The Rumpus Interview with Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg talks about her new collection, Locally Made Panties, the possibility of feminist pornography, and curating her Rumpus column, (K)ink: Writing While Deviant. ...more
Posts Tagged: essays
Writing Truth
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Colin Dickey explores the idea of the contemporary American essay as a vehicle for truth. Citing essayists such as John D’Agata, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, Dickey writes:
...moreHow do you know a thing is true?
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Cristina García and Truong Tran
How do you work with a material that you don’t have trust in? I had to step away from it and find another way of articulating and I had to do it without words. ...more
All the Time Dissolving
Wherever the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, Geoff Dyer has long since crossed it. For Hazlitt, Kyle Chayka talked to the author of White Sands about the continuum of the critical and the narrative:
...moreIf people call it an essay collection, then I immediately want to say, hey, but there are stories as well!
The Rumpus Interview with Brian Blanchfield
Poet and writer Brian Blanchfield talks about his essay collection Proxies, touring in support of a prose collection versus a poetry collection, and frottage. ...more
(K)ink #9: Writing While Deviant: Jera Brown
I wanted to uncover the nest of wires comprising my gender identity and describe its complicated mass. ...more
Postcards From Here by Penny Guisinger
Sarah Einstein reviews Penny Guisinger's new collection of vignettes, Postcards From Here. ...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Accidental Curators
He staggers; he loses his standoff with gravity. It was never a fair fight. ...more
Meet Elissa Washuta
Washington State Book Award finalist and Rumpus Saturday Editor Elissa Washuta was interviewed by Moss about her writing, living in the Pacific Northwest, and pop culture.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: A House, a Girl
The day you follow me to that mound of oyster shells on the beach is the day I realize muscle and bone have been at war for a long, long time. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore
We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means. ...more
Chipotle to Publish Student Work
Chipotle’s Cultivating Thought campaign, which has put essays from the likes of George Saunders and Aziz Ansari on takeout bags and soda cups, will expand next year to include a contest for young writers. Students can submit an essay on “a time when food created a memory” through the end of May.
...moreThose Kinds Of People are The Only People Here
Electric Literature posts a graduation speech from Vonnegut; he riffs on World War II, busboys, ambition, and suicide notes:
...moreA young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed her asked her why she had found the place attractive.
Charles D’Ambrosio’s Fast Friends
For the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering, and explains why he thinks that D’Ambrosio, in essays, has “found the perfect medium.”
...moreThe Essay Makes a Comeback
2014 has already been called “The Year of the Debut” as a way of recognizing all the amazing debut novels published over the last twelve months. Now Jason Diamond is calling 2014 “The Year of the Essay,” pointing out the growing popularity in the non-fiction form and telling us why he values it so much:
...moreReading fiction is one of my true loves, but essays help me to understand things about the world, the writer, and if they’re really great, myself.
The Big Idea #10: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines. ...more
Slouching Toward Didion
The Daily Beast takes a look at the history of the female essayist from Didion to Dunham:
...moreFrom cultural critic Susan Sontag and journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist (and Dunham’s mentor) Nora Ephron, and on through to the host of talented female essayists writing today, this is clearly a flourishing genre that the following women writers—in my mind some of the best writing today—are very much making their own; as Carol Hanisch famously declared in 1969, the personal is political; if, that is, one’s personal experience is mined eloquently and intelligently enough.
A Footnotes Advocacy
...moreMany readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they’re too raw to digest, and often stiff.
The Unteachable Dark
Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the rigid way American high schools teach essay writing.
...moreThe Last Laugh
Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates:
...moreI think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor to it.
One Giant Cliché
When I became a father myself, I swore my son would never feel my absence like that—not if I could help it. I’d talk to him. I’d listen, ask questions. I’d teach him things, too, and share in the joys of his discoveries. It didn’t occur to me that what he might need would be something entirely different. ...more
I Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
My connection to my Puerto Rican heritage seemed as tenuous as my connection to my white skin. I didn’t feel white, didn’t believe I had the privileges that came with whiteness. ...more
Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do not.
While Cole continues to stand by this essay, he admits that there are exceptions to this rule.
...moreRoxane Gay and Leslie Jamison Get Personal About Essays
Rumpus essays editor and author of the forthcoming essay collection Bad Feminist Roxane Gay sat down to talk with The Empathy Exams author Leslie Jamison and Michele Filgate; the three women had an insightful conversation about essays, sexuality, and nuance over on Salon.
...moreAnnie Dillard and the Art of the Essay
“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”
Read an essay on Annie Dillard’s philosophy of the essay and its writer over at Brain Pickings.
...moreDrugs and Creativity
Gila Lyons has a strikingly vulnerable essay at The Millions about her decision to start taking anti-anxiety medication. Typically, artists who suffer from mental health issues opt to ride against the current and let their creativity take precedent. Yet, Lyons took the road less traveled and chose mental stability over waxing genius.
...moreHow Has the Internet Changed Longform Journalism?
Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited audiences.
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