The Pastoral Novel in Chaos: Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency
. . . to witness the world is always to participate in it, to make choices about what to see and what to ignore, and also to be worked upon by forces of differing scales.
Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
Rumpus Original Fiction: To Go
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
Finding Enchantment in the Ordinary: A Conversation with Meng Jin
The reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
Sketch Book Reviews: Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING EARTH . . . is a quintessential Barry Lopez book. It is a clarion call to lovers of the earth, but one full of hope and optimism. This is exactly the kind of book we should all be reading right now.
Love in and Loving Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons
If I didn’t already write poems, Lisa Dordal’s Water Lessons would make me want to write them.
Sustaining our Creative Practice: An Interview with May-lee Chai
Writing is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it's not someone else making the terrible things happen.
The Microphone
The ableism of schools as workplaces means that all teachers are assumed to be able-bodied until a disabled teacher identifies their need for accommodations. Schools respond; they do not, to my knowledge, anticipate disabled teachers.
The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Only Humans
Hearing old people’s memories is like watching a once-in-three-generations downpour. In the past, they lived in abundance and air conditioning. So many details go over Salwa’s head. She doesn’t know how to transcribe all the words.
A void that migrates to the surface: An Interview with Juliet Patterson
That was my singular personal motivation for doing any of this work: to prevent the threat that this might happen to me. I naïvely believed that my parents would not die by their own hand because they had suffered as children of parents who had already died that way.