Tag: memoirwriting
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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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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…
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on keeping the channel open
I just counted, and I have 37 houseplants. I only bought about 10–the rest came from propagating, cuttings, and lately, now that my compost is the ripe old age of six months, from the soil itself. In fact, so many seedlings have sprouted that I just scooped some compost into a tin can and am…
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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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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 