Open Letter to Our Body
The only thing I can count on to be there tomorrow is my body. And yours.
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Posts Tagged: daughter
People You May Know
Staring at that profile picture, I couldn’t not click.
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What Did You Expect, Though?
The immune system, meant to protect a body from foreign invaders, works too assiduously, sees danger where there is none, turns on itself. Such conditions lend themselves to metaphor.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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Allowing a Female to Own Her Genius: Talking with Alana Massey
Alana Massey discusses her debut collection, All the Lives I Want, the best piece of writing advice she’s ever received, and acknowledging the work that women do.
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The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
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Mothers of My Diaspora
It paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #60: Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, […]
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Our Secret Family Legacy
When I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
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Baking Lessons: Needing, Rising, and Letting Go
When I took those breaths, I also learned to say, “I am enough, I am enough, I am enough.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Asali Solomon
Asali Solomon discusses her debut novel, Disgruntled, narrative structure, the mythology of memory and place, and returning to Philadelphia after years away.
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Keeping Secrets from the Stupid
I was four years old when my mother taught me to lie. There were certain instances, she explained, when lying was acceptable, when it wasn’t even lying, really.
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Michael Derrick Hudson, Before You Steal My Chinese Name
Know that you are trying to steal from a naming ritual and culture that goes back five thousand years.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I wanted to be sure to reach you
I have no answers, but I can feel my feet.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Anti-dentite. Being an American girl is expensive. A daughter’s revenge. The metaphors of ants.
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Seven Almonds
The first thing my parents bought when they earned money in America was a giant bag of almonds as a talisman for success.
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Ukemi, The Art of Receiving
In Japanese martial arts, the uke is the ‘receiver’ of the technique, the one who attempts to attack their sparring partner, the tori. The tori defends against the attack of the uke, who usually winds up on the floor after getting flipped, swept, thrown, punched, or kicked.
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OG Dad #21: The Head Bang, the Hole In The Wall, and the Happy Fart
My daughter likes to bang her head off the floor. It makes a point—an especially guilt-tinged one, given that we had to get rid of our carpets due to a mold infestation, so now there’s no cushion between baby cranium and wood.
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This Man Is Not My Father
I’m sitting across from the man who looks exactly like my father would look if my father had lived to be fifty-seven. If my father hadn’t died sixteen years ago when I was thirteen. But he did.
...moreAlone in the woods: A New Memoir
Rumpus contributor Micah Perks has a new eBook out on Shebooks called, Alone In The Woods: Cheryl Strayed, my daughter and me. Micah Perks’ candid short memoir takes an insightful look at women and the wild, the wildness she experienced as a child on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness, the ways women and wildness […]
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Eulogy Material
“This is eulogy material,” my father says as he explains this logic. He preps me, teaches me what to say, how to stand. “Remember how he used to draw symbols on his socks,” he begins…
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For All the Saints
I’m a student, I say. My teacher has told me to go to a cemetery and find a stone, any stone, that speaks to me. I chose Kenda’s because hers gave more information, more anything, than any other stone I saw in the one cemetery I visited.
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What Burns in the Pit
“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
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