parenting
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Difficult Decisions
She was fed exclusively through a gastrostomy tube. Although she couldn’t speak, she often smiled and made noises and expressed pleasure in the company of her siblings. Her parents — worried that their daughter’s continued growth would restrict her ability…
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The Rumpus Interview with Meghan Daum and Elliott Holt
Meghan Daum, the anthology’s editor, and Elliott Holt, who contributed its penultimate essay, discuss Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: A Roundtable on Writing, Editing, and Race
With Lisa Factora-Borchers, Patrice Gopo, Jennifer Niesslein, Tamiko Nimura, and Deesha Philyaw.
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Children in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”
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“Throw Something Down Hard Enough, You Discover Its Laws”
Maybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we’re offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly.
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There Is No Such Thing as a True Story
Perspective is a fickle beast, and memory is an unreliable traveling companion through the years.
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Are We All Our Own Vanishing
We will never be an exclamation point, an ellipses, a question mark. We must all leave with this: a period—solid, and utterly irrefutable.
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Plankton (A Body of Stars)
Plankton either grows into something other than plankton—a strong swimming non-planktonic adult, like a crab or a fish, or it stays the same—forever drifting with the shifting tides.
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Mole Biopsies and Other Love Notes
If this were a comic book, Bad Mole would be skulking in a dark alley, wearing an ill-fitting trench coat.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Admission of Guilt
Last summer, I nearly killed my son. It was an accident, but the guilt I live with belongs to those whose malicious deeds are intentional.
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What Pregnant Women Read
At Lit Hub, Yardenne Greenspan discusses the solace she found in parenting books during pregnancy: Now that I was in this completely new and foreign scenario, my body doing things I never realized it knew how, my mind trying to…
