Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Investigation Moves the Interior Life Forward: A Conversation with Patrick Cottrell
“ I actually had a much different ending when I did the first draft. For this novel, it needed to have a sense of something happening. It couldn’t just fizzle out or neatly resolve everything. I needed something decisive but…
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Apartment by the Sea
She tried to visualize all those photographs from art school that now pop up as Facebook memories. They had been friends for half of their lives now. How could she have forgotten something so obvious?
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
It really is a lovely and clarifying tradition I participate in, having eyes and skin. It makes green the tree and darkens the walk. I am unruly at thinking, looking down a street or I gasp, seeing a wasp near…
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Star Champions
Simone diminished the flame of curiosity in Isabella Fernanda to a quiet ember. Alexandria was actually relieved. The sticky food in her mouth had already indicated she wouldn’t be speaking further on the subject anytime soon and tilted her body…
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National Poetry Month: Quick Response
could not know your dazzle in all its power a brilliance from inside that dark center otherwise stark gaze gleams
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National Poetry Month: Two Poems
Only my shadow is real: upon its shoal, waves bend and break. No need to write an argument for shade –
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Writing the Shit Out of Your Darlings: A Conversation with Ramona Ausubel
“Thinking about the way a river moves while thinking about plot is really helpful, for example. It’s not a straight line. The same way an early draft doesn’t go from page one effortlessly and straightforwardly to page two-hundred and fifty.…
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National Poetry Month: “DRAB AS A F OOL, AS A LOOF AS A BARD”
Don’t nod, borrow or rob. Live not on evil,
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The Grand Performance of Womanhood: A Conversation with Caro Claire Burke
“A lot of the experience of writing a novel was not unfamiliar to me. And I think, at least for me, so much of writing is just figuring out mental tricks to stick with it, because so much of it…
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National Poetry Month: Magdalena
Magdalena was shaping small pools of water in pockets of stone. A bare-faced ibis sounded his quintuplet alarm when you turned to me to say you’d stopped the medications one month ago. The head pain, back pain, tremors, the cytomegalovirus—too…
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Infestation
Everyone knew the housing projects had rats, but when Liliya first saw one she was lying on her mattress on the floor, looking at her phone until a sudden, furtive movement caught her eye. The rat was only a few…
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The First Book: Avery Curran
“For me, writing a first novel was defined by having to accept that I was learning how to do it as I went, and that is a very disagreeable experience if you, like me, are one of the world’s great…