The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems
These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.
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Posts Tagged: domesticity
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #205: Beth Alvarado
“For me, when I write nonfiction, my mind moves from the outside to the inside.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #203: Molly Spencer
“I would say the primary role of speech in these poems is to attempt something. To try.”
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At Home and Not at Home Everywhere: A Conversation with Xu Xi
Xu Xi discusses her new essay collection, THIS FISH IS FOWL.
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Both Aggressor and Victim: Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Who is Adèle Robinson, really, and what is it, exactly, that happened to her?
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More Than Ordinary: If the House by Molly Spencer
Attention—where it is, where it is not—pervades If the House.
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A Window with Reality Through It: Everything Here by Billie Swift
Swift’s shuffled lines create haunting, breathtaking possibilities.
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Rumpus Exclusive: Cover Reveal and Excerpt from Home Making
An exclusive cover reveal + excerpt from Lee Matalone’s debut, HOME MAKING.
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Modern Lives We Lived: Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies
Social and economic forces are always pressing on the characters in Wang’s work.
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Life after Death: A Conversation with Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley discusses her newest novel, LATE IN THE DAY.
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Taking Control and Staking a Claim: Erin Adair-Hodges’s Let’s All Die Happy
This is lovely writing, alive, thoroughly thought, and thoroughly felt.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #129: L.A. Johnson
“Right now California is burning and yet there’s snow on mountains that I can also see from my window.”
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Writing into the Void: Talking with Mary Jo Salter
Mary Jo Salter discusses her latest collection, The Surveyors, writing about the domestic as a feminist act, and how her title poem came from someone else’s dream.
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Writing My Context
I know being a mother does not limit me. But I also know that it defines me.
...moreInstagramming Motherhood
Vela Magazine’s always-funny Sarah Menkedick discusses her newfound relationship with Instagram as a mother, and posits photo-sharing as a powerful validation of domesticity: It creates scenes, story. More importantly, it asks for recognition and imbues meaning. It ushers the domestic out as worthy of attention, praise, Lo-Fi filters and exaggerated lighting. For this, I believe, women […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: In Defense of Not Cooking
Should there be a Bechdel test for women in the kitchen?
...moreYou Write Like A Girl, Knausgaard
Domestic duties are regarded as feminine in popular culture. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous three volume tome, My Struggle, is full of descriptions of domesticity, and he has been showered with highbrow literary praise for them. But would the same be true if he were a woman? What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood […]
...moreBuilding the Idea of Home
At JSTOR Daily, Livia Gershon offers a brief history of the concept of “home.” Gershon traces the changes not only in the emerging role of the home as a private retreat, but also the people who could define a household and its dynamic through the ages.
...moreA Postcard from History
Jessica B. Harris writes about her collection of historic postcards and the unique slice-of-life perspective offered by the 19th century postcard form. Harris has cultivated her postcard collection for decades with a focus on “depicting Africans in their homeland and in the diaspora with food: fishing, farming, vending, serving, and consuming.” This essay appears in […]
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On Living Apart Together
Can we make a lasting love that won’t offer the luxury of ignoring one another, as cohabitating couples can? Can we settle down together, apart?
...moreThe Dollhouse Within
What does it mean to be “in the house,” to be held in place in an age of motion, of fleeting relationships, realities, and contexts?
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