personal essay
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A 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…
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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.
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Measuring 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…
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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.