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ALSO BY AMY KELLNER
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LYNDA BARRY - PART 1INTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER 
If you were ever a weird kid or a sad kid, you have to read Lynda Barry’s comics and novels immediately because they will freak you out with how much you’ll relate. It’s embarrassing how many of her comics have made us get all emotional, even the funny ones. They’re like repressed memories of childhood coming to the surface in cartoon form and going “Holy shit.” And then there’s Cruddy. Cruddy is the novel where you’re either with us or against us. It is the dark, and we mean daaaaark, tale of a teenage girl who meets a bunch of freaky kids, does acid with them, and then recounts her experience of going on a crime and murder spree with her insane dad when she was 11. It’s gory and nightmarish but also unexpectedly kooky. And it’s beautifully written in this signature language that Barry has that is so perfect, it kills us. Oh, and she wrote the whole novel by hand! Man. So basically Lynda is our #1 hero. We’re excited because Drawn & Quarterly is putting out a gorgeous five-volume hardcover reprint collection of all her Ernie Pook’s Comeek strips. Yay! And if she ever brings her Writing the Unthinkable workshop to New York (please!), we are very there. We’re sorry to hear about her turbine problems though. We officially hate turbines now. Down with turbines!
Lynda Barry: Thanks, but I’m not feeling very amazing at all. Ever since I found out an industrial wind farm is being planned for right beside our place—67 turbines, each standing 40 stories tall, 1,000 feet from our door. We’re looking at losing everything we’ve worked for—maybe having to move and start over. I’ll try not to mention it again, but if you would like to know more about a whole other side of “wind energy” you can visit the website I run for our community. It’s at betterplan.squarespace.com. I do want people to know these machines are not benign. They bring a lot of misery to those who are forced to live among them. I’m sorry to hear that. But you’re still amazing. Which of your characters do you most identify with? Are you Marlys or Maybonne or Arna or Freddy or bits and pieces of all of them? Do you have a favorite? I dig them all, completely! Even Arnold, the very straight brother of Arna. They all appeared at once in one comic strip called “The Night We All Got Sick” in the mid-1980s. I had no idea they would stay with me for so long. I relate to all of them and I’m always glad to have them come out of my brush or my pen because it’s the only way I get to see them. I never know what they are going to do or say because I don’t plan anything out before I start a strip. It’s kind of the way kids don’t have to plan everything out before they start playing with hand puppets. You just start wiggling the puppets and the story comes. I wiggle a pen or a brush but it’s the same thing. Can you tell me what a typical day in your life is like? Do you write and draw every day? Well, there was life before the turbines and life after the turbines. My life now is non-stop work on helping our community and other communities in Wisconsin get the word out that 1,000 feet from a home is just too close for these machines. I’m working to get setbacks of at least 2,640 feet. The wind developers are livid about this because it cuts into their profits, but it gives people some chance to stay in their homes. The main problem with the turbines is the noise they make at night. But enough about turbines. Before the turbines I had a very happy, hardworking life that actually makes me cry when I remember it. I liked getting up at dawn or just a little before dawn, and going to my studio, which is an old grain barn about 500 feet from our house. I did work every single day, but to me it was a joy. It’s like asking a kid if they really played every single day. I did. I painted and read and wrote every day. It was my job, the beautiful job I always dreamed of. I can hardly stand to think about it. I don’t get to do any of that now. I try to find some time to make a few pictures or write a bit but my head is too worried about our future to work very well. We put all our savings into our farm. My husband, Kevin, has a small native-plant nursery and he does prairie-restoration work. We heat with wood and cook with wood and grow a lot of our own food. We don’t have a dryer and we hang our clothes outside all year round on our covered porch. I can’t believe we’re going to lose it all but it’s looking that way. I’m really sorry. Writing in a barn sounds great. It’s a small barn with a wraparound porch my husband and my neighbor built. It has a tin roof and a lot of windows and a wooden ceiling and it’s filled with books and art supplies. Before I start to write I always read something—I’m still trying to keep that up every day before I start my AT (After Turbines) work. I either read poems—Emily Dickinson is a favorite—or philosophy—Zhuang-zhi, who is considered to be the kind of far-out Lao Tsu—or one of Shunryu Suzuki’s wonderful Zen talks. I like to read something that shifts my mind from the hamster wheel that it can become otherwise. BT (Before Turbines), I would grind my ink on my inkstone and paint out the alphabet slowly on legal paper. Sometime during that painting of the alphabet I’d get a feeling about something to make. If it felt like writing then I’d work on my novel—writing it with a paintbrush. Slower writing is better for me. Better for my ideas. The novel is in an overflowing laundry basket on the floor of my studio right now. I miss it so much. If the feeling I had while writing the alphabet was more toward drawings or collage I would work on those. If there was no particular feeling I’d keep on writing the alphabet and moving my brush around the page in an unplanned way. Something always came up to meet me from this activity. There weren’t many bad days. CONTINUED LYNDA BARRY | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | RELATED LINKS: http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n10/htdocs/lynda-barry-162.php
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