creative nonfiction
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The Rumpus Interview with Chanan Tigay
Author Chanan Tigay discusses the complicated man at the heart of The Lost Book of Moses, the anxieties of writing true stories, how much to withhold from your reader—and tells a few jokes about creative nonfiction.
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The Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs. At the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham asks what makes an essay American?
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: A House, a Girl
The day you follow me to that mound of oyster shells on the beach is the day I realize muscle and bone have been at war for a long, long time.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mira Ptacin
Author Mira Ptacin discusses her memoir Poor Your Soul, what inspires her to write, motherhood, and why she considers her beat “the uterus and the American Dream.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Debra Monroe
Debra Monroe talks about her new memoir, My Unsentimental Education, the future of the genre, and how the Internet has changed what it means to be human.
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Means to an End
It’s a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself. The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn asks: what makes an essay literary?
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Einstein
Mot was living my own fear… I wanted to learn from him how I might survive, if I too ended up without a home, without the resources to live what I thought of as a minimally decent life.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Karrie Higgins
The more narratives that approach reality “differently” get treated as “insane” or “unreal,” the less readers are exposed to them, and the more “unreal” or “insane” they seem. It’s like a feedback loop.
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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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.
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Making the Cut
In writing, what is not said can be just as important as what is. Over at the New Yorker, John McPhee discusses the art of choosing what to include and what to omit from a piece: Writing is selection. Just to…
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The Rumpus Interview with Les Standiford
Prolific writer and Director of the FIU Creative Writing Program Les Standiford takes a look back at his career in books, including Water to the Angels and Bringing Adam Home, and tells us what’s next.