fear
-
The Rumpus Interview with Daniel Torday
Dan Torday talks about his novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West, the role of fear in fiction, the fabrication of facts in a memoir, and about being “constitutionally unoffendable.”
-
Writing Outward to Write Inward
I wrote toward the place that scared me. What happened was that the wellspring from which I wrote ended up nourishing my life. Writing changed me, composed me—behavior and all. For the Ploughshares blog, Alex Chertok explores his fears and…
-
The Saturday Rumpus Review of It Follows
It Follows interrogates its patriarchal ancestry and forges a unique and clever film in the process.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Josh Weil
Writer Josh Weil talks about his novel, The Great Glass Sea, magical realism vs. science fiction, Russia’s experiments with mirrored satellites, his early days as an aspiring playwright, and how he uses fear as a fuel to accomplish his work.
-
The Anatomy of Funny
McGraw’s studies have led him to endorse something called the benign-violation theory, which holds that “humor only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening (i.e., a violation), but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable, or safe (i.e., benign.)” The form this…
-
The Eager
We were then young girls and our want was written on our skins. Between our legs and along our necks and wrists, our skin craved friction and more friction.
-
“He Smells Your Fear”
…beyond any fear is a greater circumambient fear, a terror, that one will be insufficiently able to hold that fear. That if the stimulus is present and ongoing, unchecked, one might fall apart, come to pieces, in her faculties disintegrate. Writer…
-
Red Tooth Claw
In a borrowed bed, in a foreign room, I woke up to a cry, raw and guttural like a baby’s first breath. My bedside lamp was still on, and the mild darkness of morning stretched outside my window. I slept…
-
Fabricating Fear
We searched for a lake monster on the shores of Lake Superior. This was sometime last July. My wife Meredith, son Henry, and I had headed north from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the hopes that the vacation town of Duluth,…