Blood from a Door Nail: Talking with Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro discusses her forthcoming book THE BYLINE BIBLE.
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Posts Tagged: personal essay
(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Emily Smith
A writer must push her pleasure into risk, expose herself publicly to strangers with no knowledge of how she might be received, and become something that must be seen.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Amy Benson
Our American obsession with the personal and individual has made us the tremendous resource consumers we are in the world.
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Allowing a Female to Own Her Genius: Talking with Alana Massey
Alana Massey discusses her debut collection, All the Lives I Want, the best piece of writing advice she’s ever received, and acknowledging the work that women do.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Night
With these young women, I no longer slip in and out of places undetected. With them, my cloak of invisibility—my only known superpower—has been removed.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pain Scale Treaties
Perched on the shoulders of generational trauma sit these two theses: suffering begets cruelty begets suffering begets cruelty, and pain is empathy’s catalyst.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Self-Portrait with Parts Missing and/or Smeared
A first day means there was a never-day.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs
Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now.
...moreThe Hell of Personal Writing
When I give lectures to writing students I tell them to not get discouraged if they do not enjoy writing. “I hate writing,” I say, “It’s horrible. It’s hell.” They are shocked every time, but I mean it. I often finish essays feeling like I’ve had to cut away a part of myself in the […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
...moreA Home of One’s Own
Jami Attenberg wrote a personal essay in Lenny Letter about finding home in unexpected places: I found myself uttering these words: “If I lived here, I would never want to leave.” No one was more surprised than me when I said it; they rose up from somewhere new in me. I didn’t even know that […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Kill Shot
1964, a month prior to the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, a different home movie shot. Infant toss. Up-down. Plummeting. I’m ten months of age—picking up speed.
...moreMeasuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA program: “I hated this sort of smug assumption that we all knew what was bad.” […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Used to Be Schwartz
When I told my friend Aharon that my family name used to be Schwartz, he said, “Used to be Schwartz—sounds like a Borscht Belt act.”
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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 Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results
There were chains. History books always describe the chains.
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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 Saturday Rumpus Essay: Predation
There is a legend in Central America of an evil Black Cadejo, who is malevolent with glowing red eyes, and who stands on two feet like a man.
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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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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Accidental Curators
He staggers; he loses his standoff with gravity. It was never a fair fight.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Veronica Dies in Jamaica
Understand that she is both the gold city in my imagination and its queen, and that her death signifies the end of that dream.
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Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism
As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories.
...moreLanguage and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine? That I don’t know? Maybe because I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any […]
...moreLanguage, Love, and Loss
Over at The Toast, Nicole Chung has written a deeply personal and beautiful essay about coming to terms with her adoption, embracing her Korean heritage, and learning her mother tongue alongside her daughter: When I watch my daughter writing in Korean, when we talk about our family history, when she seems sure about who she […]
...moreValeria Luiselli’s Book Club at the Jumex Factory
To write her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli got ongoing book club feedback from workers at the Jumex factory featured in the novel. Over at Broadly, Luiselli talks to Lauren Oyler about her process, a childhood spent moving, and how to use—rather than abuse—the personal in essays: I think that maybe […]
...moreGetting Personal
In response to Slate’s viral article about the rise of the “harrowing personal essay,” prominent editors from different publications weigh in on the importance of confessional writing, reasons for its gender divide, and the publishing process behind it.
...moreWriting and Collecting
When I left the house on Pace Street and moved to Vermont, I became a writer. I became a writer because I was so broken down by early motherhood that I stopped fearing criticism long enough to throw my work out into the world. Moving into an old farmhouse, I began collecting again, amassing things […]
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LeBron James as Personal Essayist
Beneath all personal essays, especially those that deal with trauma, a change, or, in James’s case, a tough decision, the implicit narrative is that the author is presently in a clear enough place to produce the prose.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider’s favorite things, in rhyme. In The Last Book I Loved, Richard Kramer delves into the “determined and effective” Judith Schneiderman’s memoir, I Sang To Survive. A “propulsive drive” lies behind the Auschwitz survivor’s writing. “What I love most about her book,” Kramer writes, “is the joy with which she tells it, the […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Megan Stielstra
I made work in any little spare minute I could… Everything was scattered and all over the place, and the question was: how can you grab this moment and live it as hard as you possibly can?
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