Staking Ground in Multiple Lands: A Conversation with Ghassan Zeineddine
I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.
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Funny Women: Ways* to Get Reproductive Rights
Click your heels three times and say “there’s no rights like reproductive rights.”
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The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
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Magical Realism as the Savior of Memory: A Conversation with John Manuel Arias
Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask why, and as a writer I’m just as interested.
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Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
The Long Form reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light
I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.
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“Writing is An Insistence Against a World Insisting Otherwise”: A Conversation with Jessica Cuello
Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno
how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it / means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk
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October Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Our next Letters in the Mail come from Ling Ma and Kelly Sather.
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Negotiating Grief, Shame, Loneliness, and Love: A Conversation with Vauhini Vara
Stories for me are much more like poems than like novels—that is, each of the stories in this collection started with just a vague impression: an experience or imagined vision of one that stuck with me and called to be written down.
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Voices on Addiction: Whole Pools of It
This time, Mandy calls me. Her words are much quicker. There is the force of meaning behind them, but the slur is still perceivable at the edges.
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The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays
Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Dollmaker
Sakshi can lay me over her workbench, unstitch my skin, stuff me with fur, and then sew me. She can weave her magic into me. Make me not be myself anymore.
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They’re Both and They’re Neither: A Conversation with Robert Lunday
My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.
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What to Read When Your Spirit Needs a Refresh
A reading list from India Adams, author of FOX WOMAN GET OUT!
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Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners
Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.
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Student Hunger is an Issue on College Campuses
What can we do to change this?
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To Mother, To Remember, To Survive: A Review of Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex
To be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy.
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Main Character as Witness: A Conversation with Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
To some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.
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Escape Velocity
But neither of us has said what does matter, or what we want, only what we do not want, and there in his defensive stammering, I can play my final card: You don’t know anything about me.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Storytellers
The first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.
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I See Something I Can’t Shake: A Conversation with Myronn Hardy
As a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.
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Words as the Way: Rediscovering my Sister and Myself Forty Years After Her Assault
No one talked about what had happened to her. No one, at least in my hearing, asked her what she needed. What she wanted. Including me.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White
Let’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns
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Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
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The Intimacy of the Short Story: A Conversation with Daphne Kalotay
Compassion is a window, and ideally the reader feels that—even if they’re reading a character whom they don’t necessarily like—this person is a rounded character with good qualities, bad qualities, and in-between qualities.
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from The Book of (More) Delights
Anyhow, alas, thanks to my boundless, bottomless, boundaryless ignorance: goddamn and holy shit! Waxing and waning! Have you heard?!?!
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Imprisoned by Insomnia: Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq
Memoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.
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The Turbulent Landscape of Identity: A Conversation with Jinwoo Chong
I’ve always wanted to write plot-driven novels that borrow from a lot of different traditions and institutions. That’s something I like most to read, and whenever I write something, I try to write something that I enjoy reading too.
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