Posts by author
Serena Candelaria
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The People You Want to Share Your Brain With
“Why are you so interested in MFAs and whether they’re a good idea or not?” asked Rumpus friend Sheila Heti, in a recent interview with the New Yorker. Heti, who did not attend grad school, believes that it is possible for writers…
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Don’t Let the Other Voices Get Too Loud
Before Leslie Jamison was a New York Times bestseller, she was a student at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In an interview with The Millions, Jamison said she has “a lot of faith and trust in the workshop process,” but this doesn’t…
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Our Voices Are Voices Too
In the 1990s, Junot Diaz enrolled in an MFA program where there was silence when it came to critical discussions of racial identity. As Diaz writes in the New Yorker, “Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on…
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Why Children’s Books Matter
In a piece featured on the Paris Review’s website, Sadie Stein encourages readers to check out the New York Public Library’s exhibition “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” The exhibition features original sketches and manuscripts of beloved children’s…
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Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do not. While Cole continues to stand by this essay, he…
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Plunge Into the Dark with Open Eyes
Terrifying though the unknown may seem, there are benefits to plunging into the murky waters of uncertainty. In an essay featured in the New Yorker, Rebecca Solnit writes, “It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to…
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Still Writing Like a Motherfucker
An article published in Flavorwire hails Cheryl Strayed (Rumpus’ very own Sugar) as a publishing hero. In Jason Diamond’s words, “Strayed is the rare type of writer who is both critically and commercially embraced, but also keeps her feet firmly planted in the literary world.” But how did this…
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I Cook Because I Love You
When my grandmother taught me to make banana pancakes, which we did every Wednesday night through much of my childhood, she would counsel “Hold the bowl” as I stirred, which became, in our letters to each other, code for “I…
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Like, Considering the Other Side
Critics might believe that “like” has infiltrated and degraded American English, but John McWhorter argues just the contrary. McWhorter claims that “like” is not a marker of the downfall of spoken language, but instead, a sign of its “growing sophistication.”…
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On Writing and Uncertainty
Is writing a fundamentally speculative act? This is one of the questions Jenny Offill was asked in an interview with the Paris Review. Offill discusses the uncertainty that comes with being a writer, working constantly at a craft that can never…
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What’s the Point of Speed Reading?
“The dream of speed-reading has been around since long before screens were ubiquitous,” as James Camp writes in the New Yorker. Now, the much-discussed startup Spritz is promising to make that dream a reality with a technology that streams text…
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The Eternal Question: To MFA or Not?
Writers who are currently trying to decide whether an MFA is right for them will find that the questions being raised today are not unlike those addressed by Flannery O’Connor: What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is…