parents
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Sound over Water
We tell the stories to fit the narrative we need. But within each story we must maintain the grain of truth that will provide the urgency.
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Not a Widow
I want to think of him as inhuman and selfish instead of an admirable man who eventually succumbed to a brain chemistry he had no control over.
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Is It My Story or Yours?
Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Martelli
Jennifer Martelli discusses her debut collection of poetry, The Uncanny Valley, growing up saturated with images of the Madonna, and her experience of motherhood first as a daughter and now as a mother.
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Fitting Characters and Scripts
Unwittingly, my mother teaches me in this conversation her generation’s word for gay: 同性恋. I look it up in an online dictionary, three characters in my mother’s tongue. Same, sex, and love.
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Trump Dads: A Confession
Mine wears short shorts while he jogs, with a baseball cap over his baldness, and no shirt. His comes home from work and changes into a full gray sweatsuit, then sits at the head of the kitchen table to relax…
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Saturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie
These are desperate times, and I’m not as desperate as a lot of people, but I’m desperate enough to need this job.
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Inheriting Trauma
At The Millions, former Rumpus Managing Editor Zoë Ruiz pens a beautiful piece on how trauma is passed from generation to generation.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tinfoil Astronaut
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark…
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Scrabbling Love
While I was in residential treatment, my Scrabble games with my mom slowed down. We both lingered over our turns, taking longer than usual to make the next move. Normally I rush to play my turn, keeping the tab open…
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Broken Bones and Old Songs: A Novelist’s Fight to Keep Memory Alive
Memory is the machine of creativity—its heart and soul.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Thao Nguyen’s Release
The thing I want to talk about is something I’m not in possession of anymore, but of all the things I’ve lost it’s the thing I think about the most.