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The most beautiful thing I can think of to do with one’s life is to write a novel, even as I feel really ambivalent about the utility of doing it, about the value to myself and to society and to my local community of having written a book.
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An illustrated review of Melissa Febos’s new essay collection, GIRLHOOD!
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It is easy to be awed by Tony Birch’s prolific body of work—his dynamic career ranging from firefighter to professor—his deep love of family and heritage, and his humility. He is a historian and climate change activist who outwardly observes the devastating consequences of colonialism, yet also writes from within his experiences as an Aboriginal […]
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The ethics of Body Work are not necessarily that we writers and lovers must achieve perfect consistency between our behaviors (shopping at Sephora) and our politics (beauty standards are harmful), or between our desires (to be rewarded, both intangibly and commercially, for our adherence to dominant culture) and our values (to resist that dominance).
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In Buddhism, there is always an expression on this and that, and the yes and no of this and that. For example, the other side of the river is a metaphor of death, in contrast to this life, this side. I hope that poetry is a way to shatter the border.
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A reading list for spring and spring cleaning!
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I think poetry lends itself to community and getting to know people intimately. Poetry requires vulnerability.
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The actor stares the audience in the eye—shattering the fourth wall, and we’re implored to see better. Holnes challenges us to view our realities as multifaceted and dynamic—there are no neat boxes, no easy definitions.
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The Membranes is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster.
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We need fiction because fiction does not polarize. Fiction is based on understanding over judgment.
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An excerpt from Suzanne Roberts’ Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, & Other Difficulties forthcoming from Nebraska Press, March 2022
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Consider: My coming out story has been told, but coming out is constantly changing and shifting and needs retelling, and each telling has value for a particular audience.
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Zina’s observations of her time in Detroit crystallize both a feeling of otherness and a wry critique of the young American activists who celebrated socialist ideas without fully appreciating the legacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine.
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The most truthful we can be in a factual genre is to doubt the attainability of fact at all.
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Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of DON’T SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU, shares a reading list for when you want to be a Bad Girl.
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If I had a dollar for every word I have written about BIPOC representation in entertainment media, I still wouldn’t have enough to pay back my student loans and car loans.
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The [novel’s] main question would be, How does a man stuck in resentment and anger at others and the world, who lacks a sense of belonging and sense of his usefulness in the world, find his way out of that?
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Her writing is quiet, perhaps even naive. But Schloss is enamored by the minutiae of her subjects, and the exactness and delicacy of her details ripple out like water. Trying to focus on one aspect of the book would be to let the entire thing go.
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Everyone, even the most tell-all writer, withholds something in the interests of protecting herself or others, but my interest in my own stories has always been to use them to illustrate larger stories about the culture . . .
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Eva Jurczyk about her debut novel, Department of Rare Books & Special Collections (Poisoned Pen Press, January 2022), and its structure, art capers, and more. This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. To join the Rumpus Book Club, click here. Upcoming authors include Suzanne Roberts, Laura Stanfill, Yuvi […]
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…if I’m going to acknowledge my fear, finding something about it that’s funny helps it go down easier. That’s how I survive.
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Her enthusiasm . . . leaves you a little raw, thinking about the things in your own adolescence you could have enjoyed more if you hadn’t learned so early the most ironic ways to protect your heart . . .
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“When I teach, my biggest hobby horse is specificity . . . Even boring people are specifically boring.”
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Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month!
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As we start seeing the effects of climate change, of people struggling with drought and struggling with erratic weather patterns and flooding, we have to accept our responsibility.
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What’s special about Hartnett’s chorus of the dead, though, is that they stress the tension between overlapping realities.
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…we live in a culture that’s at once euphemistic and profoundly hyperbolic, where people try as hard as possible to not actually be saying anything so that they can never be accused of holding any position. Whereas it’s important to me, to talk about what people really do, what they really feel.
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There’s a lot of rules or feelings about how writing a book should be, but very little of that actually corresponds with reality.
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A review of THE PERISHING: “[H]ope keeps you in the ring, pushing off the ropes. Hope keeps you in the fight.”
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Matthew Olzmann: [S]uddenly the poem becomes this meditation on mortality, but at no point do you think, “Oh my gosh, Yusef, why is he talking to a maggot or how does he know this maggot? Or what kind of relationship do they have?”
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