The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The (Online) Stories We Tell
Sometimes you want to dream about the life you didn’t get to have. Sometimes you want to see the life you were lucky to escape. ...more
Posts Tagged: motherhood
My Daughter at the Blue Venus
My daughter has finished experimenting with chemicals. Now she is experimenting with life. ...more
Out of the Swollen Sea
I think of a story I might write: about a daughter who loses her father to the sea. She grows progressively more melancholy; her dreams haunted by man-o-war, stingray, and poisonous rockfish. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Laura van den Berg
Author Laura van den Berg talks to the Rumpus about why she thinks America is obsessed with dystopias, the intersection of surrealism and realism in her work, and choosing an ambiguous ending for her new novel, Find Me. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Albert
Elisa Albert discusses her new novel, After Birth, postpartum depression, childbearing, and the misogyny of modern medicine in pathologizing the normal processes of birth and the female body. ...more
Writing Happiness
Michelle Tea talks with Bustle about her new memoir How to Grow Up, motherhood, Botox, and what it’s like to write about things being good:
...moreIt’s the first time I’ve ever worked on a piece of writing where I’m writing about things being kind of great.
Where No Man’s Gone Before
Photographer Lynsey Addario is profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review; the piece highlights her work as a voice for Pakistani refugees, US marines, and Syrian war casualties—all while balancing her life as a mom:
...moreThe photo of the Syrian teenager with the baby captures exactly the kind of moment that Addario claims to grasp more fully now that she is a mother herself.
Don’t Dream It’s Over
One of the surest indicators of change on the horizon (per the standard tropes of dream interpretation) is being pregnant in a dream. ...more
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Kristina Marie Darling’s poetry collection, Fortress, is “image-rich” and wonderfully allusive. The setting is the famously decadent palace of Versailles. Like the film Marie Antoinette, “Darling’s book is simultaneously excess and desolation,” writes Sandra Marchetti. White spaces are used strategically in this “lush” book of poems.
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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
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
In the Sunday Interview, Anna March talks with Robin Black about her debut novel, Life Drawing. Black—who also received acclaim for her short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This—begins by discussing her approach to writing character.
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The Rumpus Interview with Julia Fierro
Writer and founder and director of New York's Sackett Street Writer's Workshop Julia Fierro talks about her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, reading with scrutiny, being able to edit your own work, and motherhood. ...more
Post-Partum Regression
My husband went back to work, and then my mom flew back to Florida, and it was just me and the baby. Alone together, but no longer the us we had been when I was pregnant. ...more
Moms and Sex
At Buzzfeed, Rumpus Sunday Editor Gina Frangello writes about the complicated relationship between women, mothers, writing and sex:
...moreI’m not really sure how our culture has arrived at the mutually exclusive relationship between Motherhood and Sexuality, especially since in most cases, women become mothers by having sex.
Weekend Rumpus Roundup
On this weekend in 1652, a law was passed in Rhode Island banning slavery in the colonies. Turns out that particular law didn’t cause much of a stir.
Unfortunately, some of today’s legislation intended to protect marginalized groups isn’t faring much better.
...moreThe Best Stories Leave an Aftertaste
In her deeply personal essay on The Millions, Allison K. Gibson explains some of the intense literary cravings she experienced during her pregnancy. Some of them were unexpected, even violent, but all were led entirely by intuition.
...more“Now I had a voracious appetite to consume certain books I’d read long ago, revisiting passages that had always been especially moving.
Gina Frangello Talks A Life in Men
Over at BuzzFeed, Rumpus contributor Julie Greicius interviews Rumpus Sunday Editor Gina Frangello about her new novel A Life in Men, the special bonds we form in adolescence, and why moms can still write about sex. Take a peek:
...moreI’m not really sure how our culture has arrived at the mutually exclusive relationship between Motherhood and Sexuality, especially since in most cases, women become mothers by having sex.
With Child in Mongolia
Writer Ariel Levy offers a heart-wrenching account of adventure and coming into motherhood in her essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” featured in The New Yorker.
...morePeople were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.
Birth Story
This is the part of the birth story when the woman is supposed to tap into the primal strength of her ancestors, a pool with a hundred thousand years of depth... ...more
Beside Her
Once a bright and talented writer and professor, my mother now can no longer write. She tries, but she can’t spell her name, or mine, and letters run off the page. I am humbled by how quickly time passes and how roles change. Frightened, too. Where will we both be in another fifteen years? ...more
Black Wings: Love, Loss and Life as a Humanitarian Aid Worker in Iraq
It was a cool, blue morning in Baghdad. I stood in the rubble of a bombed out building, a shell of what it had once been.
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What He Took
It’s two in the morning on the OB ward. Light filters into our dark room from the hallway, making a dim twilight around bassinet and bed. My first child, Emily, is twenty-seven hours old.
...moreAlbums of Our Lives: Willie Nelson’s Shotgun Willie
I refused to listen to the B-side. This was, I guess, an extension or reflection of the poverty of those years after leaving my marriage and buying the 10 Willie Nelson records at a small town Goodwill store for 10 cents each– a kind of hoarding of every meager resource, like the unopened cans of beans, moved from kitchen to kitchen, state to state.
Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be around while one of my best friends gave birth to a baby boy. It was an amazing experience. As a result, unfortunately, I had to spend a lot of time at SF General.
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