“If You Give a Story Something, It Gives It Back:” A Conversation with Morgan Talty
A writer isn’t in control of what’s on the page, the story is. But if you give a story something, it gives it back.
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
What to Read When You Want to Leave
No one can do the hard work of leaving for you, but you can arm yourself with the stories of others—the closest I’ve come to finding a blueprint.
Ephemera and Artifacts: A Conversation with Sejal Shah
So many stories are written for/about male heroes with a traditional, predictable plot. That’s not to say that I didn’t and don’t hope other people would read and be interested in these stories, but I wrote them first for myself.
The Slow Melting of Faces: A Conversation with Maria Bamford
You could write about this weird thing, and people who like to read will be down to find out about this different world. It’s a very different situation in a nightclub or a theater.
Voices on Addiction: If You Give
“He’s going to want a cookie to go with it.”She seemed to exhale on the mouse’s behalf. Thank God, another cookie.
Gilded: Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
“It All Came Back to My Illness”: A Conversation with April Gibson
Writing about illness is a way to push back against all the pathologizing and dismissiveness. It allowed me to be in charge of my own narrative.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Nazifa Islam
but I haven’t the discipline to really live / for poetry, for dreams
The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
Intergenerational Epiphany: A Conversation with Margaret Juhae Lee
It’s now my favorite way to write—in community. There’s something safe about it, you feel held.
Loving Renee Back
Yet, in my moments of hope, I wonder: If trans signifies a crossing, might it cross the space between life and death?
It is Once Again Hanif Abdurraqib’s Year
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.