The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Elizabeth Gonzalez James discusses her debut novel, MONA AT SEA.
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Posts Tagged: failure
The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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R.I.P.: Inauguration Day
Instead of mourning in solitude, let us sob together. Let us soak communally in our fear. Let us hyperventilate, our breasts heaving in unison.
...moreJust Fail Your Best
Tim Falconer writes for Hazlitt on the psychological importance of failure: When you do what you’re good at exclusively, avoiding what you are bad at, you live in an evaluative world, one that’s full of judgement…. The danger is this becomes an inauthentic world, one that you don’t engage in for its own sake and […]
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Paper Trumpets #30: Feeling Disconnected From Nature
[T]he finding, cutting, and pasting process constantly offers me new perspectives on how I see the world around me.
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro discusses her latest novel, What’s Never Said, her Instant Gratification Takes Too Long teaching method, and new anti-dating rules between faculty and students at universities such as Harvard and Yale.
...moreFailing Like a Success
Many days, my own failure lurked in the shadows, too terrible for me to look at straight on, but I read the words, I watched the screen, again and again. I stared it straight in its miserable face and felt relief. For Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Stephanie Feldman writes about accepting and owning artistic failure.
...moreKeep Failing
Don’t let that stack of rejection letters get you down. For writers of all kinds—would-be, struggling, under-appreciated, even critically acclaimed—failure is part of the job description. At the New York Times, Stephen Marche describes a writing profession riddled with disappointment and missed connections, from the ever-frustrating publishing world to a reader’s power of interpretation.
...moreWord of the Day: Kakorrhaphiophobia
(n.) an abnormal fear of failure or defeat; from the Greek kakos (“bad, evil”); syn. atychiphobia Everybody in L.A. fails. We just do. —Moby, from “Creativity and Freedom to Fail” Maria Popova of Brainpickings pertinently asks in her March 2014 review of Sarah Lewis’s insightful book The Rise, “How, then, can we transcend that mental block, […]
...moreVirginia Woolf and Failure
Peter Orner writes over at Salon about the beautiful summer of being 22, out on a lake and drinking some beers. He writes of languidly gliding along in a boat with some friends and gripping a copy of To The Lighthouse. Virginia taught him an important lesson that summer: the value of failure.
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We Are Only So Much Monkey: Lessons Learned From Failure
The earliest piece of advice my mother ever gave me was simply this: “Marry a man, Amy. Not a monkey.”
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The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People
I’m pretty mediocre. I’m ashamed to admit it. I’m not even being sarcastic or self-deprecating. I’ve never done anything that stands out.
...more“Some Case Studies in Failure”
“X—well, X is just failing. At taking vitamins. At fully committing himself to the idea of dental hygiene. At opening beer bottles and wine bottles and most bottles made of non-synthetic material. Give X something with a metal lid, and he’ll give it right back to you.” Failure is front and center in Rumpus interviews […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jonathan Evison
“It’s difficult to forget yourself, to put your whole life on some back burner, and give yourself to your characters. But that’s what you’ve gotta do to get the job done.”
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