Posts by: Roxane Gay

The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch

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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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Spit and Mud

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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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Eleven

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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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The Whole World, Opened Up

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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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The Politics of Entitlement

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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 […]

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An Elegy for Oxford American

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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 […]

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A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories

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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.

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An Open Letter

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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 […]

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Problem Solving: Part 1

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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 […]

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