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Today, we’re launching this $10K crowdfunding campaign to redesign the magazine’s website. We’ve been running on the same WordPress template since the site launched 14 years ago, which makes it like 1,400 in internet-years.
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The great thing about writing autobiographically, in these kinds of ways, is that I get to write the whole swarm of thoughts and connect them as I want to.
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“There was no con. There was no crime. There was only fiction.”
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A living tree is a dare.
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We have to be urgent and radical in our belief that some solutions exist . . .
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I have always felt stuck in the quicksand of Wanting-Things-To-Be-Different.
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I want to fashion my black mouth to speak this / journey of our bodies into utterance: What / does one call this road between us?
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In many ways, community is that which allows the heart to heal, and to heal that heart together.
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. . . in a barren world with little protection and corners to hide, it’s also impossible to hide from our thoughts . . .
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I wore sobriety like a shirt that was too tight in the shoulders, and everyone around me knew it.
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. . . intellectual rigor or artistic integrity don’t have to come at the expense of legibility . . .
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I love it when a book forces me to reassess my thinking on a particular subject.
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if we are lucky / if we work very hard
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I’ll keep at it until something in me leaks
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I don’t think there are easy answers. Should we make judgments about rudeness when we talk about artistic freedom?
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“Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clear.”
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“Sprezzatura,” “An Attempt to Explain Myself,” & “The Last Norwegian Wolf”
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Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel Glassworks (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2023) follows one family through four generations. The story begins in 1910 with the wealthy young philanthropist Agnes Carter, and then follows her descendants, both in blood and in spirit, up until the present time. Each person’s story builds on those that came before it, creating a […]
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Our next Letters in the Mail come from authors Paul Ceballos and James Allen Hall
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Grief is the Easter Moon lily that blooms in / an empty room. It is not the canyon / glowing, like the inside of a persimmon torn / open by thumbs, but all of the hours, and / only ever those hours, waiting for that glow.
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I’m working on a piece right now for the New York Times where I knew the last sentence before I knew the argument I was making.
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If you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see.
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The slime problem had hatched when her daughter’s first grade class learned how to make putty they took home in plastic eggs.
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Going around the world because you can’t go through it
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I approach research dutifully and compulsively.
...moreI’ve made the choice // between brushing flies from a child’s eyes or digging / a grave deeper. It’s easier than you’d think.
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The June 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Megan Fernandes’ I DO EVERYTHING I’M TOLD. Subscribe by May 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
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We look for ourselves in literature—for comfort or for guidance—but the page rarely provides a clean mirror.
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You keep the edge of your love sharp, a knife, so that those close to you know to handle it carefully. You think you’ve done it and then you discover that you’ve been endangering yourself to everybody you meet all this time.
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Some books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from any genre. Is it memoir or environmental literature?The book covers so much terrain: Black history, gardening in the West, motherhood, and the care and cultivation […]
...moreAs I type this, we’re at 149 Rumpus Members, which puts us not-quite a third of the way (29%) toward our June goal of 500.
By now (a little more than halfway through June), we were hoping to be a bit past the mid-point of 250 members. Even though our 500 Member goal is way less than 1% of the people who read the magazine every day, there’s a lot of chaotic energy out there and maybe some of you are even on vacation (a future we’d like to imagine)?!
To encourage readers to join sooner than later (and to reduce our anxiety levels) we’ve adding some bonus incentives.
The earliest Members have the best chances of receiving a bonus gift this month as you’ll be entered into every raffle following signup. If you’ve already joined us as a Member, you’re automatically included in ALL the drawings!
Join by 3 pm ET on Friday, June 17 . .
Join by 5 pm Tuesday, June 21. . .
Join by 5 pm Thursday, June 23 . . .
Some fine-ish print:
We appreciate all the indie bookstores, presses, and authors who are stepping up to show their support and help us get closer to our 500 Member goal. It’s good to be part of a literary community that understands that our survival is interconnected. Thank you, thank you!
— 11 months ago
An illustrated review of Sumana Roy’s new essay collection, HOW I BECAME A TREE!
(more...)— 11 months ago
This essay was first published in The Rumpus on May 4, 2021.
Girlhood, written by Melissa Febos and released on March 30, 2021 from Bloomsbury, is a gripping set of essays about the forces that shape young girls and the adults they become. Throughout the collection, Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female—and what it takes to free oneself from these narratives.
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— 1 year ago
— 1 year ago
Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living, written by Suleika Jaouad and released on February 9, 2021 from Penguin Random House, is an insightful and often heartbreaking illness memoir. Throughout the memoir, Jaouad deeply examines what we know about illness, caretaking, and recovery.
— 1 year ago
