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From Stephen Elliott
At Salon, Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay writes about the cheering of Sandusky’s guilty verdict, and our spectacle-centric culture.
“The pictures are the story. The videos are the story. The confession of a broken man is the story. The protective father is the story.
...more“A lot of the walls protecting the singular author are coming down. It’s much easier to engage in back and forth with other writers and come to the realization that alone, we are great, but together, we might be able to come up with something greater.”
Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay talks with the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage as part of a new series on co-authorship.
...moreAndrew Sullivan linked to Roxane Gay’s “Where Things Stand,” which revealed that nearly 90% of books reviewed in The New York Times were written by white authors.
Amanda Hess also wrote about the piece, elaborating on the distinct conversations around gender versus racial inequality in the journalism industry.
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Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay’s short story “Who We Are Beneath the Glass” is featured in Versal’s 10th anniversary issue. The Versal Journal interviews her about creative firsts, angles, Amsterdam, and more.
...moreThe second episode of Late Night Conversation features Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay.
Listen in as Gay talks with guest host Karen Munro about emerging writers, publicizing her debut novel, and online journals.
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When I was young, my parents took our family to Haiti during the summers. For them, it was a homecoming. For my brothers and I it was an adventure, sometimes, a chore, and always a necessary education on privilege and the grace of an American passport.
We all know the common fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman—rarely, if ever, do we see stories about a woman and a woman or a man and a man—who must overcome some obstacle to reach happily ever after.
I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong.
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Lately, I read the news and have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.
Over the past couple weeks, Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton has incited a number of responses.
At The Daily Beast, Marina Budhos examines why Franzen took such a “tortuous and offensive back door route” to find sympathy for Wharton, instead of “exploring empathy” for an author who, she argues, faced similar writerly preoccupations as Franzen himself.
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“Lucy comes home from work. Lucy undresses in the foyer. Lucy gets on her hands and knees and crawls to her cage. Lucy listens. Lucy waits.”
Check out our own essays editor Roxane Gay’s new story “Lucy Lives in a World of Infinite Possibility” over at Two Serious Ladies.
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Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking) is an original, smart, and incisive novel about a Filipino fashion designer, Boyet Hernandez, who is held at Guantanamo Bay after authorities discover his ties to an alleged terrorist, Ahmed Quereshi, the man who funded Boyet’s fashion label.
We’ve got some exciting news: big-time Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay will be joining our volunteer editorial board as Essays Editor! This also means that we’ll be seeing more pieces written by Roxane on a monthly basis. Hooray!
You can send essay submissions to roxane AT therumpus.net.
...moreRumpus contributor Roxane Gay details the ins and outs of starting a micropress based on the lessons she’s learned starting Tiny Hardcore Press.
“You have to be prepared to hustle. You have to be willing to promote your book, and do readings, and plan your own events because there’s no support staff at the micropress to do it for you.”
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
The most frustrating part of not being able to keep quiet about the willful ways in which people are perfectly happy to enable the status quo is that when you voice concerns about the lack of diversity in any given arena, you are automatically positioned as that person, the shrill and humorless obsessive who simply cannot let things be.
“When you write personally and intimately, difficult questions arise. Whose stories do we, as writers, have the right to tell? To what extent do we have the right to write about the people in our lives? What are the limits of good taste?
...moreRumpus contributor Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti was listed by the The National Book Critics Circle blog as one of their Small Press Highlights of 2011. Of Ayiti they write “The title is the Haitian Creole name for Haiti and in this brief but powerful collection of stories (most no longer than three pages), Haitians navigate their beleaguered homeland or their adopted country (the U.S.) as immigrants, refugees, and undocumented bordercrossers pining for their loved ones left ‘kneeling in a bed of sand and bones’ in one of the world’s poorest nations.
...more“The Situation in American writing,” Full Stop’s questionnaire for prominent authors—with questions ranging from literary criticism to war—elicits some excellent responses from Roxane Gay.
“My writing is lots of things but more often than not, the stories and essays I write reflect an allegiance to women and the concerns of women.
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The measure of excellence is a pursuit with which writers and critics are often intensely concerned. At the end of each year any number of magazines and organizations issue a list or series of lists to quantify the year’s best books, stories, poems, and essays.
Life is the one disaster that is also a miracle. Or perhaps life is the one miracle that is also a disaster.
Roxane Gay’s on HTML Giant talking about the covers of chick-lit novels and the stigma attached to their formulaic visual coding, though the feminization of book covers is taking over more than just the chick-lit genre. It’s unfortunate that women writers have to consciously avoid being pigeonholed into chick-lit genre or are marketed via book cover designs as such.
...moreThe ever-contentious subject of teaching creative writing is up for discussion. You can teach the elements, but there are always the “intangibles that cannot be taught.” Roxane Gay is inciting a discussion on HTMLGiant, laying some foundation for all of the student/teacher ideas into one mega-blog dialogue delineating the building blocks of creative writing.
...moreElectric Literature is embarking on a new ranking system that will most definitely change the way you reflect on the past month of online book reviews. It’s called the Critical Hit Awards, and only three reviews are picked per month.
...moreThe official Table of Contents won’t be released for a couple of weeks, but a little birdie whispered in our ears (okay, announced it on her Facebook page) that Roxane Gay’s piece “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence”, which we published back in May, has been selected for inclusion in Best Sex Writing 2012.
...moreOver at HTML giant Roxane Gay interviews Aimee Nezhukumatathil, shedding light on the poet’s influences—from the natural world and family, to language, and more. The conversation turns to her third book, Lucky Fish, and the process of assembling a collection of poetry.
...moreAfter we published Roxane Gay’s essay on the Help last week, it launched a major discussion not only about the shortcomings of the movie and the book, but on how pop culture negotiates and regenerates historical movements, tired slave narratives, the “burden of racism,” and more.
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