Highlights Archives
Cartoonist Lynda Barry to Share Memory Tips
As described in her latest book, What It Is, artist and writer Lynda Barry has developed a creative and powerful technique to help people recall and capture their personal memories. Recently, in an ongoing effort to help preserve a rapidly changing culture, Barry has been showing residents of rural Wisconsin how to vividly recall their stories and collect them as part of a local history archive. She describes it as an opportunity to gather and write stories to add to the collective memory bank in the same way people once came together to have quilting bees.
Lynda Barry to Speak at the Society on June 30
 Cartoonist Lynda Barry Lynda Barry will share colorful stories of her experiences helping people create and preserve memories at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 30, in the auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society's headquarters building. The event is free and open to the public.
According to Barry, memories that come from specific unexpected words have a particular freshness to them and include the kind of detail that is often edited out when people have too long to think about things. Also, for some reason, people writing in groups seem to sustain each other and much gets done in less than 10 minutes. Filled with warmth and humor, the group exercises are more like recipes. They prompt writers to quickly mine their memories for the ordinary things that come alive with meaning once they surface.
Born in Richland Center and now residing on a farm near Footville, Wisconsin, Barry is part of the rich heritage of Wisconsin comic art. Read more about it in the summer 2009 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
:: Posted June 11, 2009
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