Happy Birthday Lynda Barry

Today is the birthday of cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (books by this author), born in Richland Center, Wisconsin (1956). Her parents divorced when she was 12, and she started dropping acid. Four years later, she was working as a janitor seven nights a week. She beat her drug habit and finished high school. Her parents didn't come to her graduation. One standout memory from her childhood was reading Bil Keane's Family Circus comic, drawn in a distinctive circular panel. She was fascinated with Family Circus because the family it portrayed was so different from the one she knew. "It seemed like things were pretty good on the other side of the circle. No one's getting hit. No one's yelling," she remembered. After she started drawing her own comics, she met Bil Keane's son Jeff — who appeared in the strip as Jeffy — and promptly burst into tears. "I realized I had stepped through the circle. I was on the other side of the circle, the place where I wanted to be. And how I got there was I drew a picture."

She's the creator of Ernie Pook's Comeek, a weekly strip that ran in alternative newspapers for nearly 30 years. Her friend Matt Groening was also penning a strip called Life in Hell. He would later go on to create The Simpsons. The market for Barry's comic dried up in 2008, so she moved on to other projects. Now, she sells original artwork on the Internet and travels around the country giving workshops called "Writing the Unthinkable." She markets the seminars to nonwriters: "bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on 'being a writer' but still wonders what it might be like to write.

Barry is also the author of several books and graphic novels, including Cruddy (2000) and The Good Times are Killing Me (2002), which was also made into a play.

-Writers Almanac