-
Dispatches from the Rust Belt
Morning Edition interviews writer and journalist David Giffels about his new book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Giffels writes about his choice to remain in Akron, Ohio when everyone around him seemed to be leaving, including LeBron James. From the NPR interview: LeBron James and I are, I think, the…
-
Penelope and Phyllis
Two mid-century writers you don’t hear a lot about are getting some attention: Penelope Mortimer at The Daily Beast, and Phyllis McGinley at The Paris Review. Though they shared publication histories (and initials), their styles couldn’t have been more different. Penelope tended to write dark, confessional stories about the difficulties of marriage and love, while Phyllis wrote about “the stability…
-
Picturing Appalachia
There’s a bite-sized symposium about the challenges of photographing Appalachia happening over at the Oxford American right now, and it’s a great read. In his essay, “Looking Without Fear,” Roger May writes: Recently, I was thinking about my grandfather and missing him a great deal. I decided to flip through his bible where, throughout the…
-
I remember, I remember
A good thing to do on a Monday is to go and read, or re-read, Mary Ruefle’s beautiful essay I remember at the poetry foundation — a beautiful meditation on childhood, cows and her first electric typewriter (and also, just about everything else). I remember, two years later, reading Three Poems on a grassy slope while across the…
-
Suprisingly Whimsical
A couple weeks old, but always fresh: the poet Charles Simic writes on the NYR’s blog about the language that sticks, both on and off the page. Simic has a lot of dark poems but the occasional blogs he writes for the New York Review of Books tend to be surprisingly whimsical. “His wife looks…
-
Thoreau, Angsty Teen
In his new biography, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims describes the young philosopher as a “quirky” young man who was a little lost when it came to deciding on his career and future (much like half the people you went to college with). He also liked popcorn: Sims says one of his aims was to…
-
The Extraordinary Ladies In My Life
Disaster has always been my most loyal muse. Whenever I glued my hands together as a child; I took to my diary. Whenever the dog I’m dog-sitting jumps out of the car I’m driving (it only happened once, and it was OK); I blog. Through bad dates, bad years, job fails, grocery-store disasters and the…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Peter Orner
Writer and Rumpus columnist Peter Orner chats about compression in his work, the reappearance of characters, self-deception, and the stories we hold close.
-
Icefalls
It seemed like nature might be offering up something fraught with emotion, a beautiful image that a writer could imbue with heartbreaking symbolism. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It was just fall, and so the leaves were red.
-
Albums of Our Lives: Moxy Früvous’s Bargainville
What did I turn to when I needed to channel my frustration with this corporatized Republican state against which I could only kick my small angry feet? The music of Gen-Xers from another country.
-
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Matthew Specktor
Matthew Specktor spent the better part of a year writing one of the most captivating novels about Los Angeles that I’ve read. I know I’m not alone in this assessment.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Mark O’Connell
Mark O’Connell, author of the first original e-book from The Millions, talks about why he is interested in and troubled by what he calls this “frictionless sharing and flattening of affect,” particularly when it comes to what Internet inside jokes have nicknamed Epic Fails.