Exclusive Interview with the Award Winning Writer, Artist, & Publisher Donna Barr

Do a search on Amazon.com for author Donna Barr and you'll come up with over 85 books and graphic novels the prolific writer and artist has published since 1986. And, from what I've seen, that's only a portion of her actually bibliography. Even Barr herself isn't sure how many times her work has been in print. Donna Barr is best known for her books and series including: The Desert Peach, STINZ, Hader and The Colonel, and Bosom Enemies.

Donna Barr has won numerous awards in her career including The Xeric Grant, Seattle's Cartoonists' Northwest's Toonie, the Washington Press Association's Communicator of Excellence in Fiction and more. Her critically acclaimed work is impossible to pigeonhole into one particular genre. Is she a writer? An artist? A cartoonist? A social satirist? Actually, she's all of the above and more. Lately, she's added blogging and art commissions to her repertoire as well.

I was thrilled when she agreed to allow me to interview her, and even more excited when I started reading her responses to my questions. Even for readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading her work, Donna Barr has a sharp wit, wry sense of humor, and a passionate intensity about her work and life in general that made reading her answers almost as irresistible as one of her books.

How did you become interested in comic books? Was it a childhood love or something you discovered later in life?

I wasn't. I never have been. My interest is in classic prose literature and folk and tomb art - especially that of ancient Egypt. You can see Egypt in the way I draw figures.

I only read the drawn books my colleagues hand me - wonderful stuff (WHEN is Colin Upton going to collect and re-publish Buddha On The Road?). I had been drawing since 1954, and combining it with writing since 1962. In 1985, I took a little bound book to a convention - V-Con in Vancouver, I think, and Steve Gallacci, of Thoughts and Images, bought a couple copies. He got one to Lex Nakashima, an editor of Eclipse Comics, and they published my first "comic"-sized book in 1986, as issue number of The Dreamery. One of my editors, Ed Vick of MU and Aeon Press, said that it was as though I'd invented the whole art form independently before ever publishing in it.

Many people in the comic book industry consider you the "Queen of Self Publishing." Was it a deliberate choice for you to self publish or was it because your stories usually don't fit mainstream comic book mold?

That's like saying "Queen Of Crazy." Most publishers aren't very good at constructing publicity. They can use traditional models, but can't think outside set genre parameters. They should hire us artists and writers as PR people - some of us are really good. Both advertising and fiction require originality and the ability to think fast, and some capability to extrapolate future trends; sci-fi authors make their whole living off it. I know my stuff is wanted in Japan, but I've never been able to get that through a publisher's head (I mean, cute gay guys and German uniforms? WHERE is their marketing savvy?).

The only thing I lack is a lot of advertising money and so I do a lot of it with forums, reviews (net and dead tree), word-of-mouth, making sure my books are updated at Books-In-Print, Baker and Taylor, Barnes and Noble, etc.

Oh, don't get me started on publishing. I could Bore For England.

IS there a mainstream comic book mold any more? Most comics are now webcomics and then taken on to the mainstream (generally prose) market. The traditional comics distribution system has to work within old systems because all the new kids are heading out into the bigger book-publishing world.

I know you did some stories for Gay Comics in the early 90s, but have you ever done any other work for another publisher?

Eclipse Comics, Thoughts and Images, MU and Aeon Press, Fantagraphics, and finally my A Fine Line Press. It was a joke that I've had more publishers than most publishers have had artists. I know this isn't a complete list.

If you could give some advice to comic book self-publishers that are just starting out, what would it be?

Figure out your goals. If you want to work in superheroes or manga, get together a portfolio and head for the San Diego Comicon or one of the new genre conventions that are being squished out of the bottom of the giant top-heavy San Diego monster. If you want to self-publish, check out Keith Knight's http://www.kchronicles.com/ and Jane Irwin's www.vogelein.com - both great marketers! And, great artists and writers, too. Jane's got a great distribution list on her site. Either way, be prepared to work your butt off. And ask every professional every question you can think of; they're kind, gracious people who will be happy to tell you how -- but don't do it while they're trying to eat lunch or in the middle of a line of signings. Be businesslike and polite and you'll get the same treatment from them.

You've received a lot of critical acclaim for your work over the years, and won quite a few awards, is there any single accomplishment or award that you're the most proud of?

Yes. The little hand-book that cadged a few pages of a story from a Fantagraphics anthology, about staying safe on the street, said handbook being distributed in restrooms to help street kids and prostitutes stay safe. The reader who said a Stinz story had allowed her to finally weep for her dead father. A reader who said The Desert Peach helped him come out. A hostile interviewer who got his homophobia cured in the course of the interview. A reader who wrote that Stinz had helped him be a better father.

My biggest fans are my colleagues and peers, people all over our industry. I'm not naming names; it's just a kick to know they enjoy and respect my work.

I've got the San Diego Comicon Inkpot and the Xeric Grant, and something from the Washington Press Association ("Best humor anthology?").

You mentioned earlier that you have big interest in folk and tomb art, especially ancient Egyptian. How does that relate to your latest book, Afterdead?

Look at my line work. The spidery forms, the concentration on outline. The crosshatching is straight out of German woodcuts (as has been noted time and again). A reader once asked if I had ever seen Heinrich Kley's line art. I had seen very little of it, but when said reader sent me a couple of collections of the artist's magazine cartoons, I had to agree with her that there was a great resemblance.

As I mentioned in the introduction, you're an extremely prolific writer and artist. How do you keep producing so many great novels, graphic or otherwise, year after year?

Thank you for the "great!" I'm part German; we're very methodical. I keep a pretty rigid work schedule. Along with a lot of other backgrounds, I'm part Jewish and part Rom. I'm sorry, but centuries of living on the edge and knowing how and when to fleet has sharpened generations of wits. I can usually see what's coming. Writers don't write, artists don't art because we want to, but because we have to. I also have a very writerly mind - an absolute garbage box. Everything I see immediately hooks up with everything else I know and see and I begin to extrapolate and then I have to get it down on paper.

I also get hired to do strange fanfic, including fanfic on my own stuff! Sooner or later I have a collection. One of my readers keeps hiring me to do TF (transformation) stories, and when I get enough he lets me collect them. You can find a volume of them, Transformations, at www.lulu.com/desertpeach. A couple of those stories are in the back of AFTERDEAD.

I can also spot business opportunities. Sometimes I spot them too far ahead, or work them through and leave them behind too early. I've seen younger artists today going through all sorts of genres and ideas that I did in the early '60's. Lord, I wish the publishing atmosphere and structures had been there back then! I tend to be about 20 years ahead. My stuff's going to be worth a lot of money when I'm dead (see earlier answer).

What's a typical day for Donna Barr like? With all the work you do, do you ever sleep?

Typical: Get up at 7:00, feed cats, schmooze with breakfast, lots of caffeine and NPR until 9:00 (Birdnote!). Hit the computer for production (layout, book production in the winter, distribution and PR in the summer), contacts, organizing projects, etc. In there can come a lot of errands, running around, lunch, etc. Sometimes off to Port Angeles (50 miles away) or Forks (29 miles) for TDS (The Dreaded Shopping) 5:00 shut down computer, hit the art (while watching videos - I'm a child of the homework-before-the-media generation) 'till 10:00 or sometimes midnight. Occasionally do odd-box things like turning into the only freelance journalist on the upper west end of the Olympic Peninsula. I think I may have a replacement lined up, who knows her grammar, the local contacts and the AP style sheet - cross your fingers. With the PR and distribution drive I did all summer, I'm trying to handle all the resulting publishing and art hoo-hah that is beginning to rev up now that everybody's back from vacation. Accidentally talked myself into a graphic job about 29 miles away, that if I can do from my own computer I can swing it. I really can't commute, for SO many health reasons, metabolic and joint related (working on the latter) - and that's why I don't do shows any more. I'm getting nearer and nearer to becoming virtual for shows. If we can figure that out, we'll share it with distant, ill or aged classic authors - they can show up anywhere for any convention. I do not know how the techies in our industry haven't figured that out.

That's an outline. Yes, I sleep, but not well; I've inherited the family insomnia.

That's not unusual. Roberta Gregory has the same kind of days - we all do (will be uploading Afterdead 1.2 - The Desert Peach Crosses Over at Lulu pretty quick. The little version, before I publish the whole collection next year as Afterdead 2).

(And I slip in a walk on the beach that is five minutes from our house, every day, if we can manage it. See beach at www.sekiu.com)

Your books and graphic novels are well known, and highly respected, for their social commentary. What are some of the things going on now that really matter to you on a personal level?

Well, our idiot war, or wars, of course. Watching humanity running closer to the cliff all the time. Wanting generally to hit us stupid monkeys upside the head so I don't have to keep saying, "I told you so!!!" If it's in the news and making me rant at the ceiling (I do this in the morning - my family either wakes up like bears with sore heads or in stumbling zombie-hood. I'm one of the bears) then I'm probably going to be sticking it in the day's page.

The place I'm living at is getting closer and closer to being stuck into a series of prose stories. I've even sent off a story about them to a pagan magazine contest. They are total loons (This from me!) and everybody has some kind of scam going. Check out www.wolffood.wordpress.com for the latest blogs, which include some of their craziness.

Like many authors, I'm an ArtWitch - I write it or say it, it happens (if I'm not thinking about it). When I make a joke, my colleagues grab me and yell, "Take it back! Take it back!" I can't say things like "I wish he'd drop dead," because he WILL. This is actually why I'm so nice at conventions.

So I've been purposely putting in things I want to have happen (buffalo come back in this book), or things I'd like to see certain people GET. If I'm involved in any for of spirituality, it's something I've called The Black Path. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody else, and I'm not going to try to teach it. The vision drug is alcohol (does that make most of the people in this industry...?).

What can we look forward to in the future? What comes next?

Well, I'm doing layout right now for a few episodes of Afterdead 2 - it'll be over at www.lulu.com/desertpeach as soon as I can get it done. The working subtitle is "The Desert Peach Crosses Over"-- in every way that sentence can work. Basically, Stinz has been chosen for the great honor of breeding for the Reich. He wants the Peach along for company. Rosen (now Pope) gets involved. And the Mormons...

Right now Pfirsich and Rosen and Georg are all at a roller derby, where one of the company officers goes by the derby name of "Hell Maeri." Rough sketch of her: http://rummelhart.deviantart.com/art/Hell-Maeri-58773436

Fun things: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/dbarr/roastdave/series.php Part of a Dave Sim roast for charity that didn't come off - but I'm doing a Desert Peach story for the same bunch. There are references to male/female DNA that will send Dave off the deep end (or he'll pretend it will, anyway. He's like Robert Crumb that way - TOTAL HAM.).

More blogs! www.dbarr.gather.com Oh, there should be enough in all these to show all the other links. If any of them are dead, please tell me! Did I put in my Wiki link? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Barr

Doing art commissions, of course. This is some of it anyway. I need to be cloned (never mind, my mother already did - there are six of us. And I'm the quiet one.).

For more information on Donna Barr and her award-winning work, check out http://www.stinz.com/. To purchase her latest works, go to http://www.lulu.com/desertpeach or check out her large selection of books on Amazon.com.