Rumpus Original Fiction: My Mother Fires Guns
You are never really at peace with what you haven’t gotten.
...more
Posts Tagged: hunting
My Father’s Guide to Field Dressing an Elk
Around here, we don’t waste meat, and we don’t waste life.
...more
Moving Targets
Love twists itself into fear, into statistics, into things people can live with.
...more
Slowly Converging Paths: A Conversation with Nate Blakeslee
Nate Blakeslee discusses American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, cultivating trust in his sources, and recreating action-packed scenes he did not witness.
...more
TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Great Elk
For a moment, seeing the small figures walking before the elk makes me think that white people know the Great Elk too.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: Rhino Girl
But these were not men, she realized. They were a cackle of spotted hyena, bright-toothed in the dark, and they were laughing at her.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Coffee and grief. Coffee and compassion. The future of the future! When you are not strong. The complexities of Cecil the lion.
...more
Armored in Cars and Driving Unseen
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Sound of Galton’s Whistle
Those acres of wild were not about to cough up what I was missing no matter how much I clapped and whistled.
...moreHunting the Pages
I find the threat of predation satisfying in a short story because, when done well, it solicits a visceral reaction. The etymology of the word visceral can be traced to the Latin word viscera, which was used to refer to internal organs; the plural term, viscus, refers to “flesh.” A visceral reaction refers to an […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider has some helpful suggestions for forgetful readers. In the Saturday Essay, Melissa Carroll investigates the surprising cultural phenomenon known as the “brony,” a species of lovable man-child obsessed with the cartoon My Little Pony.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Coyotes and Roses
I was a man and when the time came for my shot, I pulled the trigger and painted the prairie with coyote blood. Glenn was right. Being eaten while alive was unacceptable; the coyotes had to die.
...moreWord of the Day: Venatic
(adj.); of or relating to hunting; fond of hunting, whether for sport or livelihood; from the Latin venari (“to hunt”) “Love her or hate her, Banksy is putting herself at the intersection of the street and the art world. Why would anyone expect that position to be occupied by a man?” —Kriston Capps, “Why Banksy […]
...moreA Wild Hunt
Wells Tower went on an elephant hunt, and then wrote about it for GQ: The indescribable thought sensation was not this, but some tiny part of it was sort of like this: Before I saw the elephant get shot, I understood that there was life, and there was its cessation. But now I understand there […]
...more
Guns in the Family
In my extended family, a generation ago, it was the odd household that didn’t have guns. I think that for my father’s father, a gun served mainly as another mechanical thing to tinker with.
...more