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greg and jessi
“Say a character walks into a room right as something crashes through the ceiling,” my student Greg was saying. Greg was a senior majoring in creative writing and physics, and he often stayed after class to pepper me with questions. “How would you explain why he looks up?” My TA Chloé and I looked at…
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the right person
Last spring, I had a call with a woman who wanted to write a memoir of her career in the military and then in crypto. It was instantly clear that we are opposites in every way. Her style and background were so vastly different from any project I’d worked on that I didn’t expect us…
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compromise, vicarious
Sometimes I think about what I learned in school. It’s hard to quantify, exactly. Yeah, I learned about cells and rhombuses and World War II. Mostly, I learned how to get good grades. I learned this quickly, so I did well in school, so teachers said I could “be anything.” But the older I got,…
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a gift, not a given
“I was in a gang growing up.” “I’m a slam poet. I actually have a show on Friday if anyone is free.” “I just moved here from Berlin.” Well, geez. How was I supposed to follow those? I was 21, in a two-week training that kicked off my AmeriCorps year, faced with the hated icebreaker…
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begin anywhere.
“I’ve been thinking of writing a book for years,” a friend told me the other day. “But…where do you start?” I hear this all the time. Many people have ideas for a book—yet most never get written, in part because getting started is one of the hardest things to do, ever. I don’t have all…
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how to find your voice
The other day I saw an Instagram post from a fashion icon and poet, where someone asked them, “How do you find your style?” They answered, “Heal.” Wow. What an answer. And how true. You can only know what clothing expresses your inner self when you know and accept that inner self. You can only…
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water and shared water
One night eleven years ago, my best friend came over for dinner. We were chatting along as usual when I began chopping a sweet potato, and she interrupted herself to say, “What are you doing?” I stopped. “What do you mean?” “The pieces are so uneven,” she said (not critically—just neutrally, surprised, curious).“You’re just, like,…
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the silliness of thinking…
When I was 19, I spent a month in Ghana. Inexplicably, in the months leading up to this, I pinned a strange hope on that trip: that when I came back, I’d be able to improvise on piano. (This is exactly as illogical as it sounds. True, I would be taking drum lessons and a…
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and that makes you hard to see
After college, I worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Rochester, New York. My friends and I spent a lot of time at dive bars, namely one where we could spin a wheel to win cheap beer and hog the jukebox all night with our laundry quarters. We talked about anything and everything, and one night,…
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advice from a stranger
In February 2020, I took a road trip around the U.S. I met my friend Sam in New Mexico, and we decided to hike the Atalaya Mountain Trail. Around 8,000 feet we passed another hiker, a guy in his sixties decked out in hiking gear, standing in the middle of the trail. He waved his…
Kimberly Bunker, MFA 