The Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life. ...more
Posts Tagged: MFA
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #53: Meet WTAW Press
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of the forthcoming book of flash and hybrid prose, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow (ELJ Publications). Her work has been published in VOLT, the Journal of Compressed Arts, and RHINO, among others, and shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor Award.
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The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison
Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviews The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison today in Rumpus Books. ...more
(K)ink #10: Writing While Deviant: Amber Dawn
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins? ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Blair Braverman
Blair Braverman discusses her latest book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, gendered travel narratives, and the pressure to write about personal trauma. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Janine Joseph
The day the manuscript became Driving without a License was the day I said “yes” to the truth of my own life and coming-of-age experience as an undocumented immigrant. ...more
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
Visible: Women Writers of Color #3: Cole Lavalais
Cole Lavalais discusses her debut novel, Summer of the Cicadas, why she’s a huge fan of outlining, and the importance of dedicated communities for black writers. ...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
The Rumpus Interview with Shawn Vestal
Shawn Vestal discusses his new novel Daredevils, Evel Knievel, growing up in a mainstream Mormon family, and what he thinks of the American West. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Chanan Tigay
Author Chanan Tigay discusses the complicated man at the heart of The Lost Book of Moses, the anxieties of writing true stories, how much to withhold from your reader—and tells a few jokes about creative nonfiction. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Bernadette Murphy
Bernadette Murphy on her forthcoming book, Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life, the challenges of selling a memoir, and life beyond "the suburban-wife-mother picture." ...more
My Life with Annie Lennox #4: Honestly
Oh, Annie, I thought, opening a can of beer. We’re going to be okay. Aren’t we? ...more
Measuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA program: “I hated this sort of smug assumption that we all knew what was bad.” At the same time, Jamison says, “I was deeply afraid of being seen as someone who was making too much out of a personal experience that actually wasn’t that hard.”
...moreFalse Dichotomy
Can women really have it all? Like, all of it? But how could they possibly have multiple things at the same time? How can they even think human thoughts after they’ve subsumed their corporeal selves into an all-encompassing prison of motherhood?
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The Rumpus Interview With Brenda Miller
Author Brenda Miller discusses the lyric essay, her "poet self" who always bleeds through, and what she's writing about next. ...more
Visible: Women Writers of Color #2: Tania James
Tania James discusses her most recent novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, the challenges of writing an elephant narrator, and the moment when she knew she could be a writer. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Brendan Jones
Brendan Jones talks about his debut novel, The Alaskan Laundry, living in Alaska, his time as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and living and loving what you write. ...more
Whose Workshop Is It?
...moreHere’s what I mean by not centering the author of the workshop piece: I always tell my students, following the lead of my favorite MFA professor, that the truth is that workshop is most helpful to the person talking, not the person being workshopped.
A Stand-In for New and Difficult Thinking
Clichés are tempting because they do the work of communicating for us. In a manifesto against workshop jargon, Helen Betya Rubinstein warns us of the dangers of sticking to old models:
...more…because you’d have to remember all the way back to the first time you heard this cliché against clichés to actually see, once again, that clichés are ineffective because they prevent you from seeing.
The Rumpus Interview with Charles Bock
Charles Bock discusses his new novel, Alice & Oliver, the challenges of writing from experience, and how art and life can mirror one another. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales talks about his new novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack!, transitioning from nonprofit work to teaching, and how to zig when a trope wants you to zag. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath talks about his new collection, XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century, capitalism, history, and what it might mean to write a wordless poem. ...more
The Conversation: Jeremy Clark and Thiahera Nurse
I’m thinking about the difference between “I stay somewhere” and “I live somewhere.” ...more
The Conversation: Desiree Bailey and Sean DesVignes
For me, intersectionality is a reality that I can’t escape. ...more
The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws. ...more
Agents and Editors and Readers! Oh My!
At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel offers a sharp response to a recent Atlantic article that explores how MFA programs have influenced contemporary literature:
...moreThe MFA is only two to three years out of a writer’s life. Those years don’t outweigh decades of signaling from the publishing industry, major newspapers, and magazines about what type of fiction is popular and publishable.
The Rumpus Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, siblinghood and sisterhood, and finding a group to call “my people” in the larger literary world. ...more