The Rumpus Interview with Monica Drake
Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl and now The Stud Book, discusses the physicality of characters’ bodies, the complicated issues women face while aging, and the crucial nature of writing communities.
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Posts by: Roxane Gay
The Rumpus Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
In fifty-four sections, Terry Tempest Williams not only tries to gain a greater understanding of her mother, she explores her faith, her marriage, her role as a woman in the world, and much more.
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Stunned Silence
What wearies me is how often I have found myself stunned and silent in recent years. What especially wearies me is having such a finely honed vocabulary for tragedy.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jim Gavin
Jim Gavin is a talented writer who allows his stories the room they need to be told. These are stories that are intelligent and quiet and moving, stories that take up time and space in satisfying ways.
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How a Wound Heals
Last night’s Oscar ceremony and some of the commentary around the ceremony make the best possible case for why diversity matters.
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Spit and Mud
What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really understanding why every Sunday, I found myself, alongside my family, in the same place, mindlessly repeating prayers by rote.
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The Better Bombshell
This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models.
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Today, Enough
We are crying out for change, for a mental health care system that can truly help the people who soothe their inner torment by reaching for weapons of such destruction. We are crying out for gun control laws that, at the very least, make it more difficult for such tragedies to occur.
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The Rumpus Interview With M. Bartley Seigel
M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the page with a raw sense of place and longing, an undercurrent of anger and adulation
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Eleven
We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing faster, developing sooner. We forget.
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How We All Lose
Discussions about gender are often framed as either/or propositions. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or so we are told, as if this means we’re all so different it is nigh impossible to reach each other.
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The Whole World, Opened Up
I don’t really want to know what a man looks like when his face has been cannibalized. I don’t really want to know about this dog-breastfeeding woman. I don’t want to be in the position of being able to judge or ridicule the ugliness and the strangeness of this world.
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Roxane Gay’s Reading Roundup, Fall 2012
Our essays editor surveys new novels and collections — coming-of-age tales, journeys, and love stories — and looks ahead to forthcoming works.
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A Matter of Dignity
Certain constituencies are always shoved aside, always told their issues will be addressed at some nebulous point in the future. During a lengthy debate, to see these issues merit neither discussion nor debate speaks to how little dignity is valued on the political stage.
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The Politics of Entitlement
To be entitled means believing you have an inherent right to something. It is very easy to feel entitled, to feel like we deserve a certain quality of life or valuable opportunities. I don’t know that anyone is immune from entitlement at one time or another. It’s what you do with that sense of entitlement […]
...moreThe Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion
There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath but I don’t believe in trigger warnings.
...moreAn Elegy for Oxford American
There has been a shakeup recently at literary magazine The Oxford American. Editor and founder Marc Smirnoff and managing editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald were fired on July 15. They have since compiled a website detailing events leading up to and after their firing. The story is part passionate defense, part manifesto, part elegy, with some oversharing and […]
...moreWe Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
A great deal of the conversation about publishing and diversity is grounded in the idea that there simply aren’t many writers of color.
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A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories
We are still in that time in our history where public figures come out of invisible closets largely built by a public insatiable in its desire to know all the intimate details of the private lives of very public people.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Valerie Trueblood
“The short story is a dark form, don’t you think? There are sunny ones but they’re in the minority. I don’t want complete darkness, though. I like a dappled story.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Karolina Waclawiak
Roxane Gay talks with Karolina Waclawiak about her new novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms, the displacement of being from different worlds, loneliness, and Los Angeles.
...moreAn Open Letter
On her blog today, respected critic Ruth Franklin wrote an open letter to the editors of Bookforum. She writes: I have considered opting out of writing for magazines at which women are not represented among the top editors, such as Bookforum. But such a policy would naturally be counter to my stated intent. So I’ve resolved to […]
...moreProblem Solving: Part 1
When we talk about issues of representation, many editors say, “Where do I find writers of color?” I’d like to start to answer that question by compiling a working list of writers of color, across genres. Please feel free to share some of the names from your rolodex, either in the comments or via e-mail […]
...moreWhere Things Stand
After the VIDA counts in 2010 and 2011, as well as Jennifer Weiner’s count she released on her blog in January 2012, I wanted to see where things stood for writers of color. Race often gets lost in the gender conversation as if it’s an issue we’ll get to later.
...morePeculiar Benefits
What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.
...moreToday’s Required Reading
At Guernica, Randa Jarrar writes about this one time when she tried to visit her sister in Palestine and she was deported by Israel. I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would picture myself walking around Ramallah with […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Julianna Baggott
Julianna Baggott’s Pure is about a post-apocalyptic world where the responsibility for changing and saving civilization lies with children.
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The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us
I enjoy fairy tales because I need to believe, despite my cynicism, that there is a happy ending for everyone, for me.
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Girls Girls Girls
A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track.
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