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
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Rumpus Articles
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.
“Writing is An Insistence Against a World Insisting Otherwise”: An Interview with Jessica Cuello
Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.