Against a Singular Story: A Conversation with Jane Wong
In many ways, community is that which allows the heart to heal, and to heal that heart together.
...more
Interviews
The Poem as an Archive of Your Life and the World Around You: The Rumpus Interview with Clint Smith
. . . intellectual rigor or artistic integrity don’t have to come at the expense of legibility . . .
...more
Very Little of This Book Is Made-up: Talking with R.F. Kuang about her Novel
I don’t think there are easy answers. Should we make judgments about rudeness when we talk about artistic freedom?
...more
Inheritance, Family, and Beauty: A Conversation with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel Glassworks (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2023) follows one family through four generations. The story begins in 1910 with the wealthy young philanthropist Agnes Carter, and then follows her descendants, both in blood and in spirit, up until the present time. Each person’s story builds on those that came before it, creating a […]
...more
Our Own Messy, Imperfect Reactions and Feelings: Talking with Hannah Matthews
I’m working on a piece right now for the New York Times where I knew the last sentence before I knew the argument I was making.
...more
They Are The Bones: A Conversation with Kelly Link
Going around the world because you can’t go through it
...more
The Work We Can Do Only As We Age: A Conversation with Priscilla Long
I approach research dutifully and compulsively.
...more
Broadening the Scope of the Environmental Canon: An Interview with Camille T. Dungy
Some books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from any genre. Is it memoir or environmental literature?The book covers so much terrain: Black history, gardening in the West, motherhood, and the care and cultivation […]
...more
the strange, the surprising, the slightly off-center: A Rumpus Conversation with J. Bailey Hutchinson
part of my fixation with textured and torqued language . . . stems from growing up in the South, where figurative language isn’t limited to formal literary spaces.
...more
Not every queer story needs to be a coming out story: An Interview with Miah Jeffra
Don’t we often write about what we struggle to understand?
...more
I Never Thought I’d Write a Book Like This: An Interview with Nicole Chung
It’s my year of Banana.
...more
The Poem is Second, Living is First: An Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez
Above everything else, people come first.
...more
I Freed Myself from Needing to Make Sense: A Conversation with Leila Chatti
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I’m in control.
...more
Hope and Rapture in the Anthropocene: A conversation with Julie Carrick Dalton
. . . fall in love with honey bees, or fall in love with the forest . . .
...more
Loving the questions: Religion and poetry with Jennifer Michael Hecht
Thinking in terms of the poetry of your life is about noticing that you are one of the sentient beings in a universe with billions of galaxies, and your experience is the universe knowing itself and it is weird and messy and painful but it matters.
...more
The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan
“The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?”
...more
Strength and Feeling in Motion: A conversation with Henri Cole about Gravity and Center
Horses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I am knocked about.
...more
A reflection on reflection: An interview with Katherine Indermaur
I did some research on how the vertical slash was used in different contexts, and fell in love with the Sheffer stroke.
...more
A story is like a nomad: An Interview with Geetanjali Shree
We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language
...more
When The Pipes Inspired the Poets: A conversation with the Boiler House Poets Collective
The Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.
...more
Men Haunting Men: A conversation with Richard Mirabella
Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby
...more
Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
...more
The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings
Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
...more
The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward
“If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.”
...more
What might my gaze reveal? An Interview with Erica Berry
I suppose I’m obsessed with how we buffer uncertainty.
...more
The Person Is Not The Body: An Interview with Rushi Vyas
I think, as writers, we only have so much choice. Obsessions emerge from our lived experience.
...more
Science and Symbols: An Interview with Kevin Jared Hosein
I like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.
...more
When Craft Becomes an Act of Love: An Interview with Gayle Brandeis
I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.
...more
This Is All the Time We Get: A Conversation with Felicia Chiao
I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
...more
All the World is a K-Drama: A Conversation with Matthew Salesses
I wanted to be able to frame the story within this understanding that these are powerful forces and that these are stories we’ve heard a lot before, and that these stories get in the way of, or make it hard to understand or even listen to, a more authentic or more real story about who people are or can be.
...more