Syllabus
Notes From an Accidental Professor
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Writing exercises and creativity advice from Barry's pioneering, life-changing workshop
The 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 has set out to prove it. For the past decade, Barry has run a highly popular writing workshop for nonwriters called Writing the Unthinkable, which was featured in The New York Times Magazine. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor is the first book to make her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. Barry teaches a method of writing that focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. It has been embraced by people across North America—prison inmates, postal workers, university students, high-school teachers, and hairdressers—for opening pathways to creativity.
Syllabus takes the course plan for Barry’s workshop and runs wild with it in her densely detailed signature style. Collaged texts, ballpoint-pen doodles, and watercolor washes adorn Syllabus’s yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process. Throughout it all, Barry’s voice (as an author and as a teacher-mentor) rings clear, inspiring, and honest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning alternative cartoonist legend Barry (100! Demons) returns with the third book in a series of hybrid comics that are both instructional and engaging. This graphic memoir/guide tells the story of Barry's first three years teaching at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The book includes the syllabi for her courses in interdisciplinary creativity and most of the activities she ran with the students, as well as her personal musings about the classes. She includes student work and explores many fascinating pedagogical subjects, as well as deeper questions about creativity and the brain. She talks about what makes drawing interesting, and how her drawing style has changed as a result of teaching, with surprising results. She also continues her investigation of what an image is. This book is charming and readable and serves as an excellent guide for those seeking to break out of whatever writing and drawing styles they have been stuck in, allowing them to reopen their brains to the possibility of new creativity. Readers can pore over the exceptionally gorgeous graphic mixture of collage, inking, and watercolor for hours.
