The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #147: Saadia Faruqi
“If you can’t really tell the whole story in five thousand words, are you really a writer?”
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Mini-Interviews
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #146: Andrew Solomon
“I can tell my story with precautions; others strip away my armor and expose a beating heart.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #145: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
“Categories are, by definition, externally created and applied.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #144: Cathy Linh Che
“I think a safe space is one of deep listening and deep caring.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #143: Saul Austerlitz
“I felt that Meredith Hunter was the invisible figure at the center of the story.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #142: Chelsea Hodson
“If I didn’t allow myself to be vulnerable on the page, I wouldn’t get anywhere.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #141: Tara Isabella Burton
“I want to make a case for the serious, literary legitimacy of the female experience of self-construction.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #140: Alicia Kopf
“We need narrative patterns to understand reality.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #139: Debra Jo Immergut
“If the door doesn’t open, it’s okay to walk away, give your poor head a rest. And try again later.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #138: Melissa Broder
“We have what we need inside us already, it’s just a question of uncovering it, of remembering who we are again and again.”
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The Rumpus Mini-interview Project #137: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Admitting a love or joy, or yes, wonder for the natural world is, especially as a woman of color, one of the most vulnerable things we can do.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #136: Shy Watson
“I do think when I write it’s kind of therapy or having to tell someone everything or maybe writing it gets it out of my head?”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #135: Patrick Nathan
“I wanted to make these characters much more complex than the individual boxes we normally see.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #134: Elisabeth Cohen
“Writing is, for me, maybe like what religious faith is for some people.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #133: Jake Shears
“I wrote this book. I worked really, really hard on it, and I was a little scared by it.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #132: Juliana Hatfield
“These songs are not just sweet confections. They’re talking about real things, like pain, and not being able to connect.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #130: Kaveh Akbar
“I took a six or seven year break from sending out my own poems, just waiting for my abilities to catch up a bit with my ambitions.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #129: L.A. Johnson
“Right now California is burning and yet there’s snow on mountains that I can also see from my window.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #127: Tara Skurtu
“A poem is not a perfect puzzle, yet it is precisely a perfect puzzle.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #126: Christopher Zeischegg
“Being thrust into forced ritualistic closeness does break the ice, but doesn’t guarantee closeness.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #125: Tyree Daye
“I think if you are really doing the work, you can’t write about America and not explore race and slavery, and that goes for any writer.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #124: Anne Raeff
“I guess that’s true when you write a novel, you end up taking out so much.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #122: Nathan Hill
“Write what you want to write, he said, and let other people deal with taxonomies.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #121: CLS Ferguson
“Because that’s how memories are, right? Little flashes.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #120: Jeannie Vanasco
“If you’ve ever seen a video by somebody running and filming at the same time, that’s what the world looked like: shaky, fast, in and out of focus.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #119: Joyce Maynard
“I was diving straight into the wave, right into the source of my greatest grief.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #118: John Ridley
“It was about showing people taking, or denying, responsibility.”
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