Stripped: The Novel Didn’t Work
The year my baby turned sixteen was the year my novel died.
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Join NOW!The year my baby turned sixteen was the year my novel died.
...moreEssays 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 […]
...moreOf 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?
...moreI 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.
...moreThe 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.
...moreWe inhale when we’re born, then breathe and breathe and breathe until one day we exhale our final breath.
...moreD— 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 […]
...moreThe poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails.
...moreI am now twenty-seven, and I still do not know how to swim.
...moreDad 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.
...moreWe’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, […]
...more. . . 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.
...more“I once ate a mushroom in New Zealand,” I tell people, “though I had no idea if it was edible.”
...moreIn 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.
...moreI didn’t feel guilty, not exactly, but I did feel a twang of remorse as we left her by herself.
...moreThese days, I walk down to the river running through the town I’ve made mine. The water’s on the rise.
...moreThis could be a way out.
...more“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.”
...moreI 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.
...moreI haven’t slept in years, but I still can’t seem to wake up.
...moreThe 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.
...moreI’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.
...moreThe 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 . . .
...moreWelcome to our themed “issue” on Disability in Education.
...moreProximity to disaster is inevitable.
...moreAn excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s September selection, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
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