Is It My Story or Yours?
Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy.
Posts by tag
memory
184 posts
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Great Elk
For a moment, seeing the small figures walking before the elk makes me think that white people know the Great Elk too.
Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
The Rumpus Interview with Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell talks about his new memoir The Accidental Life and his career in the magazine business, which spans the beginning of New Journalism through the digital revolution.
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Shane McCrae
I think that the moment we’re living in offers the best opportunity we’ve had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems.
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
"You can’t hold on to the past," Elif once told me. "You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can."
Where were you when the world broke?
Not in your echoing womb, to scream at you across your fields to wake up, not part of your denial that Earth is burning, dehydrated, suffocating on itself— I stood…
Farewell, Professor Wiesel
Faith is about action, Professor Wiesel said that day. Faith is about what you do with that faith. Belief in God is to do, not to accept. So always the question: what can we do?
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: This American Paradise
The thing about Paradise is this—yours can’t be mine, and mine can’t be yours. Paradise exists in the imagination, and imagination is our only privacy.
The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy
D. Foy discusses his latest novel, Patricide, the evolution of “gutter opera,” his writing process, free will, and memes.
Sticking Like Burrs
Our personal pasts aren’t factual records. They’re made up on the spot, synthesized from disjointed details to answer questions we have in the present. For KROnline, Natalie Mesnard and Patrick D.…
Band Names for Books
Spoiler alert: there are no cannibals in Mike Roberts’s new post-9/11 novel Cannibals in Love, but there’s a lot to admire. Over at FSG Originals, Will Chancellor gets granular in conversation…