Rumpus Original Fiction: Storytellers
The first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.
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ENOUGH: Words as the Way: Rediscovering my Sister and Myself Forty Years After Her Assault
No one talked about what had happened to her. No one, at least in my hearing, asked her what she needed. What she wanted. Including me.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White
Let’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns
Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca
Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.
Funny Women: Catalog of This Season’s Memoirs by Men
I spilled blood. Which is to say I wrote. Not much. Just, you know, the text you are reading. Right now.
Voices on Addiction: Where the Heart Is
I read in the kitchen after dinner, after the dishes were washed and put away and everyone crowded into the living room to watch the Twilight Zone or Bonanza. There was a light over the table, and I’d dissolve into the stories.
Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
Voices on Addiction: Inheritance
We simply have not treated climate change as the intergenerational curse that it is. We have left it, again and again, for the next generation. We have chosen comfort and familiarity and numbness over a reckoning that might have spared our children.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People
I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad died, Brody will be twenty-six, which is old enough.