mental illness
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This Week in Short Fiction
What would you give to be happy, fun, anxiety-free? Would you give your soul? This is the question Deirdre Coyle asks in her story “Fun Person,” up at Hobart this week. The story opens with the narrator vomiting on the…
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Bittersweet Symphony
Though it’s clichéd and maladaptive to cast mental illness as the wellspring of great writing, to write about one’s life honestly often means writing about one’s mental illness. In an essay for Catapult, Colin Dickey writes lushly about his experiences with…
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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Treatment and Healing
Treatment sometimes looks like hospitalization in an overcrowded psych ward and medication that can dissolve personality. Over at American Short Fiction, Jenna Kahn writes about the depiction of mental illness in literature—as found particularly in “The Depressed Person” by David…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Heirlooms
The strings of our DNA mark us as one, but it’s the roots of our memories that bind us.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection Insurrections—our July Rumpus Book Club pick—comes out from University Press of Kentucky on Tuesday and is a timely and vital look into the daily struggles of individuals in the mostly black community of Cross River, Maryland, a…
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Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy
Eileen Favorite reviews Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life by Bernadette Murphy today in Rumpus Books.
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Voices on Addiction: Too Much Hope
I wanted more time with him, but I didn’t want to hope. Too much hope will mess you up.
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This Week in Short Fiction: Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes
[Noyes’s] stories are nuanced and unapologetic, revealing the shadow sides of women and girls in all their wild and terrible glory.
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Self-Love Stew
In her essay at Hazlitt, “Watch Me Bathe,” Jess Carroll shares that she barely bathes, and tells us that it’s for the better—in fact, it’s like reverse self-love and self-care, as we’ve come to think of those terms now. She rejects…
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Unlinking Mental Illness and Creativity
The idea that “mental illness is the heart of creativity” has persisted for decades. But this idea can negatively impact one’s ability to seek help that they truly need. At The Establishment, Sarah Bronson debunks the notion that treating mental…
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Rob Roberge’s Liar
Rob Roberge’s new memoir, Liar, is out February 9 from Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.