Rumpus Originals
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“Being in Uncertainties”: A Conversation with Maureen N. McLane
A lot of poems want to place you in the darting mind of the poem. Some want to address you—as “the beloved,” say, or as someone hated, or they implicitly situate you as an overhearer of such an address. But…
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What to Read When Remembering Milan Kundera
Though I am often at least the typist behind many of the posts authored by The Rumpus, I am keeping my name on this one as it’s very much a pet list. You’ve probably heard that Milan Kundera passed away…
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Fady Joudah
The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true. The mind goes to self // as the self comes to mind. / The mind tells the self, I made you, / and the self…
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Amnesia and Abject Terror Are Prerequisites: A Conversation With Ruth Madievsky
You don’t read literary fiction if you’re looking for tight little answers to life’s mysteries.
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The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special
To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.
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The In-Between-ness of Things: An Interview with David Groff
What would it mean to embrace being generative? To have a different way of taking on a responsibility for creating more life on the planet?
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From the Archives: FUNNY WOMEN #61: My Imaginary Wet Hot American Summer
Shwayder Camp, Idaho Springs, 1997. This summer has been—without rival—the best summer of my life. Life, I am sure, will continue on this trajectory.
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Worship
In eleventh grade at St. Rose of Lima, I became obsessed with the idea of suffering for a noble cause.
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Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
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Inherent Violence: A Conversation with Rita Chang-Eppig
I knew I wanted to be deliberately vague, as to whether something was actually happening. For many people across the world and across time periods, there isn’t always this strong delineation between fantasy and reality.
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Animal Rescue
The morning I found Gaspard and Vincent, I had just visited the punk house where the ex boyfriend had been staying. He had some things of mine that I couldn’t let him keep . . .
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On abandoning words: Carlos Fonseca’s Austral
Hidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.