The Rumpus Interview with Monica Drake
Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl and now The Stud Book, discusses the physicality of characters' bodies, the complicated issues women face while aging, and the crucial nature of writing communities.
Roxane Gay
55 posts
Roxane Gay served as Essays Editor in the early days of The Rumpus, where she contributed many essays and interviews for the magazine. Some of her original pieces, first published here, found a home in her widely acclaimed New York Times bestseller essay collection Bad Feminist.
The Rumpus Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
In fifty-four sections, Terry Tempest Williams not only tries to gain a greater understanding of her mother, she explores her faith, her marriage, her role as a woman in the world, and much more.
Stunned Silence
What wearies me is how often I have found myself stunned and silent in recent years. What especially wearies me is having such a finely honed vocabulary for tragedy.
The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.
The Rumpus Interview with Jim Gavin
Jim Gavin is a talented writer who allows his stories the room they need to be told. These are stories that are intelligent and quiet and moving, stories that take up time and space in satisfying ways.
How a Wound Heals
Last night’s Oscar ceremony and some of the commentary around the ceremony make the best possible case for why diversity matters.
Spit and Mud
What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really…
The Better Bombshell
This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models.
Today, Enough
We are crying out for change, for a mental health care system that can truly help the people who soothe their inner torment by reaching for weapons of such destruction. We are crying out for gun control laws that, at the very least, make it more difficult for such tragedies to occur.
The Rumpus Interview With M. Bartley Seigel
M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the…
Eleven
We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing faster, developing sooner. We forget.
How We All Lose
Discussions about gender are often framed as either/or propositions. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or so we are told, as if this means we’re all so…