From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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Join NOW!“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
...moreJoshua Henkin discusses his new novel, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS.
...moreLearning to read a landscape can reveal a deep history.
...moreMy grandmother, Frankie L. Baker, was born 72 years before me.
...moreJudith H. Montgomery discusses her latest poetry collection, MERCY.
...more“While the past remains always present, old women exist in the present.”
...moreMaggie Downs discusses her debut memoir, BRAVER THAN YOU THINK.
...more“I like to engage with and argue with the research; this makes the work dynamic.”
...moreXu Xi discusses her new essay collection, THIS FISH IS FOWL.
...more“Trust that if you want to write that much it will find a way out of you.”
...moreAbeer Hoque talks about coming of age in the predominantly white suburbs of Pittsburgh, rewriting her memoir manuscript ten times, and looking for poetry in prose.
...moreJennifer Martelli discusses her debut collection of poetry, The Uncanny Valley, growing up saturated with images of the Madonna, and her experience of motherhood first as a daughter and now as a mother.
...moreMy father makes me cry when he starts crying and walks into the kitchen to call 911 because he doesn’t know how to fix this. He is the guy who could always fix everything.
...moreWhen I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
...moreThere are dark forces roiling beneath the surface of American life.
...moreI got to thinking about home. What the fuck is home anyway?
...moreDesiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
...moreKaren Salyer McElmurray talks about academia, the relationship between flaws and perfection, writing memoir, and the “tapestry” of writers who inspire her.
...moreFew things are more frightening for an academic and a scholar than losing the ability to think. Their livelihoods, and sense of self, are dependent on the cognitive ability to generate new ideas and write about them. And so for Sandy Bem, a psychology professor, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s threatened a devastating blow. Her conclusion was […]
...moreHoping to gain some insight into the nature of love and family, Elizabeth Tannen begins to visit the elderly woman who was once like a grandmother to her and who now has Alzheimer’s.
...moreThese are memories, packaged, dusted, shrink-wrapped, and worn. How strange are they for the man to whom they belonged?
...moreThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Carmen Giménez Smith about her poetry collection Goodbye, Flicker.
...moreIn the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer’s Unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film—I was making the wrong film.
...moreWhen I was eleven years old, my father enrolled me in a memory improvement course at the local community college.
...more“I was seeing something about the human mind. I was seeing the author in the text in a way that people hadn’t seen the author in the text before.” Jed Abumrad of Radiolab talks with scientists about how our use of words—the density and complexity of our sentences, or lack thereof—may be an indicator of […]
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