Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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A Dad in the World
I always knew I wanted to be a parent, but I didn’t know I’d be a dad specifically.
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A Tight-Lipped Kind of Love: Jennifer Manthey’s The Fight
Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight…Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.
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Living in The In Between: A Conversation with Anna Mantzaris
When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.
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Telling My Daughter the List of Things I’ve Been Wrong About
There are far more jumbled states possible than whole ones, but occasionally in the shaking, maybe a piece or two comes out together.
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Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Care and Feeding
“He’s called before—it’s all routine,” the dispatcher assured him.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.