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…
Posts by tag
personal essay
52 posts
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.
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…
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.”
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.”
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results
There were chains. History books always describe the chains.
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.
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.
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: A Roundtable on Writing, Editing, and Race
With Lisa Factora-Borchers, Patrice Gopo, Jennifer Niesslein, Tamiko Nimura, and Deesha Philyaw.
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Accidental Curators
He staggers; he loses his standoff with gravity. It was never a fair fight.
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.
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.