A few weeks later I found myself sitting under a giant pin oak on the ISU lawn listening to a guy named Karl talk about writing. Karl didn't want to be called Dr. Barnaby. He told us to call him Karl. Karl was hip; he was beatnik; he was with-it; he was makin' the scene, baby. But then, it was the late 70's, and everyone was trippin' back then and writing poetry and hangin' out and growin' their hair long.
I grew a grand, sweeping full coal-black beard, too. I returned to my roots of writing long hand on yellowed second-sheets of cheap paper . . . great heaping mounds of gobblety-gook that consumed class time and made the other students in the writing class scream, "Dig it!", and "Right on!" and "Wanna hang out at my pad later and listen to the Doobie Brothers?"
Karl dug me, too. I enrolled in a many a writing class with Karl. He didn't own a TV or a radio, lived in a shanty, and wore the same clothes to class each day. I did the same. By the second week of class everyone under Karl's tutelage could identify the others in the class by scent alone. But we were writing our guts out and it smelled like it.
One day Karl told me, "You might want to slow down a little. You're writing so much, I can't read all this stuff. You're like a machine. And how do you afford the paper?"
Been the story of my life with editors ever since. But thanks, Karl, baby. I dig you!
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