Smoke Screen
I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
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Posts Tagged: essay
If You Let Me Tell You a Story
Stories need concrete details to help you understand, don’t they?
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The Algorithm of Love
The life I had doesn’t flash like I see in movies. The life I want is what stares ahead.
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The Loss of a Whole Korea
Only peace. Wholeness will not happen for our generation.
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People You May Know
Staring at that profile picture, I couldn’t not click.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Amy Fusselman
Amy Fusselman discusses her new book, IDIOPHONE!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Angela Palm
Putting experience into words gives them less power over me, I think.
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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.”
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: I Died of Dysentery
The glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
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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.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Self-Portrait with Parts Missing and/or Smeared
A first day means there was a never-day.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs
Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
...moreThe Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs. At the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham asks what makes an essay American?
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The Rumpus Interview With Brenda Miller
Author Brenda Miller discusses the lyric essay, her “poet self” who always bleeds through, and what she’s writing about next.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: A Brief History of a Bad Heart
She studies you, still panting with an energy that consumes the room, and whispers in a reedy voice: “They say you fucked up your heart.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Predation
There is a legend in Central America of an evil Black Cadejo, who is malevolent with glowing red eyes, and who stands on two feet like a man.
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