Talk Sept. 2, 2022
A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous
By David MarchesePhotograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
For nearly 30 years, the cartoonist Lynda Barry published her adored comic strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which told the whimsical, hardscrabble story of the young sisters Marlys and Maybonne, in alternative papers across the country. (An anthology, “It’s So Magic,” was published earlier this month.) She has since written acclaimed plays and novels and even a beloved book on making comics. (That would be the straightforwardly titled “Making Comics,” from 2019.) For the last two decades, she has often led drawing, writing and creativity workshops in prisons, at schools, online — wherever will have her. And since 2012, Barry, a 66-year-old who in 2019 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius grant — has been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has held various positions and now does cross-disciplinary teaching on creativity. So when it comes to self-expression, to making art, it’s fair to say that she’s an expert. But in many ways, not nearly as much of an expert as your average little kid, which is something Barry has been thinking about a lot lately. “Adults think that kids playing is some nothing thing,” she says. “But play is a different state of mind, and it can help us do so many things if we just allow ourselves to get back to it.”
For a lot of people, being creative and making things can be a helpful way to deal with uncertainty, and college students today have to deal with so much uncertainty. Not just about where their lives might go after they finish school but also about things like the future of our politics and our planet. How do you see
your students1 responding? I know what you’re talking about. These kids are also feeling that every choice should have some utility, and everybody’s freaked out about how they’re going to make a living. Plus, they have $60,000 in debt. How does someone get out from under that? But here’s the big difference I’ve seen over the last few years in the people I work with: They don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them
how to cut a circle out of paper.2 You keep the scissors there and you move the paper like this, and they’re like, “What?!” There’s so much dexterity that they, by and large, do not have.
Is that because of phones? Yeah, and kids start keyboarding in kindergarten. Handwriting, that thing that we think is no big deal, there’s so much dexterity in it. Not just in the hand you’re writing with, but the nondominant hand is always in action, moving the paper, paying attention. I mean, there’s a reason people gesture while they talk. If somebody is trying to explain something complicated, and they have to sit on their hands, it’s much harder for them to explain it.
But is something important being lost if students lack a certain kind of manual dexterity, or is that just a change in how they move through the world? Maybe it’s not bad, just different. No! It’s really sad. The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone. I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, “That didn’t happen!” It totally did happen! So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price. You miss the orc.
I know that you’ve done work on pairing Ph.D. students with kindergartners so that the children can help the graduate students with problem-solving. What does that look like in practice? They’re Ph.D. students from almost any discipline and 4-year-olds or 3-year-olds. It started because I noticed that whenever I was in some big creative jam, it was an interaction with a kid that got me out of it. They can really help you when you get stuck. When I started teaching at the university, I couldn’t understand why all the grad students were so miserable. I could pick out the grad students just by the way they walked in the room, you know? These are people that are at the top of their game. They’ve already shown that they want to work. They’re interested in something. Why is it acceptable that they’re all miserable? I was trying to figure out what the misery was. Then I thought, it is this laser focus on getting one particular thing done. This feeling that unless you’re working on it at all times, things are going to be bad. That kind of focus doesn’t set the conditions for insight or discovery. It’s like somebody yelling: “Relax! Relax!” It’s never going to work. But the kids could shift the students’ perspectives in really helpful ways. I had my students copy what the kids were doing, or I got the kids to draw the answer to questions like, “What are microbes?” And my students had to be on the floor with them working together. They had to try to get into their mind-set. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. After you spend about 90 minutes with them, you just find that something has loosened up. You get away from that laser-focused, worrisome way of being.
I’ll bet there’s a not insignificant number of people in the world — in my head, I picture some no-nonsense businessman — who thinks that playing around on the floor is all well and good for kids, but it’s not really something for adults to be doing. Is there any way to persuade those people of the value of trying to access that childlike mind-set? Why try?
Because those people run the world. I know! The reason they run the world is because of the way they were built. But it’s not going to help that person. If you don’t have a need to do it, you don’t get anywhere. Those guys, they don’t have a need. I mean, I think they need it. You think they need it. They don’t think they need it. So there’s not a lot we can do, and that’s the hardest thing to accept. When I first started teaching, maybe I’d have 32 students in two classes. There would always be three or four who were dragging their tailpipes. I spent so much time on those students. I don’t anymore. I don’t crawl toward them with a glass of water like, Please, take this! It took me a long time to say I’m not going to be able to change somebody who doesn’t want to try or doesn’t need this. I’ve had fantasies of kidnapping one of these people. But what if I heard them saying that about me? That’d be the worst. “I want to kidnap that creativity chick and show her what being a Lutheran is all about.”
You used the phrase “the way they were built.” When it comes to playfulness, can a person change how he or she is built? Whatever man we’re imagining, if you hand them their 8-month-old grandson, that man will dance, sing, tell stories. We still all can communicate that way. But there’s such profound amnesia about what kids are actually doing. There’s total amnesia of the experience of deep play. When you’re an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid’s doing that and there’s nothing else to it. But from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them. It’s interactive. There’s amnesia about the deepness of that interchange and amnesia about how when you’re making a story or making a painting it’s that same sort of interchange, and having that is what you’re born to do.
Your own childhood was pretty rough, and art helped you get through it. Is there a connection between that and your ongoing interest in kids and their creativity? People often ask me why
my protagonists are so often children or teenagers.3 I can make a top-of-the-mind answer for that, which is that children or teenagers are protagonists who can’t drive away by themselves out of a situation. It’s just easier to write about.
So childhood is a central subject for you because of the narrative possibilities rather than any working out of your own issues? Well, they can’t be pulled apart necessarily. I’m not trying to work on
the tough stuff of my life,4 but the tough stuff of my life gets worked on. Depression is a big problem for me. I’ve always struggled with it, and the things that helped me from the time I was little were reading, drawing, stories, movies, songs. I remember seeing coal plants driving in the country late at night and flames coming out. It looks like a castle when you’re a kid! It’s just an alive way of being in the world, and learning how to access that — I did have a rough childhood. But you don’t need to. I have students who will tell me: “My life’s been good. My parents are so nice. I don’t have anything to write about.” Yes, you do.
You never wanted children of your own? No, I never did.
Why not? I wondered that too! I love kids, and I am the ultimate godmother, but I never had fantasies about it. Some people need it. I never did. I feel like my life, that curve from when you’re a little kid and then you grow up — the pandemic introduced something that I had always fantasized about from the time I was little, which was being marooned. I would mourn the fact that I was never going to experience that. Then the pandemic happened, and as awful as it was, I got to do that. I got to make a pretend train compartment on my couch, and I decided I was going to read all of Dickens on it.
I rode that train by myself for months.5 It was fantastic! I feel like something happened to me then. I felt — not like a kid again, but I surely wasn’t in my 60s. I didn’t feel young. I felt out of time. I still feel that way.
I’m not quite following. Are you saying you didn’t want to have kids because you wanted to protect your solitude and your imaginative time? My answer was garbled and not answering your question at all! Maybe I was trying to say that I am still that kid. Or maybe I didn’t want to turn into a mom. That makes more sense. My mom was incredibly problematic. The terror that I would become her and do to my kids what she did to us? Or the terror that I might give birth to her. Can you imagine? Coming out: “Recognize me?” Ahhhh! It’s like a bad science-fiction movie.
Earlier you said depression was a big problem for you. Does finding ways to be creative still help you deal with it? Absolutely, and that’s been true from the beginning of my life. We’re born into a world that’s full of stories and characters that are right there for us. God, “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” saved my ass. It’s the impulse to seek those things and then, because you’re seeking them when you’re a kid, the impulse to make them. Yeah, I’ve always had trouble with depression. Part of it is a difficult childhood, part of it is probably my nature. I’ve found that engaging in this kind of work — anything that adults call art and that kids might call a toy; that contains something alive — seems to make me feel that life is worth living. It’s a thing I always say to my students: Art is a public-health concern because it keeps you from killing yourself and others. [Laughs.] It’s not going to work for everyone. I’ve thought about that person we imagined who might look down on adults playing, and the truth is the person I thought of was Trump and how much he loves the song “Memory” from “Cats.” Apparently when he was losing his mind one of his staff would put it on.6 That blows my mind. That guy, who I think is outside the human sphere a little bit — still, “Cats” can get to him. But I don’t think art has any saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.