Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
Writing the Emotional Stakes of the Mundane: A Conversation with Alexandra Chang
As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.
-
The Mind of a Female Killer: My Men by Victoria Kielland
But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.
-
The Poems Are a Part of How I’m Living: A Conversation with Edgar Kunz
The poems help me to see that, for the most part, I’m just doing my best, even when my best isn’t very good and I’m confused and flailing around.
-
Quietly Magnificent: A Conversation with Christine Sneed
On DIRECT SUNLIGHT, the alchemy of titles and first lines, teaching, kangaroo humans, The National, and more.
-
Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
-
A Ratio of Give and Take: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zero-Sum
Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.
-
Allowing Space for What Isn’t Said: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo
I have to know all the jokers they hold in their hand so I know how they would play or hold them—and I think it’s that level of intimacy I’m constantly trying to learn as I write.
-
What to Read When Celebrating Trans, Nonbinary, and Genderqueer Writers
Highlighting work by some of our favorite trans/nb/genderqueer writers
-
Letting in the Light: A Conversation with Ana Maria Spagna
Remember: you are not the only voice. You are not even the decider of what’s true or not. You are the conduit for many perspectives. Maybe through these many perspectives readers can triangulate some semblance of truth. That, to me,…
