Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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Now More than Ever, We Need “The Happiest Band on Earth”
It’s a sentiment at the core of The 502s’ origin story. In 2015, Isola and a pair of cousins founded the band, and while they were searching for a name, Isola and one of the cousins (who happened to live…
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Gendering Food and the Solidarity of Rituals: A Conversation with Alicia Kennedy
“Being rooted in my neighborhood has made my writing better because I listen to other people who aren’t on the internet. I listen to people who have very different perspectives on the world, and sometimes I hate people that I’m…
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Three Poems
Nights like these, the sky tips like a kicked over bucket and tens of millions of wings are stitched to the Mississippi wind’s long seam. But glass houses false stars and promises of endless flight. Then, sends dark dreams. At…
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The Timelessness of K-Dramas and Folktales: A Conversation with Jimin Han
“Breaking a big project down into small steps helps. In terms of time, I’m at my best when I write in the morning, first thing, even though it’s hard when there are all the social media notifications and emails to…
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Someone to Swim With
I am fifteen going on sixteen. It is well-past midnight. Reclined on the sofa bed of the beach bungalow, beneath the thin sheet, butterflies swirl in my sunburned stomach as my music teacher, the maestro bends over, his blue eyes…
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Underwater, Unbelonging, Unknowing: A Conversation with Erin L. McCoy
“Genre could be said to be another bubble—another set of laws that preclude us from participating in anything outside them. As I was writing the book, I did my best to pretend that there were no walls pinning me in—beyond…
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Ancestral Milk
“Zoe feels panic rising from her pelvic floor, then guilt and more anxiety about her own animal response, the cortisol bath leaching into her milk which will then permeate Pippa’s gut and become part of her DNA and Pippa’s entire…
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“Famesick”: On the Frackable Self
The extraction she describes is not always malicious; it often emerges from precarity, ambition, hunger, and the longing to be let inside a world that feels inaccessible. Dunham shows that fracking frequently operates without self-recognition. Those asking for access, connection,…
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Writing from the Chinese Diaspora and Against Self-Censorship: A Conversation with M Lin
“I have self-censored in the sense that, once, when I knew a story was to be published, I took out a few overtly explicit name-callings. I believe the story was actually better for it—sometimes leaving something unsaid has a chilling,…
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Bad Artist
That was summer. In the autumn, you fly to see him. The address is a narrow lane off the canal, where tourists recede and street signs wilt in their place. The buzzer is broken, he has to come down to…
