All the Forgetting
so many ends before the end.
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Posts Tagged: funeral
A Conversation with Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao About their Collaborative Novella, Funeral
Writing started feeling interesting again, like it was worth it after all, and not just a boring thing that ate ham sandwiches on white bread for every meal and whose favorite book from last year was [Redacted] by [Famous author], which remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for what felt like forever.
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From the Archive: The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: What Wasn’t
She gave him a small, relieved laugh. In another world, she replied.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Barong
Appearance aside, my boss took his work seriously.
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My Grandmother Glitches the Machine
It’s true that when I speak of machines I also mean dimensions.
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Unprepared Blue Birds
In deep grief, we rotate inside of a funhouse.
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Divestment
Secrecy stitched us a fraudulent reality. Denial masqueraded as hope.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Mira Returns to Athens”
How had he seen me upon this initial meeting? How had I seen him?
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Too Close to Home
I can’t relax. Bullets are on my mind.
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Spotlight: “Moon Moth” by Dylan Webb
In “Moon Moth,” Dylan Webb braids narratives amidst puppy love and quiet woods.
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R.I.P.: A Mortician’s Tale
[W]hat could possibly be more cleansing than accepting that death is an unremarkable part of life?
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I Will Not Die for You
Each bug in the water is one less bug on my fruit, I tell myself, ignoring the truth: under the soil, another is born.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson discusses her latest novel Another Brooklyn, the little deaths of lost friendships, and her work with children across the country as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
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Spotlight: “Distance” by AshleyRose Sullivan
“Distance” is part of a growing collection of graphic essays in which AshleyRose Sullivan tries to make sense of her oddball family history by looking at it through the lens of popular culture.
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Broken Bones and Old Songs: A Novelist’s Fight to Keep Memory Alive
Memory is the machine of creativity—its heart and soul.
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Meditation
We looked up as we moved. A handful of stars watched us behind a ripped black canvas of clouds. It started to rain as we all got to our cars. The skies poured down globs of heavy rain that burst out like tiny bombs around us.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
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Deep Conditioning with Wilson Phillips
“Don’t become a professor,” he said. “I’d rather you become a garbage man. They get paid more and have better benefits.”
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All Those Stars
Twenty-one years ago my mother stopped her dialysis treatments before they’d barely begun, a decision that prematurely ended her life.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jonathan Travelstead
I try to…consider the writing process as seriously as I do entering a house with black smoke puffing from its eaves.
...moreWord of the Day: Atrabilious
(adj.); gloomy, morose, or morbid; bad-tempered, irritable; from the Latin agra bili(s) (“black bile”) “Caleb stopped, massaged, then stopped again, as though he felt something under the skin. ‘Too big to be a morphine pump,’ he said cheerfully. At 32 years old, fresh-faced and boyishly handsome, he looks less like an undertaker than like the […]
...moreDon’t Fear the Reaper
At The Hairpin, Caitlin Doughty, mortician and author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, talks about death positivity, women in the funeral business, zombies, and why she thinks the recent move toward alternative burial practices is more than just a trend: I don’t want to say it’s a trend […]
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We Who Leave
I could not bring myself to talk about losing my last living grandparent, because talking about her would mean talking about the literal and figurative ocean between where I come from and where I am now.
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Bring It On Home
A house is just a set design, and sometimes we run lines with ghosts.
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Against Everything
The mountains of Alabama are small mountains—foothills, really—but they are mine like a sports team is mine—like a football game (which I have for so long been near but have not really, really seen) is mine—as in the phrase “We scored! We scored!”
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