Skip to the content of the web site.

Mrs. Kim Jernigan (MA 1981)

“Research is nothing more than following the trail of your own curiosity. You don't need to be brilliant, only open and inquisitive.”

     Kim Jernigan (MA 1981) remembers being in a quandary with which every graduate student can sympathize: owing a professor a long-overdue paper, and not knowing how to finish it. The professor in question was Dr. Stan McMullen, and “I felt so abashed I'd hide behind the frozen peas so as not to encounter him in the grocery store!” she recalls. “Eventually, he called me into his office and said, ‘What do you need to get on with this essay?’ ‘A deadline’, I said. ‘Okay, how about next Thursday?’” Three days off! She wrote the paper, and received her lowest mark on a grad essay (B+). However, Dr. McMullen provided her with many helpful suggestions for improvement. She used his suggestions to rework the paper and won a departmental prize for it. Yes, “you can sometimes wrest triumph from defeat!”

     Not only Dr. McMullen but many of the professors Kim encountered at UW influenced her greatly. During her master’s studies, she took away other valuable lessons from Dr. Bill MacNaughton, Dr. Walter Martin, and Dr. Ken Ledbetter. Dr. MacNaughton, she remembers, “had a wonderful way of taking the terror out of scholarship. He'd come into class and say something like, "I was rereading this novel of Twain's and it occurred to me to wonder what Twain himself was reading at the time he wrote it, what the issues of the day were, so I wandered over to the library and checked out the periodicals from that year.”

     Dr. Martin was tremendously generous. When she asked him to do a reading course with her on Alice Munro, he hosted her each week “at his house in the country, [where] his lovely wife Trish would make us all lunch, and then we'd while away the afternoon talking literature. It was only after that I realized, blushingly, that he had already stepped back from teaching (though as a professor emeritus, he maintained an office at the university) and was providing this richly engaging tutorial on his own time!”

     Kim remembers Dr. Ledbetter as a showman who loved to play devil's advocate. “Alas, I often took the bait--and it was very clarifying to have to argue my point with him! But taking the devil's part wasn't all strategic. He had unconventional views about many American classics, and often made me see with new eyes.”

     Many years after completing her master’s, Kim returned to UW to pursue a doctorate degree. “I never finished. I got as far as the pre-dissertation oral, intending to write about Alice Munro. My committee was positive about the project but by then I had three children, a part-time job in the University's writing centre, and a literary magazine on the go that likely wouldn't survive without me. But I've never regretted my time in the program.”

     Kim has worked as a tutor in the writing clinic and as a sessional instructor in the English and Speech Communication Departments. But a volunteer position sparked a lifelong passion. While still a student, Kim began volunteering for The New Quarterly, an independent, not-for-profit literary magazine based in St. Jerome’s University College. Twenty-eight years later, she is still working at the magazine. The majority of the time she has worked on the magazine has remained on a volunteer basis, “gradually squeezing out much of my paid work, but the gratification of watching writers mature and feeling like I've been part of that in some small way is significant.”