After Sept. 11, 2001, Barry foundered creatively. She and her second husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie-restoration expert, moved from Evanston, Ill., to a 15-acre farm in rural Wisconsin. Kawula, an affable bear of a man — “Everybody else loves Han Solo,” she told me, “but I always wanted Chewbacca” — built Barry a free-standing, sun-filled studio overstuffed with scrap paper, art supplies and knickknacks given to her by students. (In Miami, a puppeteer named Hannah made a little Marlys marionette, complete with polka-dot underpants.)
By 2008, the consolidation of the alt-weekly world meant that “Ernie Pook’s” was appearing in only four papers, and Barry was earning just $155 a week drawing it. Stuck in a draining battle with wind developers over plans to build turbines in her town — “they’re the S.U.V. of renewable energy,” she said — she decided to shutter the strip months shy of its 30th anniversary.
Now she sells original art on eBay and has been buoyed by the modest success of “What It Is,” her 2008 book about writing, and its follow-up in 2010, “Picture This,” about art. But it’s the classes, which Barry began teaching to share the techniques she learned from a drawing professor at Evergreen, that spark her enthusiasm. She conducts around 15 workshops a year, from two-hour minisessions with college students to long multiday seminars at writers’ conferences like this one.
On the afternoon after the third class, we sat in a hotel bar drinking Tsingtaos. “Now I can take this off,” Barry said, untying her bandanna and dropping it in her bag. That day started out rough. “For an hour, it was hellish,” Barry said. The workshop can seem haphazard but is actually carefully planned. “I run a tight ship, but I try and make it seem like I’m not doing that at all. I have stories that I know will make ’em laugh and forget. I have others that are more about: think about this. And then the ones that are really important to me, like the story about ‘The Family Circus.’ ”
She told that story at the end of the session. “I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble,” she said. “As much trouble as you could imagine. In the daily paper, there were all these comic strips, and there was one that was a circle. It seemed like things were pretty good on the other side of the circle. No one’s getting hit. No one’s yelling.”
