The Daily Rumpus
Get Our Overly Personal
Email Newsletter
“Funny Women” submissions don’t read themselves. Most of the time Assistant Regional Funny Woman Katie Burgess reads them (she wrote the infinitely funny “How to Read a Poem,” anthologized in Oxford University Press’s Humor: A Reader for Writers, and has since gone on to read slush).
...more
Following the recent announcement of its merger with Counterpoint Press, Catapult is starting a new season of writing workshops!
And, our own Funny Women Editor Elissa Bassist is among the featured instructors, teaching a two-day masterclass in humor writing, during which “each student will brainstorm, outline, write, and workshop a successful shortish parody/satire or die trying.” The course begins on September 24—head over to Catapult’s website for further info and to sign up!
...moreTime to gather for Seder: over at McSweeney’s, Rumpus Funny Women Editor Elissa Bassist has a handy guide (or a cautionary tale) of conversation topics to get through Passover’s rituals.
...moreLove our “Funny Women“ column as much as we do? Find out who “Funny Women” editor Elissa Bassist thinks is hilarious, courtesy of Vela Magazine.
...moreFunny Women editor Elissa Bassist has a very funny piece over at The New Yorker about the dating apps of 2014. This one sounds good:
...moreUnhinged
Description: Disconnect from old connections. Designed for the dumped, the living alone, and the emotionally delayed.
Rumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist is having a pity party and you’re invited. Check you coats and your positive attitude at the door and enjoy…or you know… don’t.
...more“I wrote down a few affirmations, discovered peace and serenity and my upper-arm obesity, but then I accidentally killed my succulent plant and Justin Bieber isn’t who I thought he was, so I was like, you know what?
Saturday 11/30: Indies First is a nationwide celebration of independent bookstores launched by author Sherman Alexie to support small businesses. Independent bookstores around New York City invited some of their favorite authors for appearances:
John Bemelmans Marciano, Emma Straub, Tim O’Mara, Jami Attenberg, Myke Cole, Amy Shearn, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Brandan Jay Sullivan, and Sarah McCarry will be at WORD Brooklyn, 11 a.m.
...moreOur girl Elissa Bassist lays some hella smart analysis on Orange is the New Black for Medium:
...moreTo see what’s been missing in popular culture is to see how comprehensive and refined the brainwashing has become….the number/diversity of women on-screen, the depth/complexity of their stories, the scope/span of their humanity—is one antidote to objectification.
The disparity of women writers in the publishing world has been an increasingly hot topic of late.
Flavorwire has compiled a list entitled “10 Women Who Should be Writing for ‘Harper’s,” and we’re excited that three of the women are our own essays editor Roxane Gay, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, and Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist!
...moreThe Equals Record asks Funny Women editor (and writer/motherfucker) Elissa Bassist what she’s reading offline.
She responds with a whole shelf’s worth of books, from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest to fellow funny woman Tina Fey’s autobiographical comedy Bossypants.
...more
The next Letter in the Mail, going out this Friday, is from Elissa Bassist.
Elissa Bassist is the editor of our Funny Women column. Her writing has appeared here on The Rumpus, in The New York Times, NYMag.com, The Paris Review Daily, The Daily Beast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Salon, Creative Nonfiction, and most recently in Get Out of My Crotch, a collection of twenty-one writers responding to America’s war on women’s rights and reproductive health.
...moreWe all have these feelings inside us—anxiety, fear, trepidation, hope, desire—and our every effort becomes getting these things out. Writing that letter to you and publishing it was how I felt connected and compassionate.
Two and a half years ago, Rumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist wrote a letter seeking advice from our Sugar.
...moreRumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist writes for NY Mag about her experience with sexual violence, and the difficulty of finding language — as an individual and as a culture — to conceive of and communicate sexual trauma both in the moment and after the fact.
...moreIn a thought-provoking Daily Beast essay about Daniel Tosh’s “rape joke” at the Laugh Factory, Rumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist clarifies the distinction between using humor “to cope or to point out the absurdity of a situation” and making a joke to humiliate, threaten, or assert power over another person.
...moreRumpus Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist rocks the New York Times Modern Love column.
“That online conversation was our last. Once he signed off, he was gone for good. At that moment, those children we had planned died, or were never born, or could have been born if things had gone differently.
...moreJeanette Winterson has the best-named memoir: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She spoke about the story behind the title during her reading at McNally Jackson bookstore in NYC:
...moreWhen Jeanette W. was fifteen, she fell in love with another girl and couldn’t hide it.
Are you trying to write today but feeling distracted/unmotivated/lonely? If so, perfect. We’re taking “Write Like a Motherfucker,” Dear Sugar’s #48 column one step beyond…
...more
Even though I’m Jewish, I never went to summer camp.
Feministing, the esteemed online feminist community, highlighted our very own Elissa Bassist’s interview with sex-positive feminist Susie Bright (which is still very smart and very funny, if you haven’t dabbled yet).
Thanks for the shout-out, Feministing. The love is mutual!
...more
Susie Bright, sex-positive feminist, writer, revolutionary, and my first tongue-kiss with a woman recently released her memoir Big Sex Little Death.
...more
Some advice for writers from our own Elissa Bassist:
[Some of this is stolen. But I won’t tell you what because I want to impress you.] ...more
Elissa Bassist shares her personal notes after having a conversation with Jennifer Egan:
The Rumpus Women, Vol. I contributors have been on tour. We’ve read in bookstores, bars, and family rooms in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Denver. The readings have been awe-inspiring: smart, funny, charming, sad, honest, brave.
In case you couldn’t make a reading or live in Iowa, Rumpus Women will be on Firedoglake Book Salon, an online news site that hosts author discussions every Saturday and Sunday.
...more
Loads of people have slept with authors or well-read individuals, but what would it be like to sleep with a book?
A hearty bonjour and aloha to all you lovers of arts & letters,
I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer not to keep a day job when the winsome muse of words calls to me, so I will be seeking a patron for the next 6 months to 10 years, depending on how long it takes to birth this literary love child.
...more
Not only are women not funny, but also they don’t know anything about music. Verify this:
Scientists have identified the gene that inclines individuals toward excessive Post-It use. Three out of five British women misread the word “aviator” as “vibrator” after prolonged exposure to violent news broadcasts. Non-mammalian school mascots were associated with lower student body morale.