Comic-book artist, author and illustrator Lynda Barry spent four full days in Toronto last week, appearing at the International Festival of Authors and teaching her Writing the Unthinkable workshop. Barry is best known for her long-running strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which was first published in a student paper by Simpsons creator Matt Groening while they were both students at Evergreen College in the late 1970s. Barry has maintained a fiercely loyal following by pursuing core images through every form imaginable — from her illustrative series like One! Hundred! Demons! to her off-Broadway play The Good Times Are Killing Me to her gripping and disturbing novel Cruddy — and it’s her deep belief in the power of images that is at the heart of both her new book, What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95, 209 pages), an unusual guide to writing that sprang from the workshops she’s been teaching for ten years.

Teaching the class to a comfortably full room of students in The Canadian Corps Headquarters on Niagara Oct. 23 and 24, Barry couldn’t have been more psyched about the rental space’s down-home rec-room vibe, complete with wood-paneling, strings of coloured lights, twisted streamers, balloons, fringed tinsel shades and a long display shelf lined with trophies celebrating past triumphs in darts and card playing.

“I wish I could teach this class in this room every day for the rest of my life,” she said. And it was a perfect fit with Barry’s unpretentious approach that celebrates the natural storytelling part of the brain. Her workshops — on the opposite end of the spectrum from professionalizing MFA programs — emphasize the human need to communicate through images.

“Remember hearing that if you wanted to be a musician, you had to start when you were 4 years old?” she asks. “I remember being 10 years old and thinking, dang, it’s too late. We feel like we have to leave these things to the professionals,” she continues, “like Jessica Simpson.” To prove her point, she led the class in several rousing singalongs, joined at one point by actual professional musician and personal secretary Betty Bong, a.k.a. Kelly Hogan.

Barry creates an incredibly supportive environment and it’s clear that she loves teaching. At her IFOA reading and interview with The Beguiling’s Peter Birkemoe (also a student in the workshop) Barry charmed the audience with her ebullient, infectious energy and insights on how the brain changes during creative work. “All we are doing is a physical act with a state of mind,” she says. As with her class, she opened and closed the talk by singing, once without moving her lips, a remarkable party trick.

However, at the following day’s roundtable on book covers with World’s Most Famous Designer Chip Kidd and Bill Douglas of Toronto design studio The Bang, the mood was certainly less playful. Though interesting points were made by all participants, the chemistry among the mismatched artists never quite clicked. (Though it was off to such a hot start when Kidd, after Barry introduced herself as the girl guys dated right before they came out of the closet, announced, “full disclosure — Lynda and I used to date!”)

Barry talked about the importance of working with the hands while Kidd, who says he was of the last generation to learn how to work by hand, explained that the computer allowed him to do things in 10 minutes that used to take three days. Things started to get strange when Douglas spoke of the problems that arise when authors try to horn in with ideas on how their own books should look. Barry mentioned, as an author, that was a weird thing to hear. A bit later, when the fact that designers don’t always read the books that they design came up, Barry’s mind was fully blown. “WHAT THE FUCK?” she mouthed to the audience.

She might not have been singing, but she was certainly still all Barry.

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