Tag: ghostwriter
-
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…
-
a night at the tiki
“What do you do?” a random drunk guy yelled over the crowd. The guitarist in the corner was on his third “Wagon Wheel” of the night, so you know the tiki bar was hopping. A little tipsy myself, I yelled back, “I’m a writer!” A moment of alarm. Did that sound dumb? Would he laugh?…
-
a bridge, a mask
Last week I sat down to write an essay about the year I spent leading creativity workshops in a women’s prison. It felt like an obvious topic, one that would hook people’s interest and inevitably lead somewhere interesting. But it didn’t. Every paragraph was a dead end. Finally I walked away. Later that night, though,…
-
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…
-
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,…
Kimberly Bunker, MFA 