A Doodled Interview with Ben Hazell

To say that there are some amazing doodle artists and writers out there is an enormous understatement. In the nearly-a-year since Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles came out, I've done a stack of doodling workshops. And I've found that:

• Just about everybody has a picture or symbol or word or SOMETHING that they doodle over and over again.

• Although lots of people get in trouble for doodling in school, like Dodo does, most people seem to agree that doodling makes it easier for them to listen and focus.

• Kids love to discover the power of doodle-writing to tell their own stories or to help them illustrate their stories.

Today I'm happy to share with you page one of the doodle-written fantasy Zombie Unicorn by Ben Hazell, age 12, whose animations and comics are brilliant and beautifully drawn.

After reading Doodlebug, Ben took a shot at doodle-writing and came up with Zombie Unicorn. I interviewed him about this work, using doodle-writing to do so -- of course! Our interview follows, and at the end of this post, I'll put the rest of Zombie Unicorn.

Here's Ben's response:

And what are those two things?

I completely identify. I asked:

Ben doodled on:

I had a few favorite items in Zombie Unicorn:

I wanted to know what else Ben was working on.

He's got a lot going on, including:

We were both tankful to have had this doodled conversation:

Here's the rest of Zombie Unicorn. TOO. MUCH. GREATNESS. Thanks, Ben!

A Look Inside My High School Journal . . . and Beyond!

This collaged notebook represents a watershed moment in my writing life.

Nowadays it's not unusual for teachers to have kids write journals. But in 1977, when I took three English classes at once and two of them required journals, it was very new. (I'm hoping one of my teachers will comment on this post and say what the thinking was.) I was a high school senior with a scary scientific paper term project (another assignment that had a major impact on my future writing and interests), trigonometry to survive, and lots of other senior-type things to do, so I asked the two teachers to let me write one journal that they both could read and grade.

I wasn't worried about the journal writing, just didn't want to have to write two journals. I had kept a diary since I was nine, and was a regular journaler. Sometimes I shared sentences or paragraphs of what I'd written with my aunt (just a year older than me), who also journaled. But this was the first time I'd ever written something that I knew for certain would be read by somebody else.

Mainly the journals were read for quantity; we had to write a certain number of entries, and one of the teachers (not the one I hope will comment) really seemed to just check it off. But under the eyes of the other teacher, Fran Kondziela, my writing bloomed and took off. A theater director as well as an English teacher, she was quick to point out that I needed an audience. Now, isn't that an interesting thing to find out about yourself? It makes sense, I guess. Like many who aren't physically confident, loathe getting up on a stage, and have palpitations about public speaking, I became a writer because I needed to express myself. Who was reading? Nobody -- until Ms. K.

My journal, Ms. K's comment

And that wasn't all: my writing improved when I had feedback, not just approval, from someone else. Ms. K. posed questions and made comments in my margins, and that led me to better, clearer, more thoughtful writing. Looking back at it, I also notice that I was forever drawing and doodling. Here's one example, J.R.R. Tolkien, from the back of my copy of The Two Towers.

Doodle: Tolkien and his ear

As ever, journaling has enormous value for me as a writer and as a human. It's fun and funny and educational to look back on the things I was worried about when I was 17, or 32, or 47. It helps me to see straight into those days as if I had a telescope taking the long view back into the dots on my personal timeline. So much is there, from the music I was listening to (and going to concerts of such as, in 1977, Eric Carmen, Loggins and Messina, and Peter Frampton).

I don't share my journal entries anymore, preferring to keep them private. But the journal begun for high school English in the spring of '77 taught me the value of working with a trusted reader or writing partner, someone who would confirm what was good and question what was questionable.

Nowadays I rely on the response of other writers, artists, editors, my agent, and my children.

For several years, I worked with a novels-only writing group that devoted hours and hours to each other's work -- and from which some truly beautiful novels emerged, and continue to emerge even though we have disbanded.

Without the responses of my daughter Emily and author/illustrator friend Katie Davis, Doodlebug would never have come to be, and writer/editor Ann Downer provides invaluable input about my Humanimal Doodles.

I've got to get to work, I really do. I've got a new writing partner, Gail Carson Levine, and she's expecting a new installment of the semi-graphic novel I'm working on. I'm inspired by the masterful revisions Gail has been doing on her own novel chapters, and reminded once again how important it is to have an audience that listens well, makes comments, and tries to follow my sketchy plots.

Sometimes it's difficult. Every time Gail and I meet she asks me a question that causes me to drop my head right onto the table in dismay -- something I'd blanked on, not thought of, done wrong, not considered. It's not easy, this writing job! But then I think of a possible answer, and Gail shakes her head, I think of another and Gail tilts her head to one side, considering. We talk about it a while. And then I get back to work.

Counting my blessings here, I'm very grateful. And that includes Peter Frampton.

A first for Connecticut, and me.

The Connecticut Book Festival, the first ever state book festival, which will take place this coming weekend, May 21 - 22, at the University of Connecticut's Greater Hartford Campus. The rain will stop, the sun will shine, owls will flap their wings in delight, and book people of all feathers will arrive to celebrate reading, writing, illustration, and yes, doodling.

The event's organizer, Kat Lyons, former director of the Connecticut Center for the Book, expects 10,000 people for the first Connecticut Book Festival, which makes me supremely happy, because I love books, but also gives me nervous butterflies in my stomach, because I'm going to be there to read from and talk about Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles.

Just to clarify: there is also a Connecticut Children's Book Fair, organized by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in November 2010. But this new festival is set up to bring together readers and authors of books for adults and teens -- and there will be children's events, too. As a young adult author, I think this is an interesting shift. As far as publishing goes, young adult books are generally part of children's books, and are stocked near children's books in bookstores. But they are often shelved completely separately in libraries (on a separate floor in my home library, the Bethel Public Library).

So what's going to be going on? Here's just a taste:

• FOOD (often food is last on the list, but let's get serious, okay?)

• Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, and other novels. He's incredible, and I have shaken his hand.) Here's a profile of him on Teen Reads.

• Wendell Minor, the only illustrator I've ever known to have his own billboard. Wendell's work is so beautiful. One of my favorites is this polar bear.

• A journal-making workshop led by the Amistad Center for Art and Culture (I encourage doodling in journals.)

• "Ink Passion," a performance by dancEnlight. (Having frequently done ink dances myself, I am intrigued.)

The Hartford Advocate published a complete discussion of the festival here, and I'd also like to refer you to Caragh O'Brien's blog. If you don't know Caragh's young adult Birthmarked trilogy, you should. And you'll have a chance when she takes part in a panel of young adult authors at the book festival this Sunday at 3:30.

Caragh's blog includes a picture from the lunch she and I shared with Kat Lyons and Billie Levy after Billie hosted us on her television show Children's Books: Their Creators and Collectors, where Kat, Caragh, and I talked about our work and shared our anticipation of the Connecticut Book Festival.

I'll be at the festival on Sunday, reading from Doodlebug at 2, and signing (and doodling on) books afterward. Please come find me! (If anything calms the butterflies, it's smiling faces. )

And if you're wondering how I'm going to read from a book that's done in doodles, you'll have to come find out. There's a giant book -- and some giant doodles -- involved.

Come On In!

From my desk in the window of my little house in the woods, I can see the pine tree in the front yard, which has a door nestled among the roots. My mother gave this door to me. This is typical, because she's the one who taught me to be whimsical, to anthropomorphize, to envision that door opening on a pine-scented spiral stairway that leads up the tree to the doodling workshop where I might sit, pen in hand, drawing stories, doodling pictures, writing text by hand, making up my own fonts.

Like the door to the pine tree, doodles may seem to be whimsical, unrealistic, the product of an overactive imagination. But, in the year since I began publishing them, I've realized the power of doodles.

I get doodle power from children who attend my doodling workshops -- such as the ones I did for the GRLS program in Boston last weekend -- who try out the black finepoint and gray brushpoint pens I give them, drawing constantly, telling their stories, lifting their heads only in curiosity about the pictures I'm creating as I tell them my own stories.

I get doodle power from the parents who tell me that my novel Doodlebug has gotten their kids reading at last, or that learning about my doodling has encouraged them in creating their own graphic stories.

I get doodle power from the teachers who tell me that my Humanimal Doodles have gotten their students talking about science - or arguing about, looking into, or trying their own science.

I get doodle power from the scientists who like how their stories are told, who comments and make suggestions and ask for more.

I get doodle power from the grownups who learned to read by reading comic books, and the librarians who recognize that any reading is good reading and the kids who realize that good reading doesn't have to be all typeset words.

I get doodle power from finding out how many other people -- just about all other people! -- doodle, and I love learning what they draw and why.

And this week I'm getting doodle power from National Doodle Day, tomorrow, May 12.  Neurofibramatosis, Inc., sponsors this celebration.  During their events this summer, they'll be giving away ten signed copies of Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles. For more about this, please click here.  

In this blog, I'll talk about some of my travels and experiences associated with creating and getting the word out about my doodles. And I'll talk about what's going on behind the workshop door, on the doodling desk.