From the Archive: The Dark All Around Us
There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
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Posts Tagged: imagination
A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
I hope, by writing this, language can jar a wound.
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Writing toward Meaning: A Conversation with Ethel Rohan
Ethel Rohan discusses her new story collection, IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT.
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True Detective and a Greyhound: On Imagination and Survival
It’s exhausting, I realize, to constantly convince myself that I matter.
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Imagination as Oasis: A Conversation with Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia discusses his new novel, SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #198: Rene Denfeld
“Healing is a process you must actively engage in.”
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Emily Arnason Casey
Emily Arnason Casey discusses her debut essay collection, MADE HOLY.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #103: Andrew Battershill
Picture the French Surrealists recast as mobsters running a crime ring and you have the premise for Batterhill’s story.
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Imagination Is Like Grace: Meghan O’Rourke’s Sun in Days
A poem doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but a memory has a touch of immortality: it’s a sort of recompense—forever isn’t exactly a lie, even if it’s not completely true.
...moreSteering Clear of “McMagic”
At the New Yorker, an elegant and comprehensive essay by Julie Phillips from a visit with Ursula Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon touches on the importance of place, both geographic and imaginative. Phillips writes, “[Le Guin] has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination […]
...moreIn This Hell Here With You
When people call other people crazy I don’t get mad, I get bored. When people tell me ghosts don’t exist, I just get bored. Over at JSTOR Daily, poet Dorothea Lasky writes about The Imagination, “a physical space that one shares with other people in and through poetry,” the palpable materiality of alternative existences (like […]
...moreChild’s Play
Not a day goes by that there isn’t some new study on how children’s brains work and what kind of media they should be consuming, With all the scientifically backed books out there now, it’s good to also have some children’s literature that’s still about introducing them to what stories can do. For Slate, Adrienne […]
...moreYou Are Here
Nabokov understood the seduction of maps as a way of ordering the fantastic, the disorderly, the sometimes contradictory nature of description, a visual aid to the internal eye. For Lit Hub, Susan Daitch gives a sweeping textual overview of the ways in which different authors have used maps to enrich their work, demonstrating how they […]
...moreThe Magical World of Children’s Literature
Over at the Atlantic, Colleen Gillard takes a critical look at the differences between British and American children’s stories. While British stories for children tend to be rooted in fantasy and folklore, she writes, American children’s classics tend to be more grounded in realism. “Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the […]
...moreWrite What You Don’t Know
If we only write what we know, when do we get to use our imaginations? The Millions explores the art of writing things we don’t know.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
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The Rumpus Interview with Neil Smith
Author Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
...moreThe Wonderland of Imagination
Who are you?’ Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings, as we struggle to make the choices that will define us? I can describe myself […]
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