Rumpus Exclusive: “Compulsion”
It’s like a record skipping inside.
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Posts Tagged: Mental Health
Every Moment Is a Poem: A Conversation with with Ailey O’Toole
Ailey O’Toole discusses her forthcoming chapbook, GRIEF, AND WHAT COMES AFTER.
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Different Voices: A Conversation with Crystal Hana Kim
Crystal Hana Kim discusses her debut novel, IF YOU LEAVE ME.
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What to Read When It’s Mental Health Month
Rumpus editors recommend books that shed light on what it means to live with mental illness.
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The Emotion of the Moment: Talking with Terese Marie Mailhot
Terese Marie Mailhot discusses her debut memoir, Heart Berries, crafting trauma on the page, and her views on motherhood after writing her memoir.
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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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Guns or No Guns: Mental Health Crisis in Schools
I do the best I can to reach out to those I see isolated or disturbed, but I have to also be careful I don’t make myself a target.
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A Spirit Born into a Human Body: Talking with Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi discusses her debut novel, Freshwater, her public and private identities, and deciding when to translate culture for readers.
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This Is What I Get for Wanting
When I cried over the phone, asking him if he was dumping me, he said in his gentle voice, “Sweetheart, we weren’t really a thing yet.”
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The Unexpected Feminism of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Perhaps it’s more productive then to think about Rebecca’s craziness as a source of sanity in a crazy world in which women are routinely disregarded.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #120: Jeannie Vanasco
“If you’ve ever seen a video by somebody running and filming at the same time, that’s what the world looked like: shaky, fast, in and out of focus.”
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The Meaning of Truth: A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise by Sandra Allen
The way the book is organized reflects Allen’s experience: the ability to meet a book with skepticism and find much to be admired.
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Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
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Disease Cloaked in Ambition: Gorilla and the Bird by Zack McDermott
Gorilla and the Bird is an important resource for anyone impacted by the scope of bipolar disorder, as well as those who want to learn more about it.
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Slush Piles in White
The sensibilities of whiteness do not want us to work, do not want us to think, do not want us to imagine outside of its bounds.
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Gayle Brandeis’s The Art of Misdiagnosis
After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. I am looking for clues, for evidence. Answers.
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The Story We Have Yet to Tell: Talking with Haroon Moghul
Haroon Moghul discusses How to Be a Muslim: An American Story, his own religious journey, and the blessings that come with being an outsider.
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Midnight Screams
She did everything I told her without realizing that it was hurting her and she was me.
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The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg
The stories [in THE TRUTH ABOUT ME], like Marburg herself, are insightful, witty, to the point, and told with her wonderfully dry sense of humor.
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Heartbeat Detected
I don’t want to say “calculated conversations.” I don’t want to say “I push my needs away.” I don’t want to admit I can’t control how our interactions go.
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Reclaiming the Identity of the Witch: A Conversation with Katy Horan
Katy Horan discusses Literary Witches, which she illustrated and worked on in collaboration with writer Taisia Kitaiskaia, out tomorrow from Seal Press.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #104: sam sax
I could write a bullet list of sam’s sax’s recent accomplishments, but the wiser thing would be to advise you to pick up his newly released book MADNESS.
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Erasing the Girl: Why Don’t We Trust Women to Tell Their Stories of Disordered Eating?
I didn’t want to criticize her, or demand explanations from her. I just wanted to hear her speak.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we are born of pregnant pauses.” Pausing for readers to meet her at this natal location […]
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Where You Put It on the Line: A Conversation with Mychal Denzel Smith
Mychal Denzel Smith discusses his debut nonfiction book Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, how the activist space has changed in recent years, and who he is writing for.
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The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
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Written in Chalk: What It Means to Be Crazy
As truth becomes more elusive, as fact blends with fiction, we ought to take notice of how we categorize people, as categorization seems to be married to suppression, to disenfranchisement.
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