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Radical Empathy and the Power of Fiction: A Conversation with Shastri Akella
One of the two great powers of writing fiction is the capacity to invent, to activate the imagination and access realities unlike our own
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Life is Damage: A Conversation with Claire Messud
If you’re interested in character, then you’re interested in perspective, and intimacy, and in the distinctions—and distance—between one person’s mind and another’s.
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How I Learned to Hope Again
And in order to hope, I have to once more believe—in the midst of unrelenting dark—that light exists even if I cannot see it.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #139: Debra Jo Immergut
“If the door doesn’t open, it’s okay to walk away, give your poor head a rest. And try again later.”
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The Inner and Outer Self: A Conversation with Sylvia Brownrigg
Sylvia Brownrigg discusses Pages For Her and returning to its world of characters, the inner voices she heeds and those she silences, and who she imagines her readers to be.
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Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Love of country, some argue. With their boots firmly planted in my chest as I struggle to protest. No, that is not love, but blindness.
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Every Woman Is a Nation unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray discusses the novel Valiant Gentleman, writing characters that are fundamentally different from herself, and confronting issues of colonization.
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Are You a Trans Ally?
Often well-intentioned cis folks like myself feel kind of overwhelmed by all there is to know and, not wanting to sound ignorant or hurtful, just kind of keep to the sidelines. But it doesn’t take a degree in gender studies to be a trans ally (nor does it require you to have an LGBTQ friend).…
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Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree
I knew if I could make it out of town, make it to college, I would survive. But I wasn’t sure I would.
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The Ways We Speak
We suffer, after all, not because of the ways we speak, but because of the ways we exclude ourselves with internalized external narratives about how different we feel from others.
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Seven Almonds
The first thing my parents bought when they earned money in America was a giant bag of almonds as a talisman for success.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Shields and Caleb Powell
Writers David Shields and Caleb Powell can’t stop fighting, even about their new book-length argument and forthcoming film, I Think You’re Totally Wrong.