A Rumpus Interview Archives - The Rumpus

“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 poems can also be spaceships offering interstellar as well as time travel.

David Groff

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?

Rita Chang-Eppig

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.

Gina Chung

The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung

The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.

Stephanie Foo

“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo

I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”

I Become More Animal When I’m Grieving: A Conversation with Jenny Sadre-Orafai

So much of being a poet and a writer is also about exploration.

Lyzette Wanzer

Tangled Narratives: Curating an Anthology on the Realities of Natural Hair with Lyzette Wanzer

I wanted to get Black joy into the book because that’s also part of our experiences.

Samantha Leach

Deconstructing the Troubled Teen Industry: a Conversation with Samantha Leach

It’s culture that needs to change and not girls themselves.

Jared Pappas Kelley

S/Talking Jared: A conversation with Jared Pappas-Kelley

We swim in feedback, baby sharks, and it’s about how do we live in that and make sense or are perhaps shaped by it.

Emerson Whitney

Toward a Glimmering Unknowable Self: A Conversation with Emerson Whitney

The great thing about writing autobiographically, in these kinds of ways, is that I get to write the whole swarm of thoughts and connect them as I want to.

Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings

There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.

Constantly and On Your Own: Talking with Natasha Stagg

Natasha Stagg discusses her debut novel, Surveys, obsession with celebrity, social media, and how she approached writing about something so ephemeral.

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