essay
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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 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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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Accidental Curators
He staggers; he loses his standoff with gravity. It was never a fair fight.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Veronica Dies in Jamaica
Understand that she is both the gold city in my imagination and its queen, and that her death signifies the end of that dream.
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Saunders and Storytelling
Brevity’s nonfiction blog takes a look at a recent short film about writer George Saunders’s thoughts on storytelling, and applies his advice to essay and memoir: With nonfiction, looking underneath is often less interrogating our imagination and more out-there-with-a-recorder research.…
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Means to an End
It’s a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself. The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn asks: what makes an essay literary?
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Encountering the Essay
Charles D’Ambrosio, a finalist for the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Loitering: New and Collected Essay, has a piece up on the PEN website about his first encounter with the essay.
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Iowa’s Ring of Fire
“One day,” he said, “you’re going to have a bad time in workshop. A really bad time. Maybe Frank is in a foul mood and you’ve pissed off a few people around the table for whatever reason—your insufficient love of…