From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: On Documentation
What is it like to be you? he was always asking, in his way, and it seemed a stupid question then. I didn’t know. I could lie better than I could tell the truth. I hadn’t left yet.
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Posts Tagged: oral history
Black Motherhood as Literary Creation: Talking with Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses her new novel, LIBERTIE.
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Landscape as Mindscape: A Conversation with Michael Prior
Michael Prior discusses his new collection of poetry, BURNING PROVENCE.
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Out of What Remains: Talking with Jacinta V. White
Jacinta V. White discusses her collection of poetry, RESURRECTING THE BONES.
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Disrupting Language Hierarchies: Talking with Judith Santopietro
Judith Santopietro discusses TIAWANAKU. POEMAS DE LA MADRE COQA/POEMS FROM THE MOTHER COQA.
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Larger Than Life: Talking with Alia Volz
Alia Volz discusses her debut memoir, HOME BAKED.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation
The Lost Boys had their moment in the media, but these people, these survivors, not boys at all and not lost now either, are still here, living lives, growing and changing and thinking and reflecting.
...moreWriting the Oral History of Our Time
Nearly everything Gould ever held in his hands slipped away. He lost his glasses; he lost his teeth. “I keep losing fountain pens, change, and even manuscripts,” he wrote. “I lost my diary in the toilet,” he reported one day. He himself appeared and disappeared. Joe Gould “was a toothless madman who slept in the […]
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: A Wailing of a Town
Inspired by the books Please Kill Me and We Got the Neutron Bomb, Craig Ibarra began compiling the 70+ interviews that make up this self-declared oral history of San Pedro’s punk scene from 1977–1985. The book consists of these interviews, accounts from band members, photographers, show organizers, and people who were there during this formative time in […]
...moreDidn’t Know a Thing
BOMB Magazine continues its Oral History project: a collection of oral biographies about New York City’s African-American artists. This week, Alteronce Gumby’s subject is Stanley Whitley: Stanley told me once, “There are many art histories … and many art worlds.” The more I talked to him about his work and influences, the more I found that statement to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Corinne Goria
Author and veteran Voice of Witness editor Peter Orner sits down with Invisible Hands: Voices From the Global Economy editor Corinne Goria to talk about putting the book together, economic interdependency, and the complex human stories behind everyday items.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joseph Huff-Hannon
Writer and activist Joseph Huff-Hannon discusses Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories, an oral history collaboration with journalist Masha Gessen and a look at the human rights crisis currently affecting Russia’s LGBT population.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sibylla Brodzinsky and Max Schoening
The editors of Throwing Stones at the Moon shed light on Colombia’s human rights crisis and the power of bringing survivors’ voices to a conversation dominated by the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the conflict.
...moreAn Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #5
Fred White, Age 86 Mission, Kansas “She was quite a doll and I didn’t want anybody else.” My wife, Helen, and I have been married sixty-five years. I met her in junior high school.
...moreAn Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #4
Dominic Sclafani, Age 30 Tucson, Arizona “He’s like, ‘She’s going to eat you alive.’ And I go, ‘Yes, I know.’”
...moreAn Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3
Betty Anne May, Age 80 Truth or Consequences, New Mexico “That man could turn me on by touching my little fingernail.”
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Craig Walzer
“We need to be able to digest and give people who are very far away the time and space to tell their story in their own words
...moreLike a Pack of Alaskan Dogs
“Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant. San Francisco. ‘I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well there’s only three or four jobs. The guys would come out […]
...moreJeff Buckley and His Band, An Oral History
Jeff Buckley: Having Tim Buckley as my father gave me the parts needed to play music. Even if I went and became a lawyer and someone asked me to sing something, I’d have the parts to sing. But that’s it. It’s not really [Tim Buckley’s] voice that I have – because it wasn’t really his […]
...moreWorking, as Adapted by Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar, the only famous comic-book creator who isn’t an artist himself, last month released a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Working with The New Press. Dave Gilson summarizes it on Mother Jones as not “the most far-fetched attempt to repackage” the classic 1974 collection of interviews with blue-collar workers — “that would be the […]
...moreOral History According to David Lynch: Interview Project
David Lynch’s most recent project seems to be a complete departure from the epic, surreal fictions that made him famous: a collection of oral histories of ordinary people, which he has called simply Interview Project. The research concept was straightforward: send a film team out on a long road trip, and along the way, stop […]
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