Syllabus

Award-winning author Lynda Barry is the creative force behind the genre-defying and bestselling work What It Is. She believes that anyone can be a writer and she has set out to prove it. For the past decade, Lynda has run a highly popular writing workshop for non-writers called Writing the Unthinkable - the workshop was featured in the New York Times magazine. Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor is the first book that will make her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. Barry's course has been embraced by people of all walks of life - prison inmates, postal workers, university students, teachers, and hairdressers - for opening paths to creativity. Syllabus takes the course plan for Lynda Barry's workshop and runs wild with it in Barry's signature densely detailed style. Collaged texts, ballpoint pen doodles, and watercolour washes adorn Syllabus' yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process. Throughout it all, Lynda Barry's voice (as author and teacher-mentor) rings clear, inspiring, and honest.

Barry isn't particularly interested in the writer's craft. She's more interested in where ideas come from - and her goal is to help people tap into what she considers to be an innate creativity. - New York Times

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She is assistant professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison; the author of acclaimed graphic novel One! Hundred! Demons!, the cartoonist behind the long-running Ernie Pook's Comeek, and the author of creative how-to memoir comic books What It Is and Picture This.