What to Read When the World Is Ending
Books to read in this fraught political moment.
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Posts Tagged: Claire Vaye Watkins
Identity Theft
In the past year, the writing process has become, for me, a way to navigate between the present and the past, between what I have access to and what I will never know.
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The Rumpus Top 15 of 2017
We share our fifteen most-read pieces of 2017!
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What to Read When It’s Been a Hell of a Year
Each of these books, in various ways, wound the crank on my empathy machine, and reminded me that telling a story can be a defiant act.
...moreNotable Twin Cities: 10/8–10/14
Literary events and readings in and around the Twin Cities this week!
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Magical Systems and Fusion Reactors: Rivers Solomon Discusses An Unkindness of Ghosts
Rivers Solomon discusses her debut novel, the importance of writing the body into a story, and more.
...moreIntroducing the Rumpus Advisory Board
When we shared our exciting news about The Rumpus’s future last month, I mentioned that we’d create an advisory board to help us guide the site forward. The function of the advisory board is to help when we have questions or need a sounding board for new ideas, to serve as role models for us, and to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Robin MacArthur
Robin MacArthur discusses her debut story collection Half Wild, life in rural Vermont, and how narrative—and fiction—is key to reaching across what divides us.
...moreBurning the House Down
In the wake of Jane Eyre’s 200th birthday and Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering,” Bridget Read looks at the proto-feminism in Jane Eyre as eventually improved upon in the postcolonial update Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (now celebrating its 50th birthday).
...moreConsider the Weather
These are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the importance of weather in the works of Kathryn Schulz, Anthony Doerr, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: A Roundtable on Writing, Editing, and Race
With Lisa Factora-Borchers, Patrice Gopo, Jennifer Niesslein, Tamiko Nimura, and Deesha Philyaw.
...moreIn Her Own Words
Over at NPR, authors Claire Vaye Watkins and Marlon James talk about Watkins’s recent essay, “On Pandering,” which she describes as: …internalizing the sexism that I’d encountered in the writing world, and the world beyond, and adjusting what I wrote accordingly so that it would be more well-received … by the people I wanted to […]
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A Brief History of Pandering
Erasing women writers like Woolson carries immense implications. It creates an environment ripe for the continued marginalization and silencing of women’s voices today.
...moreOn Writing For Old White Men
At the LA Times, Claire Vaye Watkins recounts her realization that she has been writing to appeal to the white male literary establishment: I am trying to write something urgent, trying to be vulnerable and honest, trying to listen, trying to identify and articulate my innermost feelings, trying to make you feel them too, trying […]
...moreWater and Wanting
Writing about a water shortage is handy for a writer like me who loves, when reading, to be swept away in plot but whose characters seem to prefer to sit in one place. Thirst gives the characters something to want, which gives them something to do. It’s the body’s own rising action. In an interview […]
...moreDebunking Motherhood
By writing Luz as a reluctant maternal figure, Watkins has tapped into the lean but vital tradition of fictional ambivalent mothers. The Rumpus’s own Lyz Lenz tackles maternal ambivalence in fiction in a review of Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut novel “Gold Fame Citrus” over at Salon.
...moreGold, Fame, Citrus, Belonging, Possibility
The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than the American West does. Claire Vaye Watkins, author of short story collection Battleborn, on how her latest novel transformed from a “secret sand dune document” into […]
...moreHow Do You Contend with the Hubris?
For Salon, Teddy Wayne interviews six prominent authors on what has shaped their thoughts into word: with Lauren Groff, Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Matthew Salesses, Steve Toltz, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
...moreThe Magic of Realism
I think the word realism hides our individual subjectivities of reality. In an interview with the Nashville Review, the talented Claire Vaye Watkins talks about her forthcoming science fiction novel Gold Fame Citrus, the real and unreal, life and art, and the known and unknown.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
If you’re looking for something to read over the Fourth of July weekend, you’re in luck. This week gave us brand-new issues of Virginia Quarterly Review and PANK to peruse in the beer-buzzed downtime between barbecues and fireworks. VQR’s summer issue is all about California, “as an idea and a place,” as the Editor’s Note says. […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Chalk it up to a week where Twitter just felt like too much. Chalk it up to good ol’ nostalgia for the feel of a hefty book in your hands. Or maybe, just chalk it up to an aligning of stars that placed nine exceptional writers under the same roof. If you happen to have […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Robert Stone’s fictional universe was vast. The minds of Vietnam vets. Sailors on the open sea. Hidden romances at a prestigious university. But last weekend, one of our better explorers of the darker corners of American life was lost when Stone died at the age of 77 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A writer of […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Every good story is rooted in conflict, and most of us learned the different types of conflict in our high school literature classes like clockwork, year in and year out: man v. man, man v. self, man v. society, man v. nature. To learn that last type, probably lots of us had to read Jack […]
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Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
A Nevada native myself, I’ve walked through the same ghost towns as Watkins, driven the same barren stretches of asphalt.
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