrote that post on this day 4 years ago.)
Debra Frasier makes an appearance in the documentary and she explains what Paulus taught her:
That you have this antenna that knows where you’re going before your body knows where it’s going. So if you have this journal space, and you allow yourself to trust whatever is drawing your attention, and put it into that journal, it gave me a way to magnetize the question, be alert to the answers, and have a place to store it.
Berensohn himself said making a journal was “like building a nest,” which reminded me of Thoreau’s idea about nest eggs.
Recently I saw a piece about how Americans don’t hang out anymore.
But not only do we not seem able to hang out with others, we can’t even hang out with ourselves.
Your journal is a place to do that.
(And I suspect that if you can hang out with yourself, you can get a little bit better at hanging out with others.)
Going through the motions
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
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