Those rare flashes of vivid scenes burned in my memory, which create the mythos for my five-day adventure journeying to Chicago for Pitchfork Music Festival 2013.
“You could have the baby," he said. "Best case scenario, it would absolutely destroy my relationship, like completely burn it to the ground, and then we would get together. It would be hard, but I would do it."
I wasn't thinking about the Syrian Civil War and the US's possible involvement in it when I chose Kerry James Evans's debut collection, Bangalore , for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Matthew Specktor about American Dream Machine, embracing disbelief, and the impossibility of saying no to Robert DeNiro.
So now it’s 2013 and a souvenir of that ’70s divorce-era design resides in the dark, shared bed of a slim drawer in our kitchen, in the house of my first and only marriage.
Memoirist, playwright, and short story writer Saïd Sayrafiezadeh discusses his choice to link stories together using an unnamed war, writing without a game plan, and the stasis in his own life that ultimately took shape in the lives of his characters.
But I had deployed only once to Iraq. When so many others, including friends of mine, had suffered two, three, four, five, or more deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, why should I be the one enjoying the comfort of flying first-class?
Writer Nelly Reifler talks about her latest book, Elect H. Mouse State Judge, the bodies of characters, weird writing exercises, and revisiting one's childhood.
A bad play; a lover whose name has slipped forever into the cracks of history; a crash on a deserted highway in the middle of the night...Jennifer Pastiloff remembers the ingredients of jealousy, shame, regret, and the transformational power of the stories we tell ourselves.