Love and Gymnastics
I didn’t want to be a ballerina. It didn’t even sound right. I wanted to be a gymnast. The word alone made me feel proud and stand a little straighter.
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Posts Tagged: desire
The Rumpus Interview with Paula Whyman
Paula Whyman discusses her debut collection You May See a Stranger, discovering truth in fiction, and how memory interferes with good storytelling.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial
Growing up, I understood my father through observation, and I suspect that he understood me much the same way. I liked to think our love was purer that way. Like two stray dogs who found each other and are blessed enough to just get along.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Amber Dawn
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?
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You’re Just a Sinner I Am Told: Prince & the Sexual Revolution
It was all about desire, including women’s desire, Prince’s music. Women were not degraded. They were exalted, body and mind both.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Ames Hawkins
Is it really that human capacity is limited? Or are we limited by what it is we believe we are able, and allow ourselves—are willing—to see?
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jay Deshpande
I try to make sure no one’s around when I talk out loud to books.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #20: Greats
Great strides, great artists, great desires, great complexity—this week’s books are all about these kinds of greats. They also all showcase exceptional writing and take us far and wide—from elective politics to abstract art, from Coney Island to California—to explore great ideas. How does the world change politically? How is a woman artist’s life entwined […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
You know it’s fall because of the crisp air, the changing leaves, the decorative gourds, and, most importantly, because the fall issues of literary magazines are launching. This week was Virginia Quarterly Review’s turn. On Monday, its Fall 2015 issue dropped with five stories from Ann Beattie, Richard Bausch, Taylor Antrim, Praveen Krishna, and Elliott […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thunder, Thighs
Over one third of the women in my survey had been called “Thunder Thighs” at some point in their life. Many were still haunted by this. None of them interpreted “thunder” to mean “power.
...moreHunger is the Beginning
Desire is transformative, and transgressive: whether it’s an unpeeled onion or a noble lover, to want something, especially for women, can never be entirely benign. A common consequence for careless appetite in fairy tales is monstrous birth– a child that is less, and more, than the mother bargained for. The Toast on hunger and desire […]
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The Language of Desire
The alchemy of desire is much harder to master, its falls more tragic. And yet our language for it is maddeningly woolly. The great poets have striven for clarity here but most of us are doomed
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Dirty or Clean?
I felt like an arrow of sheer desire, flying through the air in a small town and emblazoned with this unfortunate tag line: “Newly single mother of a dying baby.”
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