I Was Channeling @DoodlebugKRY Even Before I Met Her This Summer. Still Excited By Her Craft and Influence on Reading & Writing Non-Fiction Texts

Last night was the first night teaching of the semester and I brought a few of my writer's notebooks with me to share my evolution of documenting thoughts, life, memories and wonders. I picked up one from my Bread Loaf School of English days in Middlebury, Vermont. This was from a class on The Odyssey taught in Santa Fe, New Mexico. By then, I was a good 5 years as a National Writing Project fellow. I understood the power of doodling and sketching in my notebook, as I tried to process my own thinking and what I wanted to say about the texts we read.

As soon as I saw the doodle, I laughed and said, "Hey, Karen Romano Young, you're so powerful, you influenced me even before I discovered your fantastic non-fiction texts."

This summer, the author/artist spoke to our teachers and I was beyond impressed by how quickly they gravitated to her expertise and recommendations. One of our teachers, in fact, did a non-fiction doodle text each and every day. Her notebook was a piece of art and I loved it.

Thursday mornings will be rough for me this semester, only because I don't return from campus until 10 p.m. and it takes a few hours to unwind my brain.

The doodle has me thinking, however, of the first poem I ever memorized, written after I met a girl named Nicole at Binghamton University.

Nicole
I wanted to read Homer
but instead I read you
as Penolope.
Me? The big O
my God
Our eyes froze
tickles in our toes,
I didn't kiss u, u didn't kiss me.
Now, I wander under
Athena's fireworked sky
and wonder, why I want to
fly where Elpenor roams,
me, myself and I,
eye of Polyphemus, stupid stick stuck in the eye,
blinded by sly cupid, stupid tale,
I want to die.

Ha. Captured in a notebook. Alluding to a writer. And triggering a friend. Not bed for a wake-up blog with 5 hours of sleep. Happy Thursday.