Turkey Lurkey
Gladden, Julie

JULIE: When I was in elementary school I remember writing a poem in fourth grade. I don't remember what the prompt was but I wrote a poem about a turkey named Lurkey. It went something like this: "On Thanksgiving day we had a turkey. This turkey's name happened to be Lurkey. Lurkey was fun, Lurkey was won by my father at a game, that's how he got his name." And it was just something that I made up but my teacher really liked it and then my mother sent my sister to try out for a movie by standing up in front of these people in a dress and saying this poem. Well anyway, or some reason that just happens to be a piece of writing that got me going. That's when I started writing and I started journaling. I was in GT and they had us write a journal and as a matter of fact a couple of weeks ago I just went back through these journals and I could not believe what I was thinking and doing back when I was ten and eleven years old; it was pretty amazing. So I think that journaling is just wonderful. I had journals in high school, I had journals in my early college career and just going back to these writings of what I thought and felt at the time, it's really invaluable to me.