What It Is - Tapa dura

What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or remember. Bursting with full-colour drawings, comics and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance, each page is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: 'The ordinary is extraordinary'. Lynda Barry explores the depths of the inner and outer realms of creation and imagination, where play can be serious, monsters have purpose and not knowing is an answer unto itself.

How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? These types of questions permeate the pages of What It Is, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Her insight and sincerity will tackle the most persistent of inhibitions, calling back every kid who quit drawing to feel alive again at the experiential level.

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike.