Belonging Is Everything: Talking with Georgina Lawton
Georgina Lawton discusses her debut memoir, RACELESS.
...more
Posts Tagged: ancestry
Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell
This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.
...more
Masters of Movement: A Conversation with Morgan Jerkins
Morgan Jerkins discusses her new book, WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS.
...more
A Storm Underneath: Talking with Shonda Buchanan
Shonda Buchanan discusses her new memoir, BLACK INDIAN.
...more
On the Futility of Defying Extinction
Always, when my father spoke to me in words I could not understand, my guilt spoke back.
...more
Inheritance
I married a man who is related to me. I started dating him when I was seventeen and of course, my mother immediately liked him. He grew up in my parents’ hometown.
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Weyes Blood’s Mysterious Kris
To this day no one really knows where my kris came from or whether or not it’s a significant part of my family history, if it’s a random object or an heirloom with an untold story.
...more
Our Secret Family Legacy
When I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results
There were chains. History books always describe the chains.
...morePonce de León, You Are Not the Forefather
Aside from a few shared scribbles of genetic code, it is difficult to say exactly what keeps us tethered to our distant ancestors. Over at Oxford American, Alex Mar thinks through the implications of incorporating these stories into our personal narratives as she confronts the terrible deeds of her oft-claimed ancestor—the conquistador, Ponce de León. “This […]
...more
What They Never Told Me, What I Never Asked: Reflecting on Roots and Writing
[T]he questions pile up, never to be answered.
...moreStrangling Yourself While Trying To Sing
Over at Maud Newton’s website—a letter, to you, on old family letters. Dusty old leaves from the early 1900s, excavated from here or there. Grandpa’s love triangle. An apology from the sanitarium in which Aunt Louise died. There’s magic in letters. Ah—but where? In a letter I wrote last year for The Rumpus’ Letters in […]
...more
Round Trip
Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family.
...more