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Suzanne Bunkers

Suzanne Bunkers
Suzanne Bunkers

Dear diary

English graduate, Minnesota professor tells other stories in edited volumes.

When she was 10 years old, Suzanne Bunkers received a Christmas gift that has kept on giving.

"My sister and I received matching diaries for Christmas that year," she said. "It was a one-year diary that lasted for several years."

Some days Bunkers would write an entry. There were other days she didn't have anything to say. The pages in the matching diary was long finished by the time she entered high school, but the entries continued.

It wasn't until she started college at Iowa State University however that she became almost fanatical about diary entries.

"A couple of other friends in the dorms decided we wanted to keep a diary," she recalled. "It was more open-ended and I only wrote when there was something of consequence that I wanted to remember."

By then, Bunkers had moved away from a conventional diary to a lab book, which she continues to use to this day. And that isn't the only change in Bunkers' diaries.

"Initially I would write only what happened in my life," she said, "before I gradually shifted to how I was feeling - the ups and downs of college life."

Over the years Bunkers had accumulated so many diaries that she donated over 100 to the Iowa Women's Archives about six years ago. This summer, she anticipates donating another 40 or 50 notebooks to the archives.

"Maybe I'll end up a subject of somebody's studies later on," she says.

Bunkers is familiar with such studies because she conducts them as well. The Minnesota State University (Mankato) English professor has authored and edited several books, primarily in the fields of autobiography, memoirs, Midwestern American history, women's studies and immigration history.

A primary focus of her work is "to bring together both diaries from historical society archives and diaries still in possession of the diarists or their descendents so that such important primary documents might be accessible to a wide readership."

The two-time Iowa State English graduate (B.S., 1972 and M.A., 1974) has published such works as Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler, Sarah Gillespie: A Midwestern Farm Girls' Diary, A Pioneer Farm Girl and The Diary of Caroline Seabury.

"I love to work with manuscripts and diaries," Bunkers says. "I read them first, then analyze them, contact relatives that may have other background relevant to the diaries, conduct historical research - essentially look at the diaries in a number of different ways.

"I try to find out what the diary reflects about that person."

In The Diary of Caroline Seabury, Bunkers was attracted to the story of a young schoolteacher from Massachusetts who moved to, and lived in Mississippi in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Now the book is used in history and literature classes to give a different look to what life was like in the Deep South during this time period.

Another Bunkers book, Sarah Gillespie: A Midwestern Farm Girl's Diary, was gleaned from 17 volumes of the country schoolteacher's handwritten diaries from 1870 to 1952.

"I was really interested in what it was like to be a country school teacher," Bunkers said.

Gillespie's diaries tell a story of a teacher that was instrumental in establishing a general curriculum for country schools in Iowa and whom later became a county school superintendent in the state. In the end, Bunkers wound up using only about 15% of the work available to her from Gillespie's writings.

"Sarah's life just made for too good of a story not to tell," Bunkers said.

Another story that Bunkers that was too good not to tell was In Search of Susanna, an intergenerational story of her great-great-grandmother and herself. The book traces Bunkers' process of unraveling family secrets and tracing ancestral lines, both in Luxembourg and in the United States. It interweaves Bunker's life story with that of her great-great-grandmother as their lives and those of their descendants unfolded.

The book was published as part of the University of Iowa Press's Singular Lives Series.

"Memoirs are a different type of work," Bunkers said. "I was interested in Susanna's story and it was a very satisfying type of work. Because of the interconnections between the two of us, I put more of myself into it than my other books."

A professor of English at Minnesota State since 1980, Bunkers was recently awarded the designation of Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the school. The honor is granted to tenured professors whose body of scholarship and current level of scholarly activity warrants distinction within the university community.