The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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Posts Tagged: addiction
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
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The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #130: Kaveh Akbar
“I took a six or seven year break from sending out my own poems, just waiting for my abilities to catch up a bit with my ambitions.”
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House Rules: Lessons in Autofiction
You try to pass yourself off as a rock and the water just laughs. You try anyway.
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The Intersection of Hope and Despair: Talking with Julien Baker
Julien Baker discusses her latest album, Turn Out the Lights, the ways in which she approaches writing about difficult subjects, and the redemptive power in being open about sadness.
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Tarnished, Shiny Exteriors: Kate Braverman’s A Good Day for Seppuku
With A Good Day for Seppuku, Braverman has written a collection of intense images and exacting language
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Passing as Privileged”
I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
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Voices on Addiction: Dead Eyes and Bob Barker Crocs
Broken people are drawn to other broken people. Comparing scars. Laying belly to belly. Two similar pieces of different puzzles.
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After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
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Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
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Rumpus Exclusive: Three Excerpts from AFTERWORDS
Three exclusive excerpts from …AFTERWORDS, a new series of distinctive commentaries on great works of contemporary literature from our friends at Fiction Advocate!
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Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
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Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prescriptions
I wore sobriety like a shirt that was too tight in the shoulders, and everyone around me knew it.
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The Peep King’s Legacy: A Family Portrait
The day after Hugh Hefner died, I received a text from my sister that our grandfather was starring alongside James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal in HBO’s new series, The Deuce.
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Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
I imagine the box of obsidian flakes and chunks at home—gathered from explorations in the desert. Their edges cut through skin, draw blood.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar discusses his new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, finding community in poetry, books on craft, and mining the supernatural for poems.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #104: sam sax
I could write a bullet list of sam’s sax’s recent accomplishments, but the wiser thing would be to advise you to pick up his newly released book MADNESS.
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Death, Satan, and Cats: A Conversation with Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine discusses his newest novel, The Angel of History, surviving the AIDS epidemic, and the role of religion in his life and writing.
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Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
Sometimes life is so big and so loud and being a human being in the world is so much I feel overwhelmed and need a cocoon.
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Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
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A Magpie for the Lord
What would it be like to not be us? We were trying to figure out so much about the world then, and this is something we could never get to the bottom of.
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Voices on Addiction: Keys
He wasn’t an alcoholic! He was just British. I was starting to think that this bullet was long past being dodged.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
...moreThe Summer of Lana Del Rey
Three summers ago, I did nothing but drive around Middlebury, Vermont, blasting Lana Del Rey and chain-smoking cigarettes. It was—and I will be dramatic, because that is how it felt—an act of survival. That summer I was in an academic program where we were only allowed to speak or be spoken to in French. But […]
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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