Stripped: The Novel Didn’t Work
The year my baby turned sixteen was the year my novel died.
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Essays
The Most-Read Essays of 2022
Essays are all about reflection, and we thought we’d kick off 2023 with a look at the most-read pieces of last year. It can sometimes feel like hours (years) of hard work disappear into the maw of our short attention spans, and these lists serve as important reminders of the work. — The Eds. *** #1 […]
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From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
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From the Archive: The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope.
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Anecdotal and Harsh
The thing about trauma is that it can split a person right down the middle. And J. was, indeed, bifurcated in this way. That is, she occupied multiple timelines simultaneously.
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Space to Breathe
We inhale when we’re born, then breathe and breathe and breathe until one day we exhale our final breath.
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Voices on Addiction: Whatever Fatal Thing
D— was dreamy in the precise manner of Neil Young circa 1974. Long, dark hair; green eyes; great butt; nice smile. He was sweet, funny, just tall enough. Wore a felt hat with a hatband he’d beaded himself, and a feather. Drove a forty-year-old turquoise-and-white Ford pickup with a broom and shovel in the gun […]
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The Last Book
The poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails.
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Thalassophobia: The Black Boy and the Sea
I am now twenty-seven, and I still do not know how to swim.
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Voices On Addiction: The Hypnotist
Dad quit smoking via a hypnotist shortly before my sister Margaret was born. When I was eight or nine, he liked telling me the story of the hypnosis, sitting together on the green sofa in the living room, parallelograms of sunlight on the brown carpet.
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Call for Submissions: November ’23 Themed Month
We’re accepting essays (750-4,000 words) by adoptees from 11/1 through 12/31 via Submittable. Publication will be in November 2023. Rumpus Essays Editor (and Book Club coordinator extraordinaire) Lauren J. Sharkey will be curating this series, and she’s elaborated on the types of stories (and whom) she is hoping to feature below. — Eds. *** When I was three-months-old, […]
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Constraints: A Hometown Ode
. . . the sheets hold a diagonal crease: the memory of the line, an imprint as obvious and useless as the adult our childhood selves once planned to be.
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SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW: A Search for Transcendence & Annihilation in New Zealand’s Hippie Paradise
“I once ate a mushroom in New Zealand,” I tell people, “though I had no idea if it was edible.”
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Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
In 2022, I attended the 106th running of the Indianapolis 500, and watched cars hurtle past at 220 mph—fast enough to cover a football field in nine tenths of a second. Over 325,000 fans cheered louder than the engines themselves.
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Pecking Order
I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly, but I did feel a twang of remorse as we left her by herself.
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Into the Body
These days, I walk down to the river running through the town I’ve made mine. The water’s on the rise.
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Voices on Addiction: Rome, Risotto, and My Alcoholism
This could be a way out.
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Braced and Bedazzled
“This is solid, mostly titanium,” the surgeon says while I’m still groggy in recovery. “You can’t pull it apart if you tried.,” and, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t try.”
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The Dislexic Poit
I always received glowing remarks on my alliteration or understanding of poetic devices, but they were hidden beneath what felt like hundreds of tiny red strikes across misspellings—although my phonetic versions of the words were sometimes genius, and always understandable.
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Treatment as Noun
I haven’t slept in years, but I still can’t seem to wake up.
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The Microphone
The ableism of schools as workplaces means that all teachers are assumed to be able-bodied until a disabled teacher identifies their need for accommodations. Schools respond; they do not, to my knowledge, anticipate disabled teachers.
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Outside(r)
I’d never thought of myself as separate from the world I lived in; the Outside I came from was sensory-rich and immersive, there my interactions unfolded organically and overlapped, building intuitively like the scales on a pinecone, rewarding curiosity with wonder.
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So You Want to Feel Better: Navigating Grad School, Disability, and the Language of Pain
The term “invisible disability” is commonly used to describe disabilities that are not readily apparent to the eye, but I want to push back on this term. When you pay close attention, most disabilities become visible. Poems are not encoded messages that we’re meant to decipher, I frequently remind my students, they are language organized in ways that demand a different kind of attention. And so it is with invisible disabilities . . .
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Disability in Education
Welcome to our themed “issue” on Disability in Education.
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On Erosion
Proximity to disaster is inevitable.
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: HYSTERIA REBOOT BY ELISSA BASSIST
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s September selection, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
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