Variants of Unknown Significance
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...moreRumpus editors share a Mother’s Day reading list to celebrate mothers in all their complexity!
...moreMichele Filgate discusses WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON’T TALK ABOUT.
...moreRumpus editors share a Mother’s Day reading list to challenge traditional views of motherhood!
...moreWe’ve got the perfect last-minute gifts for the literary moms in your life!
...moreDo I have a public self that is separate from my private self? I’m not so certain about that.
...moreWe here at The Rumpus matriarchy are celebrating all of our feminist “mothers” this Mother’s Day!
...moreEach bug in the water is one less bug on my fruit, I tell myself, ignoring the truth: under the soil, another is born.
...moreI will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame.
...moreShirley Jackson’s bone-chilling story “The Lottery” is probably the last thing anyone wants to associate with Mother’s Day, yet her lurking plot twists and sharp character insights are the perfect tools to write about parenting. In this month’s Slate Book Review, Dan Kois explains how Jackson’s books depicted family life well before any of us […]
...moreSaeed Jones published a book of poems, Prelude To Bruise. Over at Buzzfeed, he’ll tell you why he wrote them, too: “My mother had a fatal heart attack the night before Mother’s Day in 2011. The experience of losing her broke me down. I quit my job teaching high school English and pretty much locked […]
...moreEvery holiday has its parallel griefs, as much for what isn’t present as for what is. In the New Yorker, Ruth Margalit writes beautifully about experiencing Mother’s Day, after her mother is gone: Meghan O’Rourke has a wonderful word for the club of those without mothers. She calls us not motherless but unmothered. It feels right—an ontological […]
...moreHappy Mother’s Day. And a big hug to Dawn Cave, the mother who gave us the King of The Bad Seeds. Thank you, Dawn, and thank you, Calliope. Calli-a-who? Calliope was the mother of the greatest musician of all time, Orpheus. So it’s quite proper that Nick would turn some Greek mythology on its head […]
...moreWe hope you were so busy taking your mamas out to brunch and showering them with love and appreciation that you simply had no time for The Rumpus this weekend. We celebrated Mother’s Day with two very different interviews that ended up being the same in many ways.
...moreA day of celebration for many, Mother’s Day is a more complex holiday for people who have lost their mothers–or their children.
...more“Back when my son was three I took him to Downtown Brooklyn. He pointed to a sign, and said ‘The – King’s – Store.’ I had no idea he could read.” Artists Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton spoke with moms on the streets of Brooklyn, gathering the “memorable moments of their motherhood.”
...moreAt Ebony, Saeed Jones reflects on the vastness of grief as the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death approaches. “Now, though I sometimes cry, I more often feel a sense of awe at the depth of my connection to my mother. Perhaps this wonder is how I know that ten months and more have passed […]
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