loss
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The Rumpus Interview with Richard Ford
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Ford discusses his new book, Let Me Be Frank With You, how metaphor shapes our world, and why he doesn’t like the idea he has a battery to recharge.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Casa Azul Cripple
“I wanted to be sexual/sexualized, but not fetishized. But was becoming someone’s fetish the only way? How was being fetishized different than being desired for having a unique, unrepeatable shape…or would the one leg always and forever be the only…
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Broke and Broken
Saeed Jones published a book of poems, Prelude To Bruise. Over at Buzzfeed, he’ll tell you why he wrote them, too: “My mother had a fatal heart attack the night before Mother’s Day in 2011. The experience of losing her…
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Jack of Hearts
Magic isn’t about making the impossible happen. Surely that’s a big part of it, but more importantly, magic reminds us how it feels to be bewildered by something.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Dormancy
“I wonder what it feels like to be precious to someone … I’ve always known love as a one-two combo of kiss and fist.”
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On Loss and “Replacement”
Emily Rapp’s name has appeared frequently on the Rumpus as her book The Still Point of the Turning World came out detailing her and her son Ronan’s experience with Tay-Sachs disease, his ultimate death, and her experiences as a mother.…
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I Know Death Too Well By Now
In a breathtaking essay on aging, Roger Angell reflects on death. At the age of 93, he writes: “A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it.” Angell has…
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A new way to measure time
At the New York Times, Chris Huntington writes an essay about how working with prisoners taught him to reevaluate how he measured time, as well as his successes and failures. “When the battery in my watch died, I still wore…
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Of Love and Loss
For Guernica, Boyer Rickel offers us raw reflections on love and disease after losing his partner in “Morgan: A Lyric.” You don’t realize how much nothing is until you have nothing, says a woman in Oklahoma whose house burned down. Love…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Look. It was a nasty weekend. We both said some things we didn’t mean. Let’s just put it behind us with the weekend Rumpus roundup (though that was still a pretty perverted thing you did). Who knew that, upon finding…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.
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Books For The Dark Night Of The Soul
In his late thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald experienced a series of emotional and mental breakdowns, many of which he wrote about in a series of random essays and observations collected under the title, The Crack-Up. At the beginning of the…