The Text Is My Body: A Conversation with Gabrielle Civil
Performance artist and poet Gabrielle Civil discusses her book, Swallow the Fish, how technology has shaped reactions to female nudity, and the importance of risking change.
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Posts Tagged: detroit
Album of the Week: Jay Daniel’s Broken Knowz
When it comes to musical legacies, Detroit’s is singular: talking about “Detroit sound” can refer to a jump into Motown’s soul vibes or a dive into the roots of techno’s hammering basses, two apparently distant and antipodal hearts that have more in common than we might think. Jay Daniel, 25 years old and son of Planet E […]
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What We Lost: Undoing the Fairy Tale Narrative of Adoption
The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
...moreThis Week In Indie Boosktores
A century-old Greek bookstore has closed due to the debt crisis. Colleges are giving up on campus bookstores, sending students to Amazon instead. You too could start your own bookstore.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sara Benincasa
Comedian Sara Benincasa opens up about her latest book Real Artists Have Day Jobs, adjusting to success, Venn-diagramming love, and the loss of Morley Safer.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
...morePlaces to Call Home
Rather than being shot at, my new fear would be of seeing the officers unleash violence upon a helpless body, having to watch within the confines of my approximated uniform, padded with a bullet proof vest, which would incontrovertibly claim me, identify my orientation toward the police and not the helpless body, drown me out […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Angela Flournoy
My ambition is personal. I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed.
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Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Vickie Stringer
Vickie Stringer talks about her first novel Let That Be the Reason, her Triple Crown Publishing venture, life in prison, and making hip-hop literature.
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The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
Author Matt Bell talks video games, fiction, nonfiction, politics, empathy, and his new books, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Scrapper.
...more(Don’t) Stick To What You Know
At the Atlantic, Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, discusses her struggle with writing about Detroit without having lived there, and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work helped her give herself permission to write outside her own experiences: It’s not about having a background that lines up with the characters you’re writing about, I realized. […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Marge Piercy
Dara Barnat talks with Marge Piercy about growing up in Detroit, making a kind of Judaism through poetry, and living close to the natural world.
...moreLittle Free Libraries Come to Detroit
Detroit has been trying to remake itself as a city that welcomes creative people, particularly writers, such as with the Write A House program that grants writers a house in the city. Now, Detroit is getting twenty Little Free Libraries, the first of which have been installed in the city, reports the Detroit News.
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Detroit New Hollywood Vegas: Notes from an Extra
Juliette Lewis will decide to stage dive onto just me. Later, Drew Barrymore will make Alia Shawkat cry in front of a hundred extras. Later, Juno will face-plant. Hard.
...moreHomesteading Detroit
Detroit has a large inventory of vacant homes. Two years ago, Toby Barlow thought a great way to repopulate the city–and get new taxpayers–would be giving houses away to writers. Write a House plans on giving away its first house this year with Billy Collins and Major Jackson judging applicants’ writing. Poets & Writers has […]
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Detroit: America’s Ciudad Juárez
Even before there was a war in Ciudad Juárez, I remember that Juárez had the feel of a war zone. It wasn’t until I visited Detroit for the first time that I rediscovered this feeling all over again.
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The Rumpus Interview with Frank H. Wu
Frank H. Wu, the Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings College of the Law, talks about writing, race, assimilation, his hometown of Detroit, and the similarities between the Vincent Chin and Trayvon Martin cases.
...moreFormer Detroit Autoworker Named Poet Laureate for 2011-12
Philip Levine, at 83 years old, has been named the Poet Laureate for 2011-2012. As a former autoworker from Detroit, his poetry draws largely on his working-class Jewish background. Deemed “America’s most acclaimed working-class poet,” his work expresses the “simple truths” of everyday life in post-industrial America.
...moreFetishizing Ruins
“So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.” At […]
...morePolitics Sunday
“One in four Americans is employed to protect the rich.” Here’s an underreported story: Dominicans are coming to the aid of Haitians, despite a less-than-idyllic history between the two countries. VICE is taking a ton of heat for its treatment of Liberia in “The Vice Guide to Liberia.” A very cool looking architectural installation that […]
...moreMorning Coffee
NY Times on how your brain physically manifests abstract ideas and the Tanzanian Spray Toad. The Hubble has detected an alien spacecraft (or just a comet or something, whatever). The universe is hella closer to death than we thought. (via Gerrycanavan) “Don’t you ever link to anything nonscience related?” Here are some pictures of a […]
...moreMorning Coffee
Don’t tell anyone, but today is the last day of the year. Other rad things you can make out of books. Can farming save Detroit? Sema Bekirovic takes some pretty impressive pictures. Romeo and Juliet as you misremember it. Why do we slip? A depressing note to end the year on, the decline of newspaper […]
...moreLazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff
About a week ago Vice published an amusing article by Thomas Morton about what happens when journalists from outside Detroit come into the city to do a story: they cover their preconceptions, shoot “ruin porn,” and miss actual stories right under their noses — and in the case of the Michigan Central Depot, right behind their […]
...moreAn Agrarian Revolution In Detroit (And Oakland)
“Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry […]
...moreBlue Collar: A 1978 Film for 2009
While catching up on my long-neglected film reading, I found this fascinating article by Saul Austerlitz about Paul Schrader’s debut film, Blue Collar, which stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto as auto-plant assembly line workers driven to robbery by frustration and deprivation. Austerlitz describes the film as “a union noir for the 1970s, […]
...moreDetroit’s Beautiful Ruins
A haunting essay/slide show about Detroit. The day before I arrived, the frozen body of a man was found in the elevator shaft of an abandoned warehouse; only the feet were visible, the rest of the body being entirely encased in ice. The homeless men living in the warehouse, treating the corpse as unremarkable, ignored […]
...moreDetroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline
A Time/CNN photo-essay.
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