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Essays

176 posts
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Where You Want to Be

  • Dujie Tahat
  • June 21, 2022
Art is never just art, and whiteness’ vision of the world doesn’t include me in it.
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  • Essays
  • Rumpus Original

From the Archive: What Burns in the Pit

  • Ashley Ford
  • June 14, 2022
“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
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At the Playground

  • Lucas Mann
  • June 7, 2022
We say . . .
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  • Essays
  • Mental Health Awareness

A Disassembled Room

  • M. D. McIntyre
  • May 31, 2022
It certainly wasn’t part of my grand plan to keep an ashtray full of cigarette butts for eternity.
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  • Essays
  • Mental Health Awareness

The Dark Mothers’ Club

  • Val Kiesig
  • May 24, 2022
I know all the hours intimately as any lover, the lucid high of four a.m. as familiar as the adrenaline drunk of noon.
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  • Mental Health Awareness

Keep Pedaling

  • Kieran Dahl
  • May 17, 2022
The pain is the point.
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  • Essays
  • Rumpus Original

From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I Left My Heart in Taos

  • b: william bearhart
  • May 10, 2022
You might gasp. You might gasp and your heart slips out. You whisper and let red willows drift toward the river.
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  • Essays
  • Mental Health Awareness

The Big, Mangy One

  • Bunny McFadden
  • May 3, 2022
I am transfixed with the probability of earthquakes.
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  • Essays
  • Mental Health Awareness

Getting Through It & Charting the Edges

  • Anna Held
  • May 2, 2022
Welcome to our themed "issue" for Mental Health Awareness Month.
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Waypoint Transition

  • Jo Unruh
  • April 26, 2022
I want to know more of what it is like to feel lost and not always have someone there to tell me how to find my way. Or, to tell me my way.
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Honey

  • Amanda Oliver
  • April 19, 2022
That cafe smelled like fresh-baked bread and cookies, and the baristas were all women with warm, soft hands who called everyone — the Senator, the mothers, the babies, the businessmen — Honey. So many…
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From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair

  • Lyz Lenz
  • April 12, 2022
No word is wasted. No story is told in vain.
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