The Woman in My Head: A Conversation with Emily Maloney
There’s a lot of rules or feelings about how writing a book should be, but very little of that actually corresponds with reality.
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Posts Tagged: medicine
Claiming Space to Matter: Talking with Jennifer Berney
Jennifer Berney discusses her debut memoir, THE OTHER MOTHERS.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Janice P. Nimura
Janice P. Nimura discusses her new book, THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Beautiful Dead”
It was personal, as the detectives on my favorite shows always said.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #214: Sarah Kersey
“A poem cannot exist without form or structure, just like the human body can’t operate without a skeleton.”
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How We Write the Dead: A Conversation with Vikram Paralkar
Vikram Paralkar discusses his debut novel, NIGHT THEATER.
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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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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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Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion
She said something to me, then, that has been a great comfort. “You had a choice,” she said, “but you did not have free will.” A choice that was no choice at all.
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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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Metaphors for My Forgetful Heart
My body is a drum, its last vibration fading out. My body is a temple, serene and contemplative, all voices finally stilled. My body is a glider plane, floating on warm currents of air in the eerie, engineless quiet.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Melissa Yancy
Melissa Yancy discusses her debut story collection Dog Years, using her day job for inspiration, and being “an old curmudgeon at heart.”
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Podcatcher #4: Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
Jonathan Van Ness discusses his podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, fierceness, curiosity, and hairstyles.
...moreWord 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 it.” –John Gardner, Grendel The idea of creative expression as a healing experience has been […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Virtual reality is the final frontier. How to talk to aliens. Do livestreaming apps change the news? Ellen Pao and the media and Silicon Valley and Twitter and sexism and everything. Is virtual medicine real medicine? Facebook is hungry. So. Very. Hungry.
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The Rumpus Interview with Julie Lawson Timmer
Julie Lawson Timmer discusses her novel, Five Days Left, right-to-die cases, Huntington’s disease, and fiction and illness.
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The Rumpus Interview with Katy Butler
Journalist Katy Butler discusses her memoir, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A Path to a Better Way of Death, why medicine and technology often cloud the larger issues of dying, and how we should contemplate the end of our lives.
...moreIt’s All In Your Head…And the Rest of Your Body
You’re probably aware of the placebo effect—because you think it’s real medication, a sugar pill, for example, relieves your pain—but have you heard of its evil twin, the nocebo effect? Through different biological mechanisms, it achieves something very similar to the placebo effect, but reversed: If you’re told your sugar pill causes side effects like […]
...moreInterpreting My Malady
The unpublished catalogue of fiction inspired by illness is limitless, composed every day, at every hour, in every hospital, clinic, hospice, and bedroom where the ill and injured and even the mildly indisposed attempt to make sense of our altered conditions.
...morePolitics in the Exam Room
In the fall of 2008 I was chatting with a woman I know about the upcoming presidential election. She was in her 60s, single, a funky dresser, world traveler, and amateur artist—what my mom would have called a “free-spirited Auntie Mame type”— so I was surprised by what she had to say: She was voting […]
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