Life Is Odd: A Conversation with Dinty W. Moore
Dinty W. Moore discusses his new essay collection, TO HELL WITH IT.
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Posts Tagged: brevity
The Best of Brevity: A Roundtable Discussion on Flash Nonfiction
With Deesha Philyaw, Jaquira Díaz, Danielle Gellar, and Torrey Peters.
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This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
The Rumpus Interview With Brenda Miller
Author Brenda Miller discusses the lyric essay, her “poet self” who always bleeds through, and what she’s writing about next.
...moreWriting as a Cure
Word by word, and brick by brick, I began understanding the foundation of myself—of where I had been, and where I would go—from previously unseen angles. Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, Lauretta Zucchetti shares her experience of finding herself and overcoming emotional pain through the writing process.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Paul Lisicky
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
...moreSaunders and Storytelling
Brevity’s nonfiction blog takes a look at a recent short film about writer George Saunders’s thoughts on storytelling, and applies his advice to essay and memoir: With nonfiction, looking underneath is often less interrogating our imagination and more out-there-with-a-recorder research. It can be challenging to change our own minds, especially about an experience or situation […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jane Ciabattari and Grant Faulkner
Jane Ciabattari, Vice President/Online of the National Book Critics Circle, and Grant Faulkner, NaNoWriMo director and 100 Word Story co-founder, talk flash fiction.
...moreThe Skeleton of a Story
Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, author Janice Gary talks about how to structure a nonfiction story: Fiction writers start with nothing and create a world. Memoirists start with an entire universe that already exists. We are more like sculptors than painters, relying on the advice of Michelangelo, who supposedly said he made the statue of […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore
We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means.
...moreThe Art of Dwelling on the Past
Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form … and remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned. Brevity’s nonfiction blog has posted an overview of John Koenig’s exquisite The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. In this online dictionary—which Brevity describes as “a compendium of invented words … words that […]
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Revising Poetry Just Got Easier
Revision, as classically understood, generally relates to the poet’s understanding while composing a poem, via kneading language, via discovering insight. More and more though I find that sort of revision is only part of the problem, if it is a problem. Yes, a poet revises, and tinkers, and starts over. But: Lately I’ve been thinking […]
...moreHere Are Some Stories Seth Likes
It’s been awhile since I’ve been a-Rumpusing, but I got this email from the talented Ashley Bethard thanking me for including her in an old Here Are Some Stories I Like link list, and I got to thinking about how much I loved doing those, so I asked Isaac if I could do them again, […]
...moreThe Untidy World
“In truth, memory’s great betrayal, that it will not lie intact in wait for us, is lament enough to revisit in every generation. This is what I go to nonfiction for, the way we pick at the scab, poke our finger in the wound of memory’s fickle and existential transience, and the inconvenience of our […]
...moreWriters from an Editor’s Perspective
Dinty W. Moore, an editor at Brevity and the anthology Best Creative Nonfiction, is interviewed by Matador Notebook on writers. He makes some interesting and useful points about the ever-branching taxonomy of specialized writers: “But when these labels become barbed-wire fences, no one is served. A writer is a writer is a writer, and we […]
...moreHere’s Some Essays I Like
A couple weeks ago, I linked to a bunch of very short stories — stories that were superbly written but that only took a few moments to read. People seemed to like that, so today, I’m doing the same thing with essays: “There is a hole in the ozone layer but they say not to […]
...moreJunot Diaz on the Virtues of Being Stubborn
Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer for my favorite book of the last few years The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has written a pretty inspiring tale of frustration and perseverance in O Magazine about the process of writing his novel. (Sidenote: The Rumpus linking to O? Is this a first?) And as I […]
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