Rumpus Originals
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The Femcel Catalog a.k.a. The Annals of Obsession
When you were younger, you learned how to hold your breath so you could crawl on the pool floor. Down there, the day sounded different, so you swam for as long as possible. The rising hum of water encircled you,…
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The Rumpus: Redesigned
When Debbie Millman and I decided to buy The Rumpus, one of the first things we wanted to do was redesign the website which was great but due for a refresh. For the past several months, we have worked with…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Annie Kantar
Annie Kantar is the author of Means to Be Lucky (Poets & Traitors Press), and translator of the Book of Job, commissioned by Koren Publishers, and of Leah Goldberg’s collection of poems, With This Night (University of Texas Press), which…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Eeling
Most people had stopped working. No point in making money now. Those who continued either genuinely loved what they did, or had ended up at the bottom of the waitlist and had to find ways to get by until their…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Hana Widerman
Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Hana Widerman is a poet originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and Creative Writing and is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where she…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mother Tongue
You used to look in the mirror and your face would disassemble entirely: your eyes turning to twin river stones, your nose a stub of driftwood, the rounds of your cheeks the shells of beetles. Now there’s something more whole…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Cooper Dart
for samson, his sky the way I’d show up and leave into night and he’d still be out with that orange bikethe carburetor pried open a can of cleaner in the gravel. I told him it was goingto work this time— summer was working,…
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Morally complicating your world view: A Conversation with Steve Almond
With fiction, you’re trying to get people emotionally attached to your characters, not to learn a lesson. Ideally, [readers] get emotionally attached to the characters and those characters’ experiences leave them, in the end, feeling more than they did before.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People
I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad…
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A Poem as a Shield and a Prayer: An Interview with Lyudmyla Khersonska
People want to have somebody helping them with the names of things, for someone may forget words during the war. A poem is like a shield and a prayer.
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Balancing all the parts to the whole arc: A conversation with Cristina García
I feel like in my own experience and experience of many people I see, there is tremendous competition for narrative. For me, it’s interesting to see what pans out.
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As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.