(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Kirsten Irving
The pressure to prove ourselves can have a distorting effect, causing us to doubt our instincts in favor of following others we perceive to be experts or “genuine.” ...more
Posts Tagged: Abuse
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we are born of pregnant pauses.” Pausing for readers to meet her at this natal location of identity and origin, Thom finds traces of her voice scattered across a map of a place she’s constantly retracing.
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How The Keepers Reframes Confession as a Feminist Act
Critics have noted how The Keepers is similar to other prestige documentaries but with a significant difference—its focus on the victims and their stories. ...more
This Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of the truth.
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Songs of Our Lives: Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
There’s you and him, and you and me. You seem to want each of us all to yourself, and that’s fine; you’re the one we both care about. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
At Catapult, Arielle Robbins writes a powerful story of coping with the legacy of sexual abuse. “From the Abuse Survivor’s Workbook” delivers the story, as the title suggests, in segments from the guided-journaling workbook sometimes prescribed as part of therapy, offering glimpses into the memories, anxieties, and daily life of the story’s survivor, Brie.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell discusses her collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the natural world as a character, and finding writing from the male point of view easier. ...more
The Rumpus Mini Interview Project #75: Deborah Kampmeier
I met Deborah Kampmeier at a workshop in November. We were two weeks post-election; the room was raw with emotion, and electric with conversations about resistance. This tall, badass woman dressed in all black sauntered into the room, and chose a seat at the table.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Elkin
Writer and academic Lauren Elkin discusses her latest book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, the freedoms and constraints of urban space for women, and the power of first person. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses Abandon Me, confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and searching for identity. ...more
This Week in Essays
Through her work with Doctors Without Borders, Caitlin L. Chandler offers us a glimpse of what life is like on the Syrian border for Guernica.
For Real Life magazine, Christopher Schaberg examines the symbolism of airports as “fraught borderlands” perfect for a protest.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jason Diamond
Jason Diamond discusses his memoir Searching for John Hughes, confronting his childhood abuse, avoiding his parents, and writing about all of it. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti discusses her memoir, Sex Object, how the experiences she touches on in her book shaped her, and how she discovered herself outside of those experiences. ...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
This week at Guernica’s newly re-designed website, author Jean McGarry has a short story, “Come to Me,” about an abusive relationship and the tangled dynamics of power and devotion that can hold its victims in place.
...moreThat was day four; on day one, I found underwear, not my own, in my underwear drawer.
The Rumpus Interview with Laura Albert
Laura Albert discusses her alter ego JT LeRoy, Jeff Feuerzeig's documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story, her complicated relationship with her mother, and life as a hustler. ...more
The Trouble with Confidence
“But what are the statistics? Aren’t you taking a similar risk just driving?” Wide-eyed, attentive, he leans forward slightly. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, VICE’s 2016 Fiction Issue is out, with work from exciting voices like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, and more. This year’s fiction issue, like the magazine itself, is an engaging, diverse, and sometimes in-your-face read with topics ranging from smart cars to campus rape, love triangles to the meaning of life.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Shane McCrae
I think that the moment we’re living in offers the best opportunity we’ve had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. ...more
Missing Lorraine
I guess I was somewhat relieved that my aunt realized she wouldn’t survive another day in her apartment, and I cautiously believed that she did want to live, at least for the next ninety days. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: (On My Throat)
...the connection between the throat and heart and that which they represent: voice and love. ...more
Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Michelle Hoover
You see, when a man believes he has the power to grant a woman personhood by admiring her looks or her body’s use to him... he also believes he has the power to take it away. Trump believes he has this power. ...more
The Last Book I Loved: The Telling
After what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I've gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators. ...more
When 2 Become 1
...moreOne day I went to work on my novel and, to my surprise, a part of it had been rewritten. My boyfriend, seeing my unease, told me that he had done it, that he thought I needed to be funnier. “But it’s mine,” I told him.
