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what does a writing coach do?
I guess you could say I’ve been writing a memoir for years now, ever since some friends and I started a monthly writing group and chose a “how to write a memoir” as a guide. (Oddly, none of us was actually planning to write a memoir; we just wanted to read the book.)1 Sometimes I…
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when writing gets boring
The other day I asked a client how his memoir was going, and he told me he was thinking of quitting. “It’s getting boring, reliving the same events over and over,” he said. “I’ve already told the story a hundred times; it’s not new anymore.” This struck me because I often talk about writing as…
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did you see the pigeon?
Soon after I got to Peru, I was walking along the boardwalk in San Bartolo. Several stories below the ocean crashed into the shore, unburdened by swimmers or surfers. Cevicherias sat empty, waiting for the summer crowd. I’d decided to learn Spanish about a week before, so naturally I started eavesdropping on everyone I passed.…
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if you understand calculus
When I was living in Brooklyn (a lifetime ago now), one of my roommates taught math at City College. He taught he same class every year: freshman-level calc. “Don’t you get bored teaching the same course?” I asked him once. “Wouldn’t you rather have some variety?” “No, I like this course,” he said. “Why?” I…
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music of waves
When I got to Punta Negra – a tiny, quiet beach town about 30 miles south of Lima – the first thing I noticed was the slow, bassy build of the waves. They were the biggest I’d ever seen, the loudest and slowest I’d ever heard. They crashed one by one, a slow motion metronome,…
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an epiphany at church
A snapshot of a memory: I’m seven or eight, at church, sitting in a short pew with my mom and sister. The choir is to our left, where my father stands with about half the teachers from my school. Sunlight streams in through the skylights onto the wooden altar steps. The choir sings—pretty, polyphonic, a…
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writing is like flowers.
You start with something pretty and attention-grabbing at the top. Something that makes people stop and look. But you can’t only have flower heads. You have to go down the stem, down to the root. That’s where the nutrients—the learning, the discovery, the shared reality is. That’s what grounds an idea and connects it to…
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how to learn a language
When I moved to Peru, I had some basic Spanish—a couple years in high school, some streaks on Duolingo. I hoped that might be useful, but I understood nothing. Now, more than two years later, I’ve improved somewhat. There are days when I feel bilingual. Other days I’ve still just arrived. It’s not linear. It’s maddening and hard. But it’s…
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what is garbage for?
When I was in college I used to walk around the campus’s lakes whenever the weather was nice. One night, spring of sophomore year, the sun was setting radiantly through the trees, pouring gold into its lake-mirror. It was so majestic it made my heart hurt. I felt helpless, like its beauty was too much,…
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in pursuit of a piano
Adults are always telling kids they can be anything they want. But is that true? On paper, maybe, in places with lots of upward mobility. But on an existential level? Aren’t we inexorably drawn to certain things, by virtue of what we’re actually good at and interested in? I remember one day during my first…
Kimberly Bunker, MFA 