Photo courtesy of Alexa Marcus

Fifty thousand minutes of Glee. The story of a rock. Plastic deck chairs. Church choir. These seemingly unrelated topics come together for four Sunday nights during the school year, where students gather in a basement strung with fairy lights and sprawl out on mismatched blankets. Pajamas are encouraged, and for the next couple of hours, everyone enters a space free of school, work, or stress. There’s no stage, just a projector, a comfy chair, and a space for honest, unfiltered storytelling. This is KTalks.

At KTalks there’s nothing at stake — just students showing up however they want to. Speakers find themselves reflecting and uncovering thoughts they didn’t even know they had. The themes of the talks are generally broad — growth, identity, relationships, transformation — yet deeply personal, making every talk an intimate window into someone’s life. 

KTalks began in 2012 as a response to a simple need: a platform for students to process and share the experiences that were shaping them. Founder and then-junior Rachel Binstock, reflecting on the origins of the event, wrote in a document passed down to future organizers:

“I remember seeing many friends in deep angst from experiences they were having … they had all this raw insight that was often tangled, painful, exciting, and deep but they had no space or impetus to sort through it.”

For Binstock, the event started as an act of quiet defiance. The first talk was named “Per Veritatem Vis,” WashU’s motto, meaning “strength through truth.” Binstock believed that this motto was not the guiding principle for a university “hungry to be on top and enlisting with little shame ethically ambiguous methods … to get there,” she wrote. For her, KTalks became a way to reclaim this idea — finding strength through sharing diverse experiences in a space unconstrained by the University.

Senior Clarissa Worthington, who gave a talk about the way the television comedy Glee, has shaped her worldview and her perspective on her family, shared how KTalks allowed her to hear different stories from people she sees every day. 

“It’s a reminder every single person has a story to tell,” she said, “and these people that you know well have parts of their lives that you still don’t know about them.”

In addition to being an enriching experience for audience members, KTalks is equally, if not more, rewarding for the speakers.

“Every night [leading up to the talk], I’d spend an hour journaling,” Worthington said. “There was so much that I had never really thought about but I had the opportunity to reflect on.”

For the organizers, the magic isn’t in speaking themselves — it’s in witnessing the event’s impact. Senior and co-organizer Zach Kahn described the event as a powerful reminder of the diversity of thought and experience that exists at WashU. 

Fellow co-organizer and senior April Springer echoed this sentiment, finding value in supporting others through the process. She describes each speaker growing and redefining their message as incredibly inspiring, adding that being a part of the team that helps make the event run is extremely gratifying.

“When it [runs] and we hear how people are impacted,” she said, “it’s awesome.”

Another way for students to get involved with KTalks is through mentoring. Two mentors and an auxiliary mentor are paired with each speaker to help them workshop their pieces, meeting four times throughout the process. 

For mentors, this experience can be a way for underclassmen to get involved with KTalks and to connect with upperclassmen. First-year and former mentor Alexa Marcus discovered KTalks through her sister, a former organizer. After attending her first event, she was awestruck by the “emotion and passion” of the speakers and volunteered to mentor. 

She instantly clicked with Worthington, her mentee, and described mentoring as one of the best experiences she’s had at WashU. 

“I think it’s very sweet that we’re sharing our experiences and stories, not only for the sake of ourselves, but for the sake of our friends and also a bunch of strangers that we don’t know.” 

At a time when many intellectual conversations are overshadowed by polarization and fear, KTalks offers a refreshingly positive and uplifting environment. “It’s so important to have a period of time where you can just hear things that are good, enriching, thoughtful, that are not political, upsetting, or dark,” Springer said.

More than a decade since its creation, KTalks remains an underground tradition, passed down through students. Both Binstock and current organizers like Kahn and Springer emphasized that the beauty of KTalks is its ability to evolve, becoming whatever the students need it to be. 

“Don’t do this because you feel like you should,” Binstock wrote about continuing KTalk’s legacy. “Do it because you actually want to.”

For Binstock, the joy came from building a community that exists solely for the benefit of those involved. This spirit holds true today. 

“This club just feels very human in the way that it allows people to show up as their authentic selves,” Marcus said. “It’s all about learning from and growing with each other.” This year’s final installation of KTalks will be held on April 20. Check @ktalks__ on Instagram for location, time, and recordings of past talks.