Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Padma Viswanathan
Is it that she is an immigrant to the US and was an immigrant to Canada before that, a brown woman on both sides of the border, viewed with suspicion that sometimes gets explicit? ...more
Posts Tagged: motherhood
The Read Along #5: Laura Goode
Jesus Christ, this book is like, Toni Morrison/Susan Sontag good. This book is first viewing of Beyoncé's Lemonade good. This book is Simone Biles good. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Hall
Rachel Hall discusses her debut collection Heirlooms, her mother’s experience growing up in a French Jewish family during World War II, and crossing genre borders in her writing. ...more
Lessons from The Little Virtues
For the New Yorker, author Belle Boggs reflects on Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays, The Little Virtues, and how the book influenced her own parenting philosophy. Boggs writes:
...moreThe title essay considers what we should teach children—“not the little virtues but the great ones,” according to Ginzburg.
The Rumpus Interview with Paula Whyman
Paula Whyman discusses her debut collection You May See a Stranger, discovering truth in fiction, and how memory interferes with good storytelling. ...more
Pregnant Words
In the New York Times, Rachel Cusk takes on two new memoirs about infertility and the quest for motherhood to explore the wholly compelling “half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization.” Julia Leigh’s Avalanche relates six years of the author’s trying and ultimately failing to get pregnant; Belle Boggs, in The Art of Waiting, uses Virginia Woolf’s account of childlessness to explore her own.
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The Rumpus Interview with Robin MacArthur
Robin MacArthur discusses her debut story collection Half Wild, life in rural Vermont, and how narrative—and fiction—is key to reaching across what divides us. ...more
Baking Lessons: Needing, Rising, and Letting Go
When I took those breaths, I also learned to say, “I am enough, I am enough, I am enough.” ...more
A Good Mom, a Progressive Mom, a Cool Mom
At Catapult, Rachel Klein shares her experience as a mother of a transitioning child:
...moreI was worried, like most people are at their core, about myself. I was not being a “good mom,” a “progressive mom,” a “cool mom”; I was being a self-preserving creature.
The Rumpus Interview with Nina Stibbe
Author Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism. ...more
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
Voices of Addiction #3: Mother’s Day
I will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Ann Packer
Ann Packer discusses her most recent novel The Children's Crusade, artistic mothers, the writer and her “first principle,” and the fight to like your own characters. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Milwaukee. Rust. A Baby.
By the light of early morning, I am writhing in pain again, the drugs are done. But there is a tiny creature—mammal, female—attached to my breast. That is supposed to make it more bearable. ...more
Past the Break
Past the break lies motherhood as I understand it: the rawest life that lifts and falls and crashes against beauty, and the eternal potential for heartbreak. ...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
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Heather Havrilesky
We are in a chaotic mess of a world, and our lives are going to be chaotic messes no matter how victorious and shiny we manage to become. ...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Leaving Deficit
Feathers are a gift and flexible protein. Mom put down tobacco and ran her fingers over its exposed parts. She told me the salmon run is coming and this bird would have wanted for nothing. ...more
Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy
Eileen Favorite reviews Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life by Bernadette Murphy today in Rumpus Books. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Do You Have a Beau?
Shame is the haunting that’s hardest to scrub away. ...more
Mommy Dearest
We have an unfortunate tendency to let motherhood eclipse all aspects of a person’s identity—and then to turn around and call motherhood a faulty aspiration. Luckily there are moms like Antonia Malchik who write anyway, and implore us to remember moms like Elinore Pruitt Stewart, who ventured out onto the Wyoming frontier with her daughter:
...moreWhy is work like Thoreau’s lauded and the writings of Stewart hardly known?
The Rumpus Interview with Becky Tuch
Becky Tuch discusses founding The Review Review, motherhood, creativity, and the future of literary magazines. ...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jonterri Gadson
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Jonterri Gadson about Blues Triumphant, her love of editing, and the intersection of poetry and comedy. ...more
Art Monster Moms
Rufi Thorpe writes for Vela on the responsibilities of writing and motherhood, and the transformation of a woman writer into an “art monster”:
...moreBut any soldier will tell you that much of the Army is similarly boring and routine. Yet we do not ask a war poet, Do you ever worry your work will become clouded with bureaucratic detail?
On Visibility and Middle-Aged Women
Over at Lit Hub, Dorthe Nors discusses writing about middle aged women who, on the verge of becoming invisible to a society that only values women as mothers or as sex objects, refuse to disappear:
...moreThe interesting thing is that middle-aged women on the search for essence and their license to live can come off as quite provocative characters.
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
The Rumpus Interview with Lynn Steger Strong
Lynn Steger Strong discusses her debut novel Hold Still, the influence of Virginia Woolf, unconditional love, and exit strategies. ...more
This Week in Short Fiction: Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes
[Noyes's] stories are nuanced and unapologetic, revealing the shadow sides of women and girls in all their wild and terrible glory. ...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Louise Erdrich
The esteemed author talks about the themes of justice, atonement, and reparation in her fifteenth novel, LaRose, and about the importance of Planned Parenthood to her success. ...more
This Is Not a Story About a Ghost
This is a story about memory. About neurons misfiring, about the strange space between dream and awake, that feeling, when I’m falling asleep, of falling backwards, swinging my arms up to catch myself. ...more