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Rumpus Articles
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What Is Freedom: Stefan Sagmeister
Freedom is enjoying your work so much that you would keep doing it even if the money stopped, and being in the position to actually do it. Most people love a thing they are never allowed to spend their days…
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The July Rumpus Book Club Selection: Magician by Tracy Lynne Oliver
Our second installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* will be on July 28th at 7pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with Tracy Lynne Oliver about her debut novel Magician, a dark fantasy that follows a Boy…
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Cruise Ships, Clowns, and Comedic Calamity: An Interview with Kathleen Rooney
“It bugs me that in our culture, animal stories are typically relegated to being “just for kids,” a bias which underestimates both animals and kids.Fiction is a form of magic that lets an author—and eventually a reader—inhabit any kind of…
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Three Poems
Afterwarmth Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the soupedup radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightninglines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscrapedagainst the sunset—what…
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What Is Freedom: Christina Sharpe
On July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered his now famous speech “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In this the…
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Patching Up The Past
When Novak ran past shouting, “Incoming!” I tumbled out of my GI hammock and scrambled to a sandbagged culvert hooch, waiting out the attack with squad leader Lloyd Edge. At the all clear signal we emerged to shouts that a…
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Dibé be’ iiná Remembering Sequence
Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…
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Pomegranate Season in the Underworld
This is the difference I am trying to name. The pomegranate on the shelf and the pomegranate on the newspaper. The fruit polished for display, and the fruit cracked open in a living room. The version of a place that…
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Form as Historical Memory: On D. M. Aderibigbe’s “82nd Division”
Are elegies fundamentally love poems? Or are love poems always tinged with elegy, knowing they contain their own ending?
