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.”

Once, at a comics convention, she shook hands with Bil Keane’s son, Jeff — Jeffy — who now inks the strip. Barry instantly burst into tears. She told the class why: “Because when he put his hand out and I touched it, I realized I had stepped through the circle. I was on the other side of the circle, the place where I wanted to be. And how I got there was I drew a picture.” She smiled and held her arms out. “The reason I’m standing here in Florida in 2011 is because I drew a picture and wrote some words. The reason you all are here is because you’re interested in doing the same thing. When I think about all the things that this image world has brought me. . . . I mean, I don’t have health insurance, and dental work is really an issue, but the feeling that life is worth living? Being in this class gives me that in spades.”

On the last day of class, a part-time social-sciences professor named Margaret Stott sat next to me. “God, you should write a story about the people at my table at lunch,” she said. “WRITERS. With a capital W.” She acted out their conversation. “ ‘What’s your workshop like?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s accessing your creativity,’ and they looked at me like, Is this a writing workshop, or not?”

Barry marched in singing a song about underpants. (It was from “South Park.”) She danced the hula with Hannah’s marionette. Then she said there would be no break today, there’s no time, there’s too much writing to do.

Cox wrote about sitting with her friend Sandie in the high-school cafeteria, how they used to watch out for each other — each warning the other if her hair was askew or if her minipad was showing. She’d told Barry about Sandie and even showed her the tattoo (Barry, too, had dengue fever, in fact almost died from it in 1994), and when she finished reading aloud, Barry patted her shoulder gently. “Good, good, good.”

Vanessa Moss read a story, rich with detail, about gossiping co-workers sorting the mail. “That’s perfect!” Barry shouted. “Perfect! I mean good, good! I had to remember I can only say good. Good good good good good.”