John Gardner
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What Is (and Isn’t) Held in the Light: Diane Zinna’s The All-Night Sun
Trauma’s wing conceals and reveals.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Shawver
Author Brian Shawver talks about his new book, Danger on the Page, his novel Aftermath, MFA programs, and why it’s a good thing that writing never stops being hard work.
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Word of the Day: Mundificative
(n.); a cleansing medicine or preparation; (adj.) able to cleanse, especially a wound “Art begins in a wound, an imperfection—a wound inherent in the nature of life itself—and is an attempt either to live with the wound or to heal…
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“The Labor of Reconsideration”
For the Millions, Philip Graham considers how childhood traumas can inspire art. In his exploration, Graham looks to works by John Gardner, Rabih Alameddine, and James Baldwin, authors who confront “psychic wounds” and use writing as a method of healing: We…
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Searching for Rafters in the Dark
If sentimentality is a sin, it is only because feeling can be so beautiful. One moment of sentiment in literature is worth a thousand failures. We often cannot see the rafters in the dark, but what a shame it would…
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The Winner Returns
A 1972 novel recently re-released, Rosalyn Drexler’s To Smithereens plays with fact and imagination, memoir and fiction, in ways seldom seen in her own era.

