Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
November 1 LITM Daniel Gumbiner
Our next letter in the mail comes from writer Daniel Gumbiner. Daniel’s letter explores the ideas he’s abandoned and the ones that have lured him back, and celebrates the unlimited new beginnings that writers can embark on.
Daniel Gubminer’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. He is the Editor of The Believer and a 2022–23 Hermitage Fellow. He lives in Oakland, CA.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Daniel Gubminer: One of the first books I loved was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. It had this mixture of adventure and play that I found really intoxicating, and it also spurred my lifelong interest in boats. In terms of recent favorites, I loved both of Hernan Diaz’s books, In the Distance and Trust. I am a huge admirer of his work. As far as nonfiction, I recently read Evicted by Matthew Desmond and was blown away by the intimacy of that reporting, and his storytelling abilities. I learned so much from that book. I really liked reading Maeve Brennan’s collected New Yorker pieces too. She had this ear for the everyday that was just incredible, and she could be really funny too. The writer Peter Orner turned me onto her, through his Believer column that he wrote for us.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Gubminer: I was interested in books and writers from a young age. I don’t know if there was an exact moment when I decided I wanted to pursue writing more seriously. I’ve had a lot of great mentors who’ve shown me how to persevere as a writer, and who gave me the confidence to continue. But I think the truth of it is that it’s kind of mysterious to me, why I need to write. I think what I like about it is it makes me feel more connected to everything around me. I see it as a way of being, a way of paying attention to and tending to the world.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Gubminer: “If you’re in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can just pick it up.” That’s a Julia Child quote.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book. How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Gubminer: This new book follows a family of three, in the foothills of California, over the course of a single fire season. There’s Ben Hecht, father and cannabis grower turned grape grower. Ada Hecht, mother and novelist. And Yoel, their son, who returns to the family farm and ends up staying for a while, despite his longstanding frustrations with his father. I hope the book gives readers a better idea of what it looks like to live through a fire season in California today, that they find some sense of connection with the Hechts, and that maybe, in some small way, it helps them make sense of their own experience of living through this age of ecological devastation.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Gubminer: I love all of Cheryl Strayed’s old Dear Sugar columns. I was at the party, many years ago, when she was revealed to be Sugar. This one (no. 78: “The Obliterated Place”) is particularly gorgeous and heartbreaking.
There is, of course, incredibly valuable insight in this column for people confronting grief, but there’s also insight here for anyone dealing with something that is unrelentingly difficult: “You go on by doing the best you can, you go on by being generous, you go on by being true, you go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on, you go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days, you go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”
November 15 LITM Jami Nakamura Lin
Our second November letter in the mail comes from writer Jami Nakamura Lin. Jami is a Japanese Taiwanese Okinawan American writer, whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Catapult, and Electric Literature, among other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area. www.jaminakamuralin.com
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Jami Nakamura Lin: The books I really loved when I was growing up featured girls who were spunky and would often get in trouble. I loved the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary, and Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh was really formative. I read it when I was nine, and started keeping a spy log, which I called my “dossiers,” like Harriet did. That turned into a lifelong journal keeping habit. My mother did really try to expose us to books by Asian American authors, but many being published at the time were trying to teach a lesson. The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord stuck out to me because it was fun and funny.
Recently I’ve struggled with my attention span, so I’m mostly reading story collections. One collection I’ve returned to again and again over the past couple years is Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lin: I knew since I was very young—and then I forgot. When I was four, I started bouncing a kickball around the house and telling stories to myself. It was my way of processing the world. From a very early age, I referred to the books I would write in the future. But as I grew up, I thought this wasn’t a real career. I tried to think of other ways to incorporate my love of writing that I thought could be actual jobs. I took a journalism class in high school, but I hated it. In college, I tried to double-major in psychology and English, but quit English because “Major British Writers II” bored me so much. I thought I would be a social worker. Then during my senior year, one of my psych classes didn’t fit my schedule, so I took a creative nonfiction workshop class instead. We had to pick numbers out of a hat to decide who turned in their piece first, and I was the unlucky one. This ended up being very lucky, however, because after I submitted, my professor asked me if I had ever thought of going to graduate school for creative writing. I had never thought of this as a viable possibility. Because he had seen my writing so early in the semester, we had enough time to throw together a portfolio and application, and I got accepted. So I think I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since I was four, and then had to re-learn that again when I was twenty-one.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book. How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Lin: My debut book, The Night Parade, is a speculative memoir (illustrated by my sister!) that uses yо̄kai and other Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan creatures of legend as a way to interrogate my bipolar disorder, my father’s death, and other intergenerational ghosts. At its core, the book asks: how do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?
Though it’s a memoir, the book uses many different forms, points of view, structures, and perspectives. I hope it will help crack open the limits we as readers put on ourselves and our own narratives—limits often given to us by the structures in power. It behooves them to have us not imagine, not dream, a better collective future. I hope this book helps guide its readers into how we can carry our griefs and hauntings with us, and how we can use them as sites of transformation and possibility.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Lin: I decided to have my Letters in the Mail piece resemble a zine because zines were the first publication I made that ever reached an audience of more than like, my family. As a teenager, I felt so powerful having the entire means of production within my (and my copy machine’s) hands. I loved receiving zines in the mail from teenagers all across the country, and sending and receiving letters from the zinesters I really connected with. There was no thought of literary journals or the publishing industry. We made zines because we wanted to create something, and to share our words with a community. That little ecosystem—bereft of any gatekeepers—was so powerful.
