Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue in H Minor
I want a PhD in how to want, effortlessly, to be alive.
...more
Posts Tagged: dreams
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Shana Cleveland’s Grandma’s Hats
It’s such a powerful symbol of who she was.
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Whitman Notebook: From Yourself
To write is not to dream.
...more
What Is Vibrant and Hidden: A Conversation with Jenny Boully
Jenny Boully discusses her new book, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, construction of voice, occupying liminal spaces, and editing with sincerity.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Blue Tears”
On certain nights, if I’m lucky, wisps of the shore begin to glow blue, an unearthly electric color, like someone in the sea has a flashlight and is shining it upward.
...more
The Earth Recycles All of Us: Talking with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Micheline Aharonian Marcom discusses her novel, The Brick House, female sexuality in literature, and transcendence through dreaming.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: Earthworms
In one dream, I was naked and they crawled inside my belly button. I felt them wiggling inside my stomach. When I woke up, the place between my legs was damp.
...more
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.
...more
Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell
Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.
...more
It’s All Metaphorical: A Conversation with Laurette Folk
Laurette Folk discusses her new collection, Totem Beasts, the role of meditation and dreams in her work, and “seeking some heightened experience in the conscious world.”
...more
The Universal Tether of Identity: Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin
At its core, the collection is recollected through a loose chronology of memoir essays, all of which will appeal to readers’ younger selves: who were we when we were teenagers and who are we now?
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #96: Donna Baier Stein
Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor was a bad ass. Born in 1854, ‘Lizzie,’ as she was known, bucked social norms of her day. In an era when silver miners believed it bad luck to even speak to a woman before descending into the mines, Lizzie worked alongside her male counterparts in the damp, dark underground caverns. […]
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #35: Moons and Mirrors, Fathers and Sons
So, I had a vision this morning in which I visited the moon. What’s that? You don’t have visions? Oh, my friend, you must learn to have visions; it is a gift that saves. I did not intend to go to the moon. I was trying to visit a figure I met in a dream: […]
...more
Storytelling Is a Search: An Interview with Sequoia Nagamatsu
Sequoia Nagamatsu discusses his debut collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, grief as a character, and the intersection of ancient myth and the modern world.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: Bob and Dave
The threat of perfunctory conversation looms. Raza reaches for his headphones, but it is too late. The man is already talking to him.
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #13: Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Do you keep a dream journal? I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan discusses his new collection The Dream Life of Astronauts, the “bad old days,” and the human need to believe that everything will turn out okay in the end (even when we know it won’t).
...more
The Rumpus Review of La La Land
Fantasy needs reality “because it’s only with the real backdrop that it works at all,” and reality needs fantasy to challenge its façade
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz discusses her new book Bruja, what a “dreamoire” is, the magic all around us, and why she loves indices—and cats.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Opening the Hump
The trick is to pinpoint the time of the cycle, not to try to solve the mystery in the undertow. And to understand that everything needs time; you have to position yourself, warm up.
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #5: Vulcan Mind Meld, Anyone?
Your Storming Bohemian is emphatically a child of the early 70s. At fifteen, I lived in a hippie commune under the guidance of an eccentric psychologist, later diagnosed as bipolar. All I knew is, he was hella fun. Dr. Bill wasn’t the sort to make a fuss about school attendance, regular hours, pot smoking, or […]
...more
Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape
I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Keith Lee Morris
Keith Lee Morris discusses his latest book Traveler’s Rest, Lewis and Clark, and how writing a novel about dreams requires much more than sleep.
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Texas Roses
It’s a matter of self-composition: Keep concentrating, type faster—take a breath and hold it—and do it again.
...more
Guildtalk #4: The Rumpus Interview with Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones talks about his forthcoming memoir How Men Fight For Their Lives, his new fellowship program at BuzzFeed, and making peace with the phantom.
...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #70: Alien Now!
Maybe, in terms of idiom, The Dabbers are like a thrash rock and roll version of the Cocteau Twins, or what the This Mortal Coil would sound like if the Dead Boys tried to cover one of their albums.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
...more
Paper Trumpets #27: I Don’t Remember How It Ends
I wanted to put that image inside a scene that disrupts the beauty of it.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
There is a common rule in fiction writing that you should never write about dreams. It’s engraved in stone right next to “burn all adverbs.” Dreams are a lazy way to show action that doesn’t happen, or even worse, to fool the reader up until the surprise twist ending of “but it was all a […]
...more