Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Camping Out at Walmart
Because Walmart has a company policy letting people park their cars in its lots overnight, it’s possible to find travelers, long-term campers, and even small communities of people living there. Wired highlights a series of portraits of people staying in…
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On Not “Getting Over It”
I am well aware, for example, that voter suppression is a serious problem. If we’re going to consider degrees of magnitude, which is a masturbatory exercise at best, voter suppression is the more serious problem. Or is it? For Salon, our…
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Creative Writing, Creative Careers
The two central myths are one, that literary citizenship is all about self-promotion, and two, that it’s connected deeply to the “marketplace.” In an interview for Ploughshares, Tasha Golden talks to “writing geek” Stephanie Vanderslice about teaching the business side of…
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Support Sister Spit
Back in 1994 in San Francisco, Sini Anderson and Rumpus contributor Michelle Tea cofounded Sister Spit, a “a weekly, free, all-girl open mic” that challenged the status quo of the male-dominated open-mic scene. It wasn’t long before they took the show…
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Lovely Bones
Halloween may be over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep thinking about skeletons. This Lapham’s Quarterly piece by Matthew Leib starts with a science teacher perching hip bones behind his head and “declar[ing] in a deranged falsetto that he [is]…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Hey. Kid. You wanna buy a weekend Rumpus roundup? If you missed yesterday’s Sunday Rumpus essay, “Through the Throat” by Ethel Rohan, you’ll want to correct that error immediately. A snippet: By then Dad was in the hospital six weeks…
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Queer Characters of Color in YA Novels
As a queer woman of color who writes young-adult fiction, Malinda Lo “was a little bit taken aback by the sheer paucity of books I could find about queer characters of color.” If you, too, have been seeking those sorts…
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Literary Puns, Halloween-Style
If you like Timothy Leo Taranto’s literary puns here on the Rumpus, you’ll also enjoy these Halloween-themed literary puns over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Written and illustrated by Rumpus contributor Lincoln Michel, they turn your favorite authors into scary monsters,…
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Straight Bobs and Silk Shells: Performing Respectability
Previously, we blogged about an essay on students in for-profit schools that happened to coincide with Stephen S. Mills’s Rumpus essay about employees of for-profit schools. That essay’s author, inequality scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom, has a stunning new essay up…
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Halloween Costumes for Book Nerds
Need a last-minute, low-hassle outfit for trick-or-treating? This list of literary Halloween costumes (with pictures, natch) has some great ideas—just grab a “Hello, My Name Is” sticker and write “Ishmael,” and you’re good to go. There are also some fantastic examples…
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Atwood/Munro Selfies Justify Twitter’s Existence
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate that Twitter has realized its true purpose, achieving an all-time high point in social-media history—and, indeed, in human civilization—with one stunning development: Margaret Atwood’s adorable selfies of her and Alice Munro celebrating Munro’s…
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A Spooktacular Halloween Reading List
It’s Halloween, and the Hairpin’s Jia Tolentino has put together a frightfully good list of spooky books to read by the light of the jack-o-lantern. This list has it all: “futurist nightmare, teenage romance with a Bataille-esque hint of sexual…