A Lumpy, Misshapen Book: Talking with Elissa Washuta
Elissa Washuta discusses her chapbook, STARVATION MODE.
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Posts Tagged: alcoholism
Voices on Addiction: The Five Cs
The truth is different. The truth is always different.
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Building the Muscle: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
Kristi Coulter discusses her debut essay collection, NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM THIS.
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Pulling the Thread Through: Talking with Tina Alexis Allen
Tina Alexis Allen discusses her memoir, HIDING OUT.
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ENOUGH: They Knew How to Take What They Wanted
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary people that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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Voices on Addiction: A Review of The Recovering
As recovering addicts, we must love ourselves back to the source, love our shameful bits and decimations and not just our reconciliations and resurrections.
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Coming Clean
Intellectually, I know Gracie’s mom loves her and needs help. In practice, I just want my daughter safe.
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Worth the Chuckles and Tears: Calypso by David Sedaris
Part of the magic of David Sedaris’s work stems from the simple truth that you really can’t laugh heartily until you’re hurting deeply.
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Discomfort, Desire, and Drugs: Talking with Ben Gwin
Ben Gwin discusses his debut novel, Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Regan Middleton, the book’s unique structure, and writing satire.
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell
I didn’t want to be edited in that way. I needed to tell my story.
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Voices on Addiction: Need and Smoke
Need had carved out specific contours in my personality, and then it returned like a curse to fit in those spaces.
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I Dated Bad Men Till a Bad Man Became President
Their dishonesty and danger was easier to look past then. The world had not yet shifted. But then it did, and I woke up.
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Voices on Addiction: Dead Eyes and Bob Barker Crocs
Broken people are drawn to other broken people. Comparing scars. Laying belly to belly. Two similar pieces of different puzzles.
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Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
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Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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TORCH: Over the Borderline
I’m writing about the border through the eyes of children because the border is a problem of the imagination.
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Black Ops for Jesus
Ruby knew this story and what it said about Mom’s threshold for domestic abuse, perhaps better than anyone else since her driveway was practically adjoined to our own. She called anyway.
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Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
Sometimes life is so big and so loud and being a human being in the world is so much I feel overwhelmed and need a cocoon.
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Voices on Addiction: Keys
He wasn’t an alcoholic! He was just British. I was starting to think that this bullet was long past being dodged.
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Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Love of country, some argue. With their boots firmly planted in my chest as I struggle to protest. No, that is not love, but blindness.
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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Ten Minutes of Motherhood: A Conversation with Ariel Levy
Ariel Levy on The Rules Do Not Apply, the illusion of control, and language’s inability to express grief.
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Grief Is Not Regret: May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood
When women do not want a pregnancy, we may not experience the marvel and awe some claim are instant and “natural”—or, if we do, they are overshadowed by fear, and grief.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Diggins
I was told that I was “a good digger” if I was behaving as a young child, working hard, and not talking back. Like nursery rhymes, the rhythm of racism cannot be forgotten.
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Voices on Addiction: Twenty-Five
I know that there are those who would argue that alcoholism is a singularly extreme condition, and I get that, but I’ve always felt clear that there’s a lot of overlap between alcoholism and plain old ordinary humanity.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: My Souls Are Out A-Wandering
What is marriage but another form of colonization? A renaming? A power taken, a power taken away?
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The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #23: The Love Song for Argyle C. Klopnik
File this one under “they can’t Trump everything; life goes on.” Last week, I got caught up in reflections on poverty in America: mine, yours, and ours. This week, I decided to do something about it and buckle down to design a careful budget. “Ack!,” I said, early one morning. “We’ve got to make a budget […]
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The Evolution of a Trigger
Perhaps they are really saying: This will not happen to me. I will be prepared. And, in hoisting that hypothetical gun, they feel they are made safe from the appalling vulnerability of living.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #22: Poverty Is Never “Genteel”
Poverty may have been beloved of St. Francis, but not so much by the rest of us. Nobody likes to look at advanced poverty, toothless and drooling, clutching the hands of children who have running sores on their filthy legs. Poverty is a crackhead who pisses on the pavement, and sleeps with fleas and stray […]
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