Rumpus Original Fiction: Black Bottom Swamp Bottle Woman
. . . maybe they believe labeling and understanding mean the same thing . . .
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Can we be too alive together? A conversation with Chris Martin on poetry, autism, and our neurodivergent future
The way we arrange the conditions of our togetherness can allow all the writing to happen that beckons to happen.
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What To Read When Warding Off Art Monsters
or: When great artists turn out to be great douchebags
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Voices on Addiction: Rome, Risotto, and My Alcoholism
This could be a way out.
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Braced and Bedazzled
“This is solid, mostly titanium,” the surgeon says while I’m still groggy in recovery. “You can’t pull it apart if you tried.,” and, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t try.”
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection, Inciting Joy by Ross Gay forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022 Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING JOY, pp. 1-10 […]
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Accommodations are not accessibility: An interview with Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Being disabled in higher education takes a psychic toll, whether you are faculty or a student. Yet most institutions do the bare minimum to remain “compliant” with the law rather than doing the work to make their spaces accessible and inclusive.
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The Dislexic Poit
I always received glowing remarks on my alliteration or understanding of poetic devices, but they were hidden beneath what felt like hundreds of tiny red strikes across misspellings—although my phonetic versions of the words were sometimes genius, and always understandable.
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The Pastoral Novel in Chaos: Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency
. . . to witness the world is always to participate in it, to make choices about what to see and what to ignore, and also to be worked upon by forces of differing scales.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: To Go
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
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Finding Enchantment in the Ordinary: A Conversation with Meng Jin
The reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING EARTH (and other books by Barry Lopez), released in May 2022 from Pengiuin Random House, is a quintessential Barry Lopez book. It is a clarion call to lovers of the earth, but one full of hope and optimism. This is exactly the kind of book we should all be reading right now.
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Treatment as Noun
I haven’t slept in years, but I still can’t seem to wake up.
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Love in and Loving Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons
If I didn’t already write poems, Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons would make me want to write them.
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Sustaining our Creative Practice: An Interview with May-lee Chai
Writing is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it’s not someone else making the terrible things happen.
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The Microphone
The ableism of schools as workplaces means that all teachers are assumed to be able-bodied until a disabled teacher identifies their need for accommodations. Schools respond; they do not, to my knowledge, anticipate disabled teachers.
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The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Only Humans
Hearing old people’s memories is like watching a once-in-three-generations downpour. In the past, they lived in abundance and air conditioning. So many details go over Salwa’s head. She doesn’t know how to transcribe all the words.
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A void that migrates to the surface: An Interview with Juliet Patterson
That was my singular personal motivation for doing any of this work: to prevent the threat that this might happen to me. I naïvely believed that my parents would not die by their own hand because they had suffered as children of parents who had already died that way.
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Enough: ‘Til Death
Rape stories are like weddings—everyone thinks theirs is remarkable, but they are usually disarmingly, eye-glazingly indistinguishable.
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Outside(r)
I’d never thought of myself as separate from the world I lived in; the Outside I came from was sensory-rich and immersive, there my interactions unfolded organically and overlapped, building intuitively like the scales on a pinecone, rewarding curiosity with wonder.
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October Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Some of our Letters in the Mail authors on the books that got them reading as children, and advice for creative kids.
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To Write the Way We Live: A Conversation with Jonathan Escoffery
I see myself as a story writer, and that’s just the best thing ever.
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So You Want to Feel Better: Navigating Grad School, Disability, and the Language of Pain
The term “invisible disability” is commonly used to describe disabilities that are not readily apparent to the eye, but I want to push back on this term. When you pay close attention, most disabilities become visible. Poems are not encoded messages that we’re meant to decipher, I frequently remind my students, they are language organized in ways that demand a different kind of attention. And so it is with invisible disabilities . . .
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Glimpses of Peace Only in Dreams: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees
There’s a war on, and Sergey Sergeyich is worried about his bees.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.
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Disability in Education
Welcome to our themed “issue” on Disability in Education.
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Knowledge alters things forever: A conversation with Anuradha Roy
. . . it was clear in my head that the dog in the book would not die, that he would bring people together, and also function as a kind of barometer for good and evil because, in my experience, that is how dogs are.
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RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Jealous of Children By Jill McDonough
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s October selection, American Treasure by Jill McDonough forthcoming from Alice James Books on November 8, 2022 Subscribe by September 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast Jealous of Children Not jealous of […]
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