The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
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Posts Tagged: California
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Bethany C. Morrow
Bethany C. Morrow discusses her debut novel, MEM, how it felt to read Toni Morrison for the first time, and her hope for Black girl readers.
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To Choose Music: Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble
The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit.
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The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #129: L.A. Johnson
“Right now California is burning and yet there’s snow on mountains that I can also see from my window.”
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Moving Targets
Love twists itself into fear, into statistics, into things people can live with.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Victoria Ruiz’s Grandma’s Grocery Board
I’m not a trained musician, but my grandma helped me to become fearless…
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Something Bigger and of Greater Value: Talking with Bruce Cockburn
Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn discusses his new album, Bone on Bone, songwriting, and the benefits of not selling out.
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Outlaws in the Garden: A Conversation with Denise Newman and Hazel White
Poets Denise Newman and Hazel White discuss their most recent collaborative project, Biotic Portal, how they initially met, and loving their garden’s “outlaws.”
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The Meaning of Truth: A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise by Sandra Allen
The way the book is organized reflects Allen’s experience: the ability to meet a book with skepticism and find much to be admired.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #119: Joyce Maynard
“I was diving straight into the wave, right into the source of my greatest grief.”
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Setting aside Time for Magic: Talking with Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba discusses her new memoir, MEAN, her writing process, and why she has hope for patriarchy’s dissolution.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
...moreThis Week In Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Spaces of Exception vs. Spaces of Redemption: The Films of Ana Lily Amirpour
Diasporic communities live inside a host nation, but they also live with difference.
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What to Read When You Want to See a World More F**ked up Than Ours
Reading suggestions from author Celeste Ng for these f**ked-up times: worlds more—or, okay, just differently—f**ked up than ours.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
…yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career.
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Home Is Here
There is no singular Muslim story, no definitive identity for the entire religion. […] Here, four women discuss what it’s like to be a minority in America in 2017, post-9/11 and post-Trump.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A massive bookstore, The Book Garden, has opened in Iran’s capital city, Tehran. The Huffington Post takes a look back at the Strand’s ninety years of successful bookselling in New York City. A Russian bookstore is helping customers learn Chinese.
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Where the Highway Splits
I’ve spent twenty years searching for the girl in the black shorts with a cold can of soda pop in her hand as though going through the steps of locating a lost wallet.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
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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.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A bookstore display for Ivanka Trump’s new book was rearranged to more accurately reflect the first daughter. California legislators might amend a fraudulent memorabilia law championed by Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill in order to allow authors to sign their books.
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Back to the Places I’ve Left
“No one knows how to handle it,” I tell her, but I can see she’s angry and I’m speaking into the wind.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #80: Jon Raymond
Jon Raymond is one of Portland’s finest wordsmiths. His writing spans TV, film, short story, novel, art criticism, and a hefty array of magazine work. His new novel, Freebird, is the story of a Californian Jewish family entangled in clashing politics, unspoken histories, and personal dissolve. The Singers are Holocaust survivor Sam, his contemptuous children, […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 1
The violence came in and we were not just in danger of being victims of it. We were in danger of being violent ourselves.
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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 Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #74: Alexandra Naughton
Alexandra Naughton is a writer who grew up in Philadelphia but converted to a California girl in 2008. She runs BE ABOUT IT, a small press and reading series and is an active member in Bay Area literary shenanigans. Over the course of some days I talked via Google Docs, and later email, with Naughton about […]
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