Creativity, Learning
"Play is a different state of mind, and it can help us do so many things if we just allow ourselves to get back to it.”

In 2019 Lynda Barry was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Fellows Program “genius grant”. She said then that she wanted to "get on the floor with 4-year-olds and spend a year just figuring out: What happens before writing and drawing split, and why did we split those things — and what happens when we do split them?” (Image via John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

When New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake learned that her friend Aimee Mann had picked up a paintbrush, she recommended that she read Lynda Barry's illustrated manual “Making Comics”. The book shares some of the exercises the cartoonist has developed for her myriad classes and workshops, which she teaches online, in schools, colleges and prisons.

She is convinced that we older folk have a lot to learn from kids. In one experiment she paired Ph.D. students with kindergartners so that the children could help the graduate students with problem-solving. She says that she started doing this "because I noticed that whenever I was in some big creative jam, it was an interaction with a kid that got me out of it. They can really help you when you get stuck."

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