A Place Where We Are Everything
Oftentimes when having difficult conversations about complex topics, certain kinds of people (the small-minded, feeble-minded, profoundly ignorant, etc.) will try to derail the conversation.
...morePosts by: Roxane Gay
The Alienable Rights of Women
Lately, I read the news and have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.
A Round Up of Kony 2012 Links
Yesterday I clicked on a link from my Twitter feed that took me to a YouTube video about a man named Jason Russell and his son and then I realized that the video was in fact about Joseph Kony and a decades old conflict in Uganda only Kony is no longer in Uganda and the conflict has been going on for decades.
...moreThe 2011 VIDA Count
VIDA has once again released their count, where they look at prominent magazines and identify the gender breakdown of writers, reviewers, and books reviewed. Once again, the numbers are revealing.
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What We Need to Know
Since writing “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” I have started paying more attention to how the media reports on sexual abuse and rape cases, the ways the media frames these issues, and how they report on the victims.
...moreSeriously Though, When Is White History Month?
It’s just that damn, every month feels like black history month. Black people get everything. Why is it wrong to feel white pride? Black people also get their own TV station–they have BET while white people only have ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the CW, and the hundreds of other television networks.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview With Alex Gilvarry
Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking) is an original, smart, and incisive novel about a Filipino fashion designer, Boyet Hernandez, who is held at Guantanamo Bay after authorities discover his ties to an alleged terrorist, Ahmed Quereshi, the man who funded Boyet’s fashion label.
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
Resolved: A Year of Great(er) Expectations
The most frustrating part of not being able to keep quiet about the willful ways in which people are perfectly happy to enable the status quo is that when you voice concerns about the lack of diversity in any given arena, you are automatically positioned as that person, the shrill and humorless obsessive who simply cannot let things be.
Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence
The measure of excellence is a pursuit with which writers and critics are often intensely concerned. At the end of each year any number of magazines and organizations issue a list or series of lists to quantify the year’s best books, stories, poems, and essays.
Once More, a Vocabulary Primer
The horrifying crisis unfolding at Penn State reminds us, yet again, of the carelessness of language used when we write about sexual violence.
In an AP article printed in the New York Times the headline reads, “2 Top Officials Step Down Amid Penn State Sex Scandal.
...moreOnce, We Were (Not) Troy Davis And Then We Were Something Else
Life is the one disaster that is also a miracle. Or perhaps life is the one miracle that is also a disaster.
Roxane Gay: The Last Book I Loved, This Is Not Your City
When I was a kid, I loved participating in my school’s science fair each year even though I did not necessarily have any aptitude for the scientific.
My experiments were never that inspiring but I certainly thought they were—volcanoes erupting with the magical properties of food coloring, baking soda, and vinegar, a suspension bridge made out of balsa wood and kite string that could hold a heavy brick, a microscope set up with a dark red smear of my blood on a carefully prepared slide—simple experiments that made me feel like I had accomplished something innovative, even in the face of the far bolder experiments around me.
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When my brothers and I Tragedy. Call. Compassion. Response.
Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension.
Vocabulary Primer
This is a vocabulary-based reference for Roxane Gay’s recently published “Still With the Scarlet Letters”
Definitions of Key Terms:
...moreStill with the Scarlet Letters
Last week journalist Mac McClelland wrote a brutal, exceptional essay for Good where she plainly discussed her experience with PTSD and her desire for violent sex as one means of coping with the atrocities she had witnessed as a human rights reporter.
The Rumpus Interview with Blake Butler
Blake Butler is the author of There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books, 2010), and Ever (Calamari Press, 2009).
Where I Write #9: A Cabin on the Lakefront
I stopped counting when I reached eighteen moves. That was a few moves ago. I am very good at packing my life into boxes.
The Careless Language of Sexual Violence
There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale. I read an FUNNY WOMEN #14: A Play About the Men at My Gym in Five Acts
ACT ONE
Scene: DEREK*, is in his early thirties with a military haircut, moderately toned flab, and tinted eyeglasses. He grabs the 50-pound barbells from the weight room rack and groans awkwardly
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