Voices on Addiction: Safety in a Blue Light
Television babysat our family—our thirteen-channel set, reception via a rooftop antenna.
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Posts Tagged: overdose
Asking the Right Questions: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
Transcendent Kingdom becomes an experiment in itself.
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Voices on Addiction: Heroin/e
She introduced me to the ugly of religion and to the beauty of the world.
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Voices on Addiction: Primary Source
Anything we write now is a primary source.
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Voices on Addiction: Advice
What I know has taken a long time to learn, and even longer to accept.
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Voices on Addiction: Fault Lines
After, they said I was like a saint. Death changes people’s memory.
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ENOUGH: The Face of Zero
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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Voices on Addiction: War Hero
A seagull plummeted into the wounded water.
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Voices on Addiction: Flight Patterns
There was no map, no compass. Just me, the needle, and heroin.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #89: In Praise of Tom Petty
Because Petty was so prolific and so popular, the intense craftsmanship of his body of work has been hiding in plain sight.
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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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Coming Clean
Intellectually, I know Gracie’s mom loves her and needs help. In practice, I just want my daughter safe.
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The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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A Love Letter to Fuckhead
If you’re judging your characters, you’re not doing it right. I’ll always be grateful to [Denis] Johnson for teaching me that.
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Voices on Addiction: A Bad Night
Trying to protect him from himself is like trying to protect atmosphere from weather.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Ladies Lazarus
For Mother, two worlds—earth we inhabit together, then the hot, heavenly body of euphoria and speed. Often, Mother exists in the tear between these worlds, belonging nowhere, to no one.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
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The Ever-Present Now
Music contextualizes our feelings, clarifies them, gives them new meaning.
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Voices on Addiction: Mother’s Day
I 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.
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My Life with Annie Lennox: A Christmas Cornucopia
Perhaps part of what prompted me to get clean and sober was the fact I kept making myself uncomfortable.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: A Brief History of a Bad Heart
She studies you, still panting with an energy that consumes the room, and whispers in a reedy voice: “They say you fucked up your heart.”
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: All The Time Every Minute
I lost a best friend and that means something, but you cannot deny that to go on the grief has to stop killing you, eventually.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: An Enemy to No Man but Himself
Jennifer Steil reflects on the death and life of her ex and comes to an unexpected understanding of addiction and the limits of responsibility.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Crushed
He’s a cute mensch, I gathered, a cuddly fellow with a well- groomed beard, sad eyes, and, most importantly, a comforting voice that sounded like he was about to either cry or laugh.
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We’ve had a busy couple weekends at the Rumpus lately, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed any of the spectacular essays and book reviews we’ve been posting. For example, this weekend we reviewed Bradley L. Garrett’s urban-exploration treatise Explore Everything, and Thea Goodman wrote about her complex relationship with a cousin who suffered a […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Art Lovers
After her charismatic older cousin was burned in a fire, Thea Goodman found in him a kindred spirit. Years after his overdose, she revisits their complex relationship’s influence and aftermath.
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Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB by Jaime Lowe
“A nigga don’t come out of jail and get his toes done,” ODB is quoted in a new biography, as he pointed out the earth-tones and the feng-shui waterfall in a manicure parlor. “How are the kids gonna feel about this?”
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