Martha Bayne is a writer and editor in Chicago. She is editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine, an ensemble member with Chicago's Theater Oobleck, and author of Soup & Bread Cookbook: Building Community One Pot at a Time (Agate, 2011), a narrative cookbook drawn from the long-running community meal project she organizes at Chicago's Hideout bar. For more go here; find her on Twitter @marthabayne.
This time last year I sat for days with my father in his room at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, recording his voice as he narrated the story of his…
I never thought I’d wish for a trigger warning until this week, when this long and loving NYT profile of Terry Gross appeared and, with marksman-like aim, shot me back to a…
Martha Bayne runs away with the circus and finds unexpected meaning in the effort required to achieve its gaudy display. "Can it really be escapism," she asks, "if you're working so hard?"
Friday was one of those days where it felt like way too many threads had come unraveled from the thrift-store sweater of my life and were just tangled in an…
This week’s Sunday Rumpus essay is the Rumpus debut of one of my longtime personal favorite writers — and I say that with all proud claims to bias, because I…
I went to see Interstellar the other night, in need of three hours of sci-fi escapism from the terrestrial horrors of the last week, and while, frankly, it’s sort of…
Can’t get enough Leslie Jamison? The Chicago Humanities Festival video of her October 20 talk with Jac Jemc is available here. They cover a lot of ground in this hourlong Q…
I took a break this weekend from reading Eula Biss‘s On Immunity to go hear Biss speak as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Biss’s book is a study of both…