What it’s like to be an ardent, zit-prone pre-teen girl in the 1970s, how you talk, all your “right-ons” (Sweet Tarts, equality, the gorgeous smell of gasoline, people who say RIGHT ON!) — cartoonist Lynda Barry remembers these things and has conveyed them precisely in her novels and cartoons, including “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” (which appeared for over 20 years in City Paper, among other publications across the country.)

Anyone who was there knows she got it right. Now, Barry’s become interested in memory and the creative process and has been doing writing workshops and made a book from them, called “What It Is.” One question guides her work and her workshops, she said, at a talk she gave at Johns Hopkins last month, co-sponsored by Homewood Art Workshops and Homewood Arts Programs: what is an image?

“An image is a formless thing which gives things form,” she said, to an audience of about 80 people. “An image is what we want back when someone we love dies.”

Barry talked about how she lost her creative grip for a while (the ten years she spent on an unfinished second novel) and ran through some of her techniques for getting it back — watching how little kids play, for instance, and singing.

She sang the audience a couple of Emily Dickinson poems (to the tune of the Beefaroni jingle and “Girl from Ipanema”) and finished by belting out “You Are My Sunshine,” with her mouth closed, lips-together.

The bmoreart blog had a detailed report on the talk and you can read more about Lynda Barry here, as well. An interview Barry gave the morning after her Hopkins talk appeared in Radar Redux.