The Rumpus Interview with Denise Duhamel
Poet Denise Duhamel talks about form, inspiration sparked by pole-dancing dolls and movies, and the art of constructing prose poems to fit on Venetian blinds.
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Improvising a Bone Graft
Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project.
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Readers Report Back From… Misery Loves Company
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Misery Loves Company.”
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Attention, Attention
Within the crowd is a bald-headed, bearded man. He carries a sketchpad that, if he were sitting cross-legged, would be big enough to cover his knees. He is not a reporter. “The funeral is over, but the corpse is still grooving,” he writes. The man is Shel Silverstein.
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Five Reasons to Kiss My Gynecologist
My gynecologist makes me feel like the complex whole I am. He makes me feel both normal and unique, recognizes that my body and my emotions are inextricably connected.
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The Rumpus Interview with Luis Negrón
Puerto Rican writer, journalist, editor, and queer activist Luis Negrón talks about his first collection to appear in English, working with translator Suzanne Jill Levine, and writing about people who live on the margins of the margins.
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FUNNY WOMEN #100: Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel
A lot of women people (as opposed to men people, or just “people”) are upset that Wikipedia editors have created a subcategory for “American Women Novelists.” But I’m not.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #181
YAWNING
★★★★★ (2 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing yawning.
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The Rumpus Interview with Miracle Jones
At a time when most authors, and even editors, are still trying to get a handle on this whole digital publishing thing, simply publishing e-books is already a thing of the past for writer Miracle Jones.
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Multiplicity
As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Ghost Lives
“Here’s what you do when that pile starts talking. You light a match. Light it all on fire and watch it burn with a combination of sadness and elation.”
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THE LOVE SONG OF ISAAC FITZGERALD
For those of you who have never had the pleasure of meeting Isaac Fitzgerald, but have been avid readers of the Rumpus, what you should know is this:
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The Island of Stopped Clocks: Inside Cuba 50 Years after the Revolution
In a museum in Havana there are two skulls
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My Imaginary Bunker
The recent activity in North Korea has urban survivalist websites humming. I wish I didn’t know. Some people watch rom-coms or eat fried Oreos as a guilty pleasure; I quietly troll urban survivalist websites.
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The Rumpus Interview with Claire Rosen
Most compelling about the work of photographer Claire Rosen is how fantasy and the natural world come together.
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We Are Only So Much Monkey: Lessons Learned From Failure
The earliest piece of advice my mother ever gave me was simply this: “Marry a man, Amy. Not a monkey.”
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Rock Out with Your Book Out #2: Writer Ariel Gore’s Steely Dan Detox
Hip Mama, which started as Ariel Gore’s student project at Mills College in Oakland and debuted as a zine in 1993, elevated Gore to rockstar status
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Let’s Make A Movie
The Rumpus is producing our first movie, Happy Baby. We start shooting May 14, in New York. We need lots of extras. If you’d like to be an extra send an email to april.xiong AT gmail.com.
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Rejection Sucks and Then You Die: How to Take a Dear Sad Sack Letter (and Shove it)
In what job other than writing must you seek out frequent and concrete rejection? Okay, fine, but go get your own self-pitying rant.
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The Rumpus Interview with Ben Greenman
Humor and experimental fiction—charting the meaning of charts, playing with ideas like a slippage between the gears of perception and reality—have been Ben Greenman’s stock in trade.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #180
ALPHABET SOUP
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing alphabet soup.
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On Reading
So deep into this other world do I drop, I no longer notice, nor do I care, what’s happening outside the book, in the “real” world. Like a drug, the book seduces me. I can’t resist.
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THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH OLOF ARNALDS
Iceland’s Ólöf Arnalds (cousin to contemporary classical wunderkind Olafur Arnalds) is only in her early 30′s, yet has already charted an impressive career path that is only gaining traction with the release of her latest full-length, Sudden Elevation.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Spill
“There is a point at which mourners become weak. When they crack and spill. That is what I was waiting for.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Louise Mathias
I may have seemed in need of connection to Louise Mathias, when, upon meeting her, I gushed about what Joshua Tree meant to me. It’s true that I’m in need of connection, always, especially with poets, especially to places like the high desert
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Reelings #5: TO THE WONDER
Malick seems to be interested in what is outside and underneath and around the framework of our lives. He’s not interested in the stories we tell as much as the moments that cause us to throw our hands up into the air.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
David Bowie, who isn’t doing press for his new album The Next Day, provides Rick Moody with a workflow diagram for the album. A Rumpus exclusive.
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The Sacred and the Profane
There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British…
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