Rumpus Original Fiction: Reina with White Roses
A block away from my house, Reina killed herself.
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Posts Tagged: graduation
Readers Report: Harvest
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Harvest.”
...moreIs This Water?
Graduation season is upon us again, and with it comes the vacant, cliché-ridden literary animal that is the graduation speech. Over at Lit Hub, Emily Harnett revisits David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” and marvels at the insidiousness of the speech’s logic and message: Tell your audiences that they’re too smart […]
...moreThose Kinds Of People are The Only People Here
Electric Literature posts a graduation speech from Vonnegut; he riffs on World War II, busboys, ambition, and suicide notes: A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed her asked her why she had found the place attractive. She said it was because […]
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Funny Women #117: How’s that Barnard Thing Working out for You?
Are you a Part of the Solution? Didn’t Bono turn out great? What kind of work do you do by the way?
...moreBe Kind—You Won’t Regret It
Check out George Saunders’s graduation speech to the students of Syracuse University, where he is a professor. It’s rife with exhortations to kindness and references to monkey-borne illnesses. You know, the usual. So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What […]
...moreWords of Wisdom from Writers
It’s commencement speech season, and New York Daily News‘s books blog has a roundup of some of the best graduation advice from literary figures. Like this, from Toni Morrison: …art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. […]
...moreGraduation Season Sugar
“The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” Around this time last year, Sugar […]
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