None of This Is Supposed to Be a Secret: Talking with Erin Hoover
Poet Erin Hoover discusses her debut collection, BARNBURNER.
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Posts Tagged: poverty
How to Keep Calm and Carry On
Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you. You play tricks on your mind.
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The Quiet of a Ghost: Talking with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Ingrid Rojas Contreras discusses her debut novel, FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE.
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A Real Good Guy
Doesn’t murder exclude a person from being described as “a good guy”?
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Hannibal Lecter, My Therapist
In the dark, I felt at home in the underground bunker where the hospital stored its violent men.
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How to Steal a Frozen Burrito
If you ask me why I did it, I can’t give you a proper answer. I was hungry and didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t like I was homeless or went to sleep starving.
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The Thread: The Masked Man
What I know and don’t know about men matters. What men know and don’t know about themselves matters more.
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The Emotion of the Moment: Talking with Terese Marie Mailhot
Terese Marie Mailhot discusses her debut memoir, Heart Berries, crafting trauma on the page, and her views on motherhood after writing her memoir.
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It’s All about Positionality: Talking with Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Kayleb Rae Candrilli discusses their debut collection, What Runs Over, reclaiming memory through poetry, and the political act of being happy.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Passing as Privileged”
I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Katia D. Ulysse
Katia D. Ulysse discusses her forthcoming novel, Mouths Don’t Speak, the importance of religion and music in the novel and in Haitian culture, and why Haiti will always be “home.”
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Reinventing Motherhood and Re-Dreaming Reality: Talking with Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore discusses her new novel We Were Witches, why capitalism and the banking system are the real enemies, and finding the limits between memoir and fiction.
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Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
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Wisdom Is a Double-Edged Sword: Talking with Jay Baron Nicorvo
Jay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
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Periphery: Exploring Bombs, Boundaries, and Family History
Have you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?
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In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
Jenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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No Other Options
Five months after my dad’s eviction, in the warehouse, I looked through cardboard boxes, stacked on top of one another like a game of Jenga.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For Huffington Post’s Highline magazine, Jason Fagone profiles a trauma surgeon working to make a small dent in our country’s problem with gun violence. At Catapult, Abbey Fenbert writes a funny, heartfelt essay about trying to ban books in the seventh grade.
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Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
Ratika Kapur discusses her latest book, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, the disappointing romance of affairs, and how people carry on after doing the unthinkable.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka discusses his new collection Map to the Stars, writing about poverty in contemporary poetry, and how racism maintains its place in our society.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #22: Poverty Is Never “Genteel”
Poverty may have been beloved of St. Francis, but not so much by the rest of us. Nobody likes to look at advanced poverty, toothless and drooling, clutching the hands of children who have running sores on their filthy legs. Poverty is a crackhead who pisses on the pavement, and sleeps with fleas and stray […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell discusses her collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the natural world as a character, and finding writing from the male point of view easier.
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Make/Work Episode 37: Melody Parker
In Episode 37 of The Rumpus’s Make/Work podcast, Scott Pinkmountain speaks with composer, singer, and producer Melody Parker about her incredible new album, Archipelago.
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On Suffering and Sympathy
What is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?
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Sunday Rumpus Fiction: One Small Victory
Now he started to cry and couldn’t stop the tears. He’d found a way to beat his hunger until the next meal, and he didn’t know when that would be. Hunger, his acts from hunger, made him cry.
...moreSong of the Day: “Louder Than A Bomb”
“Rhythm is the rebel,” Chuck D raps on “Louder Than A Bomb,” one of many outstanding tracks from Public Enemy’s touchstone 1988 record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Of all the controversial and heartfelt statements made on this widely acclaimed and influential album, this is perhaps the most telling, as DJ […]
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“I Will Climb, Too”
I assume he’s going to drop us off, wish us luck, and speed away. But instead Little Wei slams on his brakes, turns off the ignition, and says, “I will climb, too.”
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, in Rumpus Saturday Fiction, Sherman Alexie’s shares three short stories—”Fixed Income,” “Honor Society,” and “Valediction”—that all offer his trademark whimsy and insight into the human condition. Three different teenagers struggle with poverty, endemic racism, and social exclusion, and must depend upon themselves to make the right choices in difficult moral situations. Then, in the […]
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