Posts by tag
childhood
311 posts
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pinpricks
Time is king. Believers, agnostics or atheists—humans or not: time rules us. We submit to it, surrender to it, and are shaped by it.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Salt
A flash-fire covered the horizon all around and behind her, and my mother glowed genuine blue. I saw her skeleton, or maybe her white-hot soul. Something flew up and around our heads.
The Rumpus Interview with Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti discusses her memoir, Sex Object, how the experiences she touches on in her book shaped her, and how she discovered herself outside of those experiences.
Market Researching My Desire
I noted the weirdness, and then filed it away until a time I might really consider the implications of wanting to bury someone’s stockings. I was lost in metaphor, which meant I was lost in everything.
The Real Fidel
In a flash nearly 200,000 Cuban refugees understood that we’d lost our homeland and had better get used to life en la Yuma. We packed for six weeks, and we stayed for six decades.
Sound over Water
We tell the stories to fit the narrative we need. But within each story we must maintain the grain of truth that will provide the urgency.
How I Lost My Memory
Admitting memory’s tendencies toward storytelling, time shifting, and the emotional coloring of facts admits the potential for some forgiveness.
The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
Is It My Story or Yours?
Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy.