From the Archive: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Butch and the Bathroom
Then there is the bathroom issue. My beloved is like me, like you, like anyone. Sometimes a person has to go.
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Rumpus Articles
When To Believe an Unreliable Narrator: Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts
The aestheticization of violence in literature, like other representations, can be deceiving.
National Poetry Month Day 4: Arianne True
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
The Subconscious Repository of Weird Things: A Conversation with Ananda Lima
Poetry allows me to say the thing without a million conjectures. It leaves a lot of space and allows words to resonate and connect without me having to take you there . . . because of the conventions of poetry, I can say things that are understood as a gate to the truth.
National Poetry Month Day 3: Safia Jama
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
National Poetry Month Day 2: Megan Fernandes
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
National Poetry Month Day 1: Chen Chen
Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
Funny Women: Who’s the Man in a Lesbian Relationship? A Guide for Curious Straight People
Present a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Whoever puts it in their purse is the woman. Whoever pulls their own copy out of their pocket is Gertrude Stein.
Looking for Trouble: A Conversation with Maud Newton
Are these stories true? Did my great grandfather really kill someone with a hay hook? Was my other great grandfather really a communist?
The Scent of Man: Cameron MacKenzie’s River Weather
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Inheritance
When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom sapped from their future. She thought it was allegory until she came face-to-Western-face with a Mojave rattlesnake in the scrub out by the foothills.
Doomscrolling in Novel Form: A Conversation with John Elizabeth Stintzi
You'll really love this book if you have the opinion that reality is weird. And if you think, like me, that the fact that so many people believe that there’s even a steady thing that we could call reality is fucking insane. If that's who you are, this book is definitely for you.