An Ethnography of the Self: Talking with Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker discusses her writing process, approaching an idea from various forms, and how moving from NYC to L.A. has changed her work.
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Posts Tagged: confessional
#SuicideGirls: Why I Teach Sylvia Plath
But let’s not forget: feminism is, at least in part, about choice, and portions of life are play, not politics. Play and relationships and creativity and whatever we want.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Shane McCrae
I think that the moment we’re living in offers the best opportunity we’ve had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #7: The Art of the Accidental Selfie
One recent hot weekday afternoon, I told my partner—the guy who created the “Punk the Muse” logo and draws its cartoons—that I wanted to get out and about. We’d been sitting at home too long. Moon’s Handbook for Northern California revealed an abandoned mine, with a ghost town and an old Western cemetery, a half […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #72: Urban Pastoral
It’s like a landscape that you can’t know until you’ve seen it through four seasons, until you’ve seen it on days gray and bright.
...moreA Comic for Dreamers, the Lost, and the Lonely
Sometimes, you get lost. In art, in love, in fantasies-turned-dreams, in your five billion part-time jobs. Sophia Foster-Dimino combines daily minutia with drifting existential questions in her comic, “My Girl.” Read “My Girl” over at Electric Literature, and feel it right in your secretly lonely guts (in a good, comforting way).
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The Rumpus Interview with Alida Nugent
Alida Nugent talks about her new book You Don’t Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism, the messiness and realness of sex and sexuality, and putting likeability last.
...moreTMI, Sylvia
Better to say “I’m bad” and hope the reader responds “No, not bad, just human.” For the Guardian, Blake Morrison explores the reasons writers are so attracted to the confession, whether it be narcissism or catharsis.
...moreGetting Personal
In response to Slate’s viral article about the rise of the “harrowing personal essay,” prominent editors from different publications weigh in on the importance of confessional writing, reasons for its gender divide, and the publishing process behind it.
...moreAn “I” for an “I”
For a growing number of essayists, memoirists, and other wielders of the unwieldy “I,” confessional has become an unwelcome label—an implicit accusation of excessive self-absorption, of writing not just about oneself but for oneself. Over at the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison argues that personal writing isn’t always confessional or solipsistic writing.
...moreShock and Awe
There’s a misconception about what is truly shocking – that the shocking is the purely explicit. It seems to me that’s easy, and it’s been done in literature for centuries. What’s problematic, the real way to be shocking, is to have an unstable tone, or to use the wrong tone, the tone that’s not appropriate […]
...moreWomen Speaking Up
For Slate, Amanda Hess reports on a boom in the publication of personal essays about women’s issues like rape, abortion, or an eye-poppingly grotesque parasite infection that we’d rather remain ignorant of: These stories are emotionally electric, politically relevant, and powerfully told. They’re also first-person confessionals about women’s reproductive issues—the type of taboo tales typically churned […]
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