Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
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…
-
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.
-
Of Streets and Saints: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive and Theorem
Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
ENOUGH: 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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?!?!
-
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.