Figuring It Out: A Conversation with Rosellen Brown
Rosellen Brown discusses her new novel, THE LAKE ON FIRE.
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Posts by: Zoe Zolbrod
Reinventing Motherhood and Re-Dreaming Reality: Talking with Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore discusses her new novel We Were Witches, why capitalism and the banking system are the real enemies, and finding the limits between memoir and fiction.
...moreSunday Links
This week I found myself reading way too much about the Democratic primary. To what extent is the expressed dislike of Hillary rooted in sexism? Is being the first woman to win a primary contest in the United States giving a big f-you to the establishment, or is someone who’s been paid big bucks by […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Einstein
Mot was living my own fear… I wanted to learn from him how I might survive, if I too ended up without a home, without the resources to live what I thought of as a minimally decent life.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Chloe Caldwell
Chloe Caldwell talks about her new novella Women, gender nectar, break-up grief, and her impatience with analyzing the fiction/nonfiction divide.
...moreSunday Links
What to do with the interesting or vexing stories from our lives, the people who fascinate us, the situations that obsesses us? Do we spin them into fictions or try to capture them in nonfiction, in memoirs, essays, or—in what seems to be a trend—some hybrid form? “Autobiography is increasingly the only form in all […]
...moreSunday Links
Brooklyn Magazine’s Favorite Writers Share Their Favorite Childhood Books. One novel I loved when I was a kid was Madam Pastry and Meow. The details are fuzzy for me now, but I recall this: A schoolgirl in Paris meets a young artist, the type who lives in a garret and spends his food money on […]
...moreSunday Links
I find Lisa Carver’s bracing words about rejection fun to read but painful to put in practice. Here’s some scientific proof that rejection physically hurts. What makes me feel better about rejection? Reading about how it was meted out to writers I admire. This site’s a gold mine. Seeing the numbers of rejections juxtaposed with […]
...moreSunday Links
Amy Monticello, the author of this week’s Sunday Rumpus essay, wrote about her father’s illness and death in real time (here’s a representative essay of hers from The Nervous Breakdown) and I read the pieces while holding my breath. Lucky enough in middle age to have my own elderly parents and my in-laws still here […]
...moreSunday Links
This week I read a lot about rape. I became aware that Bill Cosby was almost certainly a rapist about 10 years ago, when Andrea Costand brought a civil suit against him that included 13 women with similar accusations. Her story and motives were questioned; the case was settled out of court; and I was […]
...moreSunday Links
This week’s Sunday Rumpus essay by Jean Kim got me thinking about the kind of retrospective realizations that make us wish we could go back in time and do something differently, or at least apologize for our inability to do so. What synchronicity then to run across “Self Portrait in Apologies” by Sarah Einstein. Sarah […]
...moreSunday Links
In talking to Molly Backes for this week’s Sunday Interview, Megan Stielstra mentions that she wants her readers to put down her book while reading in order to think, act, or write about the ideas being discussed. Her strategy sure worked on me. Before I got Once I Was Cool, I read an excerpt online […]
...moreSunday Links
This week’s Sunday Rumpus essay made me especially attuned to other pieces that touch on immigration and power differentials. In “On Publishing a First Memoir,” Daisy Hernandez recalls a teenaged boy, an artist, who was in the U.S. without papers when he won a contest. “He walked onto that stage, and for the first time, […]
...moreKathy Acker, Icon
In today’s New York Times Book Review, there’s a great essay by Cheryl Strayed responding to the prompt “Is This a Golden Age for Woman Essayists?” She rightly tears the question to shreds. And yet, I’ll admit it. I tend to gravitate towards writers who are women, both in terms of what I read and […]
...moreNew Sunday, New Editors
Way back in the 1990s we, Zoe Zolbrod and Martha Bayne, decided to publish a zine. For months we zipped editorial ideas back and forth on our brand-new AOL accounts, and then, shortly after Martha emigrated from Brooklyn to join Zoe in Chicago, we produced our first issue: a hot-off-the-presses publication called Maxine, with a […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Who’s Crying Now
Faced with parenting children who have no qualms about bursting into tears, Zoe Zolbrod revisits her own stoic childhood, two generations of secret abuse, and whether crying may hold the power to protect.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Lisa, Wolf, and the World
What is the price of art–of inspiration? Shaken by the dire financial need of one of her youthful punk idols, Zoe Zolbrod powerfully re-examines her own relationship to the middle-class ethos.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Elizabeth Moore
“The phrase ‘global citizen’ always gets tossed around with my work, and part of it is that, clearly, talking about being a global citizen is the only way we can talk about participating in globalization without feeling like assholes.”
...moreThe Last City I Loved: Chicago
It depends on the definition of love, of course. You can spend a week in a city and ache at the sight of its balconies, be imprinted forever with the particular stench of jasmine and diesel. But if the intimacy doesn’t last at least as long as a year, was it really love?
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Interview with Lisa Carver
I first heard of Lisa Carver in the late 1980s, when we were both about 19 or 20. Performing under the name Lisa Suckdog in shows that involved screeching, screaming, pissing, and violence, she was often spoken of in the same breath with notorious scum-rocker G.G. Allin,
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