The Lucky Ones
I live my life through the twin tenets of curiosity and close observation. I believe imagination and storytelling are central to our survival as a species—and yet, it’s my imagination that makes me jumpy.
Essays
148 posts
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT BY Sarah Thankam Mathews
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club's August selection, ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Voice On Addiction: Another Thing to Chase
She’s still somehow always thirsty . . . At least none of these drinks will kill her, even if the hunt for mood and mind-altering, for distraction, for something out there to help, may follow her to the grave.
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Wonderlands by Charles Baxter
This, I think, is one definition of sanity—the ability to keep things in perspective.
The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
"I was glad at least to have heard it."
From the Archive: Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion
. . . I desperately, beyond reason, wanted an intact body for burial. I wanted it viscerally, animally, the way your body wakes up in the night looking for a newborn, the way you feel a physical connection to your children even when you cannot see them, the way you want something when everything else has been taken from you. It is the same reason I buried him; I wanted to know where he had gone from me and how.
From the Archive: Explicit Violence
Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still.
Where You Want to Be
Art is never just art, and whiteness’ vision of the world doesn’t include me in it.
From the Archive: What Burns in the Pit
“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
A Disassembled Room
It certainly wasn’t part of my grand plan to keep an ashtray full of cigarette butts for eternity.
