The First Book: Melissa Petro
In our culture, motherhood is presumably sanctified, and I thought I’d experience social acceptance beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Instead, I felt under constant surveillance and yet utterly invisible....
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Rumpus Articles
“I thought my sorrow could transform me”: A Conversation with Megan Pinto
Visually, prose tells us that we’re moving through time, through narrative or rhetoric, and visually, poetry tells us we’re moving up and down through lyric, feeling.
ENOUGH: The Tiny Thing Inside Me
They are for young people who don’t need to make up their minds about having children yet. They offer safety from surprises and forgetfulness, “mistake-proof.”
“I Am in Love With Moons”: My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF) by Renee Gladman
But this is love: crying into your lover’s face until it becomes so ridiculous, that the event becomes absolutely precious.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Before Love, Before Loneliness
You make stuff up all the time. You excel in subjects that require making stuff up, like English composition and moral science.
We Live in History: A Conversation with Nicolás Medina Mora
Who among us can say that the life they’re leading is the product of their choices and not a staging of the script they were handed at birth?
Red as in: Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers
Perhaps like a phoenix, Martin maintains such a commanding presence throughout the book because she has endured the sacrificial fire of being a poet, the necessary self-immolation.
The Persistence of Enchantment: A Conversation with Sofia Samatar
To me, the difference between invisibility and opacity is the difference between being misread and being granted a quality of privacy that is a fundamental part of being a human among other humans.
The Knock at the Door
Maybe it was not such an obstacle after all, if it was going to save our lives one day. This is how my brain came to be rewired.
A Meditation on Magical Girls: Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires
Park is not being cheeky. Rather, she’s taking a power that has lived in the hearts and minds of so many young people and propelling the magical girl genre into an entirely new dimension.
Parallel Practice: Story at the End of My Fist
I will throw a lot of punches. Thousands. Hurl my fist. Aim for the target. Do it over and over. Fail.