Hard to Swallow: Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls
Jell-O, that seemingly innocuous, gem-colored dessert, has a darker history than one might expect.
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Posts Tagged: illness
A Séance of a Book: Talking with Allie Rowbottom
Allie Rowbottom discusses her debut memoir, JELL-O GIRLS.
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Struggling toward Truth: Porochista Khakpour’s Sick
Khakpour gathers courage, again and again, as she reaches into the most painful parts of her life, excavates them, and holds them up to the light.
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Being Human: A Conversation with Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour discusses her new memoir, Sick, the difficulty of receiving good medical care, and the blessing of online community.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: She Hated the Child
She didn’t want anything to change. She understood it would be easier if she loved the child. But she did not want to love it.
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Inheritance
I married a man who is related to me. I started dating him when I was seventeen and of course, my mother immediately liked him. He grew up in my parents’ hometown.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman
Sometimes a story suddenly changes.
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Breaking the Rules: A Conversation with Amy B. Scher
Amy B. Scher discusses her memoir, This Is How I Save My Life, what to do when all available treatments have failed, Trump’s presidency, and the power to heal.
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Translating the Untranslatable: A Conversation with Andrea J. Buchanan
Andrea J. Buchanan discuss The Beginning of Everything and processing trauma through narrative.
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What Did You Expect, Though?
The immune system, meant to protect a body from foreign invaders, works too assiduously, sees danger where there is none, turns on itself. Such conditions lend themselves to metaphor.
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Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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Breaking Through: Gayle Brandeis Discusses The Art of Misdiagnosis
Gayle Brandeis discusses her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis, out today from Beacon Press.
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What to Read When It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month
A list of books that offer various ways to understand what breast cancer means in our lives, individually and collectively.
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If You Are Abandoned
My uncle and I had shared many silences together and, in those silences, I felt as if we knew each other.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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Words as Events: A Conversation with Jeff Wood
Jeff Wood discusses The Glacier, his genre-bending book combining novel, poetry, screenplay, and collage, how heritage has become a brand, and the American Midwest.
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The Colonizer
It felt like one of those soundtracks where the needle scrapes across the record, and silence prevails.
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The Gate of Permission: A Conversation with Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel discusses her newest novel, Before Everything, living through and beyond grief, and why she loves secrets.
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The Hawk in Me
I continue to adapt. I do all of this because I cannot run away, not really. There is nowhere to go. The hawk is the thing within me.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #20: This Mortal Coil
Socrates: All men are mortal. The Storming Bohemian: I’m a man. Socrates: Right, so… The Storming Bohemian: Uh oh.
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What I’ll Tell My Children: On Being ‘F***Able’ under the Regime of President-elect
It’s time to take responsibility for compliancy.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
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The Rumpus Interview with Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo passed away on August 23, 2016. Earlier this summer, he spoke with Sarah Blake about his debut collection Four Reincarnations, writing with and about cancer, and how language is a game.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Surprising the Psychic
Coming up Swords, a Nine: nightmares and anguish; the Ten: rock bottom; and Death: with her audible reminder the card was in “the place you are now.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Leland Cheuk
Leland Cheuk discusses his novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, dark humor, cancer, morally corrupt characters, and his mother.
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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized.
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