What to Read When You Want to Find Home
Even if I’m still in limbo, I’m learning what home means for me and how it shows up in both my body and my mind.
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dorothea Lasky
In the space of the garden / I ordered each mouthless opening / Until they formed into spirit mouths
The Way America Treats Teens Is Unacceptable: A Conversation with Emi Nietfeld
Being affected in those ways can give us motivation to make sure that other people aren’t hurt in the same ways that we’ve been hurt.
ENOUGH: Hold Your Breath Up To The Mirror and Draw Yourself a New Face
I wish you didn’t have to climb onto the light fixture like a revenant, / watch his fingers probe someone glued to the ground, her eyes a fist.
Food and Fraternity: Bryan Washington’s Family Meal
Reading a new book by an admired writer offers the chance to recapture the familiar pleasures of their previous work—the equivalent of ordering your favorite dish at a restaurant again, comparing it to the version that only lives in your memory.
Staking Ground in Multiple Lands: A Conversation with Ghassan Zeineddine
I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.
Funny Women: Ways* to Get Reproductive Rights
Click your heels three times and say "there's no rights like reproductive rights."
The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders
Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.
Magical Realism as the Savior of Memory: A Conversation with John Manuel Arias
Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask "why," and as a writer I’m just as interested.
Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
THE LONG FORM reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light
I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.