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A Conversation with Lynda Barry, Cartoonist & Graphic Novelist

  • Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts 4000 Mayflower Hill Drive Waterville, ME, 04901 United States (map)

Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 2

Credit: Lynda Barry

Cartooning superstar Lynda Barry (creator of Ernie Pook’s Comeek and author of the illustrated novels The Good Times are Killing Me and What It is) will speak on the importance of creativity and answer audience questions about her work and process. Books will be available to purchase, and a signing will follow.

Free event with RSVP.



Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison. Currently, she is also the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence at Colby College.

Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook's Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!The! Greatest! of! Marlys!Cruddy: An Illustrated NovelNaked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award.

She has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, which received two Eisner Awards and appeared on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956.