The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons
Zinzi Clemmons on What We Lose, representations of blackness, and life's influences on writing. ...more
Posts Tagged: memory
I Will Not Die for You
Each bug in the water is one less bug on my fruit, I tell myself, ignoring the truth: under the soil, another is born. ...more
It’s Never Too Late to Be Found: A Conversation with Rene Denfeld
Rene Denfeld discusses her latest book, The Child Finder, the ways in which trauma traps us, and the important role of imagination in finding resilience and escape. ...more
Multitudes: (Re) Writing Mother
I like to listen to my mother’s voice; the sounds she makes in an English-Korean mashup; we are each the other’s dictionary. ...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell discusses her forthcoming graphic memoir, Everything Is Flammable, what it was like to mine her own life for subject matter, and how anxiety affects her work. ...more
Lone Star Cinema
In clinging to a set of memories that fade more every day, maybe I’m also clinging to an idyllic version of my own past. ...more
Mothers of My Diaspora
It paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
Bite that apple, open that jar at your own risk and see how your garden grows, how hopeful you remain. Paradise is, after all, blissful self-ignorance. ...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Fluids
To me, my mother’s body has always been the safest place—a place for me to return and to transform. ...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #68: David Kukoff
“To read,” wrote E.M. Cioran, “is to let someone else do the work for you.” Indeed, David Kukoff has done extensive footwork collecting an array of varied experiences to give us an idea of what it was to live in LA during what might arguably be one of its most pivotal decades.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jon Raymond
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Jon Raymond about his new novel Freebird, intergenerational trauma, and the unshakeable love of family. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Dawn Lundy Martin
Dawn Lundy Martin discusses her most recent collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, the intersections between poetry and social justice, her wide variety of inspirations, and bathroom gender binaries. ...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #13: Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Do you keep a dream journal?
I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off.
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
...moreThis Week in Essays
Bookbinding may be a dying art, but at Lit Hub, Dwyer Murphy tells the story of a man who keeps his business going strong on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
For Hazlitt, Suzannah Showler takes a measured look at the prepper community and at the idea of preparation itself.
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How I Lost My Memory
Admitting memory’s tendencies toward storytelling, time shifting, and the emotional coloring of facts admits the potential for some forgiveness. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Kerry and Tyler Cohen
Sisters and collaborators Kerry and Tyler Cohen talk about their new book Girl Trouble: An Illustrated Memoir, female friendships, and some of the challenges of writing memoir. ...more
The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives. ...more
Is It My Story or Yours?
Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy. ...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Great Elk
For a moment, seeing the small figures walking before the elk makes me think that white people know the Great Elk too. ...more
Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell talks about his new memoir The Accidental Life and his career in the magazine business, which spans the beginning of New Journalism through the digital revolution. ...more
Sunday Rumpus Poetry: Three Poems by Fatimah Asghar
& yes, my family did raise me right. Yes, / they cleaned their bones & cracked them clean / open to suck. Would fight over cartilage & knuckle/Sip the marrow’s nectar from urn. . ...more
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
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
"You can’t hold on to the past," Elif once told me. "You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can." ...more
Where were you when the world broke?
Not in your echoing womb,
to scream at you across your fields to wake up,
not part of your denial that Earth is burning,
dehydrated, suffocating on itself—
I stood in a blue state
while you bled the red of its people—(Our people: recall how they grew up
across Holt Street, Maple Street from us, yes?)—
delusional that you were the world’s own,
unothered.
Farewell, Professor Wiesel
Faith is about action, Professor Wiesel said that day. Faith is about what you do with that faith. Belief in God is to do, not to accept. So always the question: what can we do? ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: This American Paradise
The thing about Paradise is this—yours can’t be mine, and mine can’t be yours. Paradise exists in the imagination, and imagination is our only privacy. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy
D. Foy discusses his latest novel, Patricide, the evolution of “gutter opera,” his writing process, free will, and memes. ...more
Sticking Like Burrs
Our personal pasts aren’t factual records. They’re made up on the spot, synthesized from disjointed details to answer questions we have in the present.
For KROnline, Natalie Mesnard and Patrick D. Watson work towards an excavation of memory from the points of view of poetry and neuroscience.
...more