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Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry Books

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What It Is

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Cruddy

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Making Comics

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“There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it. I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood. They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”

“Some people say they can't remember their childhoods at all. That early morning when they waited for others, bouncing the ball and watching its shadow, is lost to them. The ant hills on the sidewalk cracks, the grasshopper that fell in the storm drain, the ball too deep in the stickerbushes to ever be recovered, a morning spent waiting. What reason would we have for remembering any of it? Yet when we do, there is always a feeling of surprise and amazement over this little bit of lost world. Who knows which moments make us who we are? Some of them? All of them? The ones we never really thought of as anything special? How many kickball games did I play? And what would I give to have just one more ups. What would I give to see them all again. Chuckie, roll the ball this way. Chuckie, roll me a good one.”

“I stared out the window and watched the land change like it had a mental illness. Dead and barren became spinach, chard and cabbage glittering with the pulsing spray from long-wheeled irrigators, and then a dead stockyard with knocked down fence posts and a collapsed ramp and then a dumping ground for junk cars and raw garbage with turkey buzzards circling overhead and then sudden low orchards, peaches it looked like, with migrants reaching into scraggly trees with dirty pick-sacks slung over their shoulders. And then it was barren again, looking quite scorched, and then we arrived.”

“If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.”

“By the 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It's not that we stop singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it. And I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call 'bursting into song.' I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone.”