Heart Work
I want them to know that heart work is hard work, but worth the struggle.
...more
Posts Tagged: essay
Introducing Lamoishe and Hezbollah Schoenfeld
I nearly got disowned over my decision not to pass on the family name.
...more
Pig on a Stick
My Filipino father refused to be upstaged by a white man’s lechon.
...more
Open Letter to Our Body
The only thing I can count on to be there tomorrow is my body. And yours.
...more
How to Name Dead Babies
Let’s not pretend first means there’s a good place to start.
...more
How I Lived and Wrote in Las Vegas
Then again, I wonder if the distinct pleasure of Las Vegas lies in the simulacrum.
...more
How I Love Her: On Depression and Suicidal Ideation
Maybe the worst part about living with this is that it doesn’t leave me.
...more
Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue in H Minor
I want a PhD in how to want, effortlessly, to be alive.
...more
The Language of What Happened to Us
“We knew things were wrong then,” she says, “but we didn’t know how, or why.”
...more
Smoke Screen
I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
...more
If You Let Me Tell You a Story
Stories need concrete details to help you understand, don’t they?
...more
The Algorithm of Love
The life I had doesn’t flash like I see in movies. The life I want is what stares ahead.
...more
The Loss of a Whole Korea
Only peace. Wholeness will not happen for our generation.
...more
People You May Know
Staring at that profile picture, I couldn’t not click.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Amy Fusselman
Amy Fusselman discusses her new book, IDIOPHONE!
...more
A Part of Me
Now my not wanting men to be front and center in my life capitalized sperm into a rare commodity. Empowered reproduction is largely a myth.
...more
The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
...more
Inheritance
I married a man who is related to me. I started dating him when I was seventeen and of course, my mother immediately liked him. He grew up in my parents’ hometown.
...more
On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
...more
Body Fluids: An Exploration of Motherhood
I think fresh semen smells like aspirin, which is made from a mold that grows on birch trees, which of course are phallic.
...more
Not Your Auntie
What I need is for white people to stop calling the Honorable Representative Maxine Waters “Auntie.” For real. It needs to stop.
...more
Hooters Chicken
I applied for a job at Hooters on a dare a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday. A shoe salesman who worked across from me at the mall told me he’d pay me twenty dollars to apply.
...more
Horses and Dyslexia
I often feel as if there is something just beyond my reach, as if I had another set of eyes, and if I could only open them I could see all the things I needed to see.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: My Souls Are Out A-Wandering
What is marriage but another form of colonization? A renaming? A power taken, a power taken away?
...moreThis Week in Essays
For Lidia Yuknavitch, the personal is unavoidably political in this piece for Electric Literature. At Catapult, David Frey writes with moving realness on what it is like to watch a parent age and transition into assisted living. Jenessa Abrams looks at the nuances of mental illness and the damage of a word like “crazy” here at The Rumpus.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tell Me Something Good
I need to feel that I can be a woman and be black in this present cultural climate.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Angela Palm
Putting experience into words gives them less power over me, I think.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jon Day
Jon Day discusses his memoir, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the bicycle as a symbol of gentrification, and the city as “a technology for living.”
...more