Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall
“It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” This the opening line of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, but isn’t it also the first line of all of our…
Rumpus Original
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About Your Letters
I moved to New York the week I turned twenty. I lived on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up with a boyfriend I was too young to realize…
The Rumpus Sunday Essay: Flesh and Bones
An Epidemic of Hidden Fat – The Week headline, April 20, 2012 “A 55-year-old woman who looks great in a dress could have very little muscle and mostly body fat, and a…
Saturday History Lesson: The Unrequited Yeats
Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I fell…
OG DAD: Stir Crazy
What going on there in Wombville? Has she heard me fart? Why is she shunning our invitation? Last to leave the party in mommy-gut…
The Grief Performance, by Emily Kendal Frey
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the…
The Rumpus Interview with Dita von Teese
This juxtaposition of the high and low art, the very artfulness itself, has made Von Teese the most celebrated burlesque dancer in the world, and gained her fans of both sexes, even made her an unlikely feminist idol.
DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #98: Monsters and Ghosts
You swam across a wide and wild sea and you made it all the way to the other side.
Texts on (Texts on) Art, by Joseph Masheck
Although he has been writing art criticism for the past four decades, and now stands on the more distinguished side of life, Joseph Masheck begins his new essay collection, Texts…
OG DAD: Insane in the Membrane
So, we’re back in the OB/GYN waiting room. Our baby still hasn’t come. The suspense, as they say, is killing me.
Peculiar Benefits
What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.