Essays
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How a Wound Heals
Last night’s Oscar ceremony and some of the commentary around the ceremony make the best possible case for why diversity matters.
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Keep Doubt Alive with Essays
If you’re a regular Rumpus reader, you probably like essays. And if you like essays, you’ll probably enjoy this New York Times opinion piece about their literary and social value: Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay,…
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Spit and Mud
What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really understanding why every Sunday, I found myself, alongside my family,…
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The Better Bombshell
This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models.
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Some Things To Remember While You’re Writing
“There is no shame in writing slow. Your writing takes as long to develop as it takes. Writing is not a race.” Click through to read this and other gentle reminders about writing from Roxane Gay. You’ll feel better about…
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Writers from Vermont to Oregon and Everywhere In Between
“There is a tendency to place the center of the writing universe in New York City. This is understandable—countless writers live there. Have you heard about this magical place called Brooklyn? The media certainly has.” If you needed another reminder…
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Today, Enough
We are crying out for change, for a mental health care system that can truly help the people who soothe their inner torment by reaching for weapons of such destruction. We are crying out for gun control laws that, at…
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Best “Best Books of 2012” List of 2012
By now, you’ve probably seen plenty end-of-the-year reading suggestions, but have you seen Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay’s end-of-the-year reading suggestions? It’s huge and rambling and dominated by women and divided into categories like “Books not normally in my wheelhouse that…
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The Rumpus Interview With M. Bartley Seigel
M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the page with a raw sense of place and longing, an…
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“Teenage Girls Aren’t Pining for Roman Polanski”
After Chris Brown’s inventively profane online spat with comedian Jenny Johnson and his subsequent departure from Twitter, the public is left to wonder once again just how Brown’s actions fit into the ways our society views race, gender, and abuse.…
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Some Queer Writers of Color
This dovetails nicely with Roxane Gay’s post about writers of color: a list of writers of color who are also queer. “I thought, I’m sure I can come up with 50 books by LGBT people of color,” writes the post’s author.…
