{"id":11698,"date":"2026-07-17T22:25:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/?page_id=11698"},"modified":"2026-08-04T12:41:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:41:54","slug":"bunny-and-free","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/?page_id=11698","title":{"rendered":"Bunny and Free (2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Bunny and Free<\/em> brings together two interrelated series of essays published initially on Substack in spring\/summer 2026.\u00a0 It is a seemingly desultory collection whose through-line may, at first, be hard to discern. There is, though, a strong emotional undertow that holds them all together. Or at least it felt that way to me writing them. The focal point of Bunny<\/em> is V.R. \u201cBunny\u201d Lang, a poet\/playwright who came of age as an artist in the 1950s and died young, in 1955. She is best known as Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s (of Lunch Poems<\/em> fame) \u201cmuse,\u201d with whom he shared both poems and lunches starting in the late 1940s until her untimely death. \u201cMuse\u201d is such a dismissive way to characterize her role in their relationship, which was deep and loving, she serving more often as his mentor than his inspiration. Theirs is a beautiful story of true friendship and mutual trust. The focal point of Free<\/em> is the character who came to me in a \u201clucid\u201d dream on the first anniversary of my wife\u2019s death ten years ago, playing out a stunning morality tale that took me months to fully decode. He and that dream became the capstones for the first book I wrote from the shadow of that loss, This Fall<\/em>, still my keystone book. Because I was discombobulated when I started all this, the self-revelatory aspect of the Bunny<\/em> series left me very anxious, enough so that I actually unpublished three of the essays. When I reread them after I started Free,<\/em> I couldn\u2019t fathom what I was so unnerved about, and I re-published them. Here\u2019s what I concluded: Last spring I was feeling vulnerable, unsafe, really, a state of mind that inclines me (as I assume it would anyone) to avoid sharing overly personal material that others might use to judge or criticize me. Now I am serene and confident again, back on my game, so can easily assume such a risk. That\u2019s a lot to get from writing, which is the primary reason I do so much of it. No matter my discombobulation, hunky dory is usually waiting at the other end of the line, of all those lines I have to write to get there. I hope you will enjoy reading about my \u201ctrip.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bunny and Free 8:3<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Bunny and Free brings together two interrelated series of essays published initially on Substack in spring\/summer 2026.\u00a0 It is a seemingly desultory collection whose through-line may, at first, be hard to discern. There is, though, a strong emotional undertow that holds them all together. Or at least it felt that way to me writing them. … Continue reading Bunny and Free (2026)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2605,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11698","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11698"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11725,"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11698\/revisions\/11725"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulkameen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}