In Protest of a Body that Refuses to End
All I want is to feed myself like a person who wants to be fed.
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...moreI tell Kurinda I’d lie flat on the floor under a pile of jackets.
...moreI’ve seen it coming. This is where it passes through.
...moreA Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
...moreI 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.
...moreMy 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.
...moreViet Than Nguyen discusses his story collection The Refugees, growing up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in the 1980s, and the power of secondhand memories.
...moreThe glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
...moreHe’s the teacher who encourages questions beyond the class assessment, who always gets his students to open the “Curiosity Door.”
...moreWhat I write in my journals is a personal record of the events in my life, and my reactions to them.
...moreYou’ve Got Mail was one of the first movies to depict the Internet as it affects the lives of ordinary users.
...more“I’m a shock absorber for tragedy,” I say, not really knowing what I mean. “Maybe I should just move to Hawaii. I hear that’s a happy place to live.”
...moreI didn’t usually consider how the binge felt. I just ate until I couldn’t eat anymore.
...moreJaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
...moreThe summer before my final year at college, my fear started to manifest as an anxiety disorder specializing in sickness and disease.
...moreThere are times when I must uncork the period, for Isabel only chases my given name.
...moreOne week last spring I said it out loud for the first time: “Sometimes I play so long, my fingers go numb.”
...moreYou don’t need to know him personally, you say. You get the best of Prince through his music. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t.
...moreSocial media’s role in all this is especially strange in that it makes people feel obligated to speak out, whether they’ve thought hard about their place in the discourse or not.
...moreAs I became increasingly jealous of the boys, I got angrier. This was complex because I spent the days worshipping them.
...moreIf nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
...more[I]f there was ever a show that could wrestle with anxiety about aging and mortality in a new way, it’s The X-Files.
...moreOver at the Paris Review, Nick Antosca writes what it felt like to read Nabokov’s Lolita as a 12-year-old boy: Even if I didn’t quite grasp the nature of my radical misreading of the novel—Humbert’s a predator, not a competitor—I understood that for the majority of readers it didn’t tend to provoke reactions like mine. How weird and fucked-up was I?
...moreWe started small, a quick flash in the locker room or on the basketball court after school, any time we wore pants with elastic waistbands. But soon the asses were everywhere.
...moreThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Carmen Giménez Smith about her poetry collection Goodbye, Flicker.
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