Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

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.

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