The Journey

Every writer talks about the moment they knew they had a story worth telling. For David J. Bunnell, that moment did not arrive in a classroom or a writing workshop. It arrived on a bus.

While David was commuting 2 1/2 Years, back-and-forth by bus, he often thought about, even pondered the portion of his life spent working with his young bride, inside a fully operational mortuary during college.  Somewhere in those long rides, alone with everything he had seen and carried throughout that experience, he started to believe he might actually have a novel in him.

He did not write from imagination. He wrote from a life fully lived.

When he finally sat down to write, it did not happen the way most people imagine a novel gets written. There was no writer's retreat, no quiet cabin, no dedicated office. He wrote his first novel in thirty days, in a thirty two square foot furnace room in his basement, while his children ran and laughed on the floor above him. He had to stop more than once while writing, not because he lost the thread of the story, but because what he was putting on the page was that real. Some scenes were close enough to his own experience that he needed a moment before he could keep going.

He finished that first manuscript in a month.

Then he carried it for twenty seven years.

That is the part of the story that is easy to skip past, but it might be the most honest part of all. A finished novel does not always mean a published one. Life continued in the way life does, work, family, the ordinary and demanding business of getting through each day, and the manuscript waited. It was not forgotten. It was simply carried, the way you carry anything that matters too much to throw away and feels too big to finish dealing with all at once. From time to time he would come back to it, add a little, adjust a little, and then set it down again.

Somewhere in that same stretch of years, two more stories took shape alongside it. One drawn from his years inside the mortuary. One drawn from his own experience of being bullied and starting over in a new town as a young athlete. Three very different books, but each one built from the same foundation, a refusal to write anything he had not actually lived.

It takes a particular kind of patience, or maybe stubbornness, to sit on a finished piece of work for nearly three decades and still believe it deserves to be read. David never set out to be a fast author or a prolific one. He set out to tell the truth as he experienced it, the mortuary, the mountains, the football field, and he was willing to wait until the timing, and perhaps his own readiness, caught up with the writing.

Today, all three of those stories exist as finished, published novels: The Winds, Body Run, and Touchdown Jesus. Given everything else about his life, a Plant Manager, a lifelong athlete, a man who has been through more physical hardship than most people face in a lifetime, and by his own account someone for whom English was the one subject that ever gave him real trouble in school, the fact that any of these books exist at all still strikes him as a little unlikely.

But that has always been the case with David Bunnell. He does not write from imagination. He writes from a life fully lived. And some stories, it turns out, are worth the wait.