Breathing into the Paper Bag: Talking with Jenny Valentish
Jenny Valentish discusses her memoir, WOMEN OF SUBSTANCES.
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Posts Tagged: recovery
Voices on Addiction: Flight Patterns
There was no map, no compass. Just me, the needle, and heroin.
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
This world doesn’t have to like me. But it does have to reckon with me, with my humanity.
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Every Moment Is a Poem: A Conversation with with Ailey O’Toole
Ailey O’Toole discusses her forthcoming chapbook, GRIEF, AND WHAT COMES AFTER.
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Voices on Addiction: The Five Cs
The truth is different. The truth is always different.
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Building the Muscle: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
Kristi Coulter discusses her debut essay collection, NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM THIS.
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Blood from a Door Nail: Talking with Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro discusses her forthcoming book THE BYLINE BIBLE.
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Pulling the Thread Through: Talking with Tina Alexis Allen
Tina Alexis Allen discusses her memoir, HIDING OUT.
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Discomfort, Desire, and Drugs: Talking with Ben Gwin
Ben Gwin discusses his debut novel, Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Regan Middleton, the book’s unique structure, and writing satire.
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell
I didn’t want to be edited in that way. I needed to tell my story.
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The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
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Voices on Addiction: Need and Smoke
Need had carved out specific contours in my personality, and then it returned like a curse to fit in those spaces.
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After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
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Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar discusses his new collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, finding community in poetry, books on craft, and mining the supernatural for poems.
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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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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #24: Must I Be an Angry April Fool?
When I attended professional acting school back in 1986 (the MFA program at UC Irvine, I proudly remark), I had a teacher ask me once, “Charles, are you able to feel any authentic emotion other than anger?” I paused for a bit and considered the question, before answering, truthfully, “No. I don’t suppose I can.” […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #23: The Love Song for Argyle C. Klopnik
File this one under “they can’t Trump everything; life goes on.” Last week, I got caught up in reflections on poverty in America: mine, yours, and ours. This week, I decided to do something about it and buckle down to design a careful budget. “Ack!,” I said, early one morning. “We’ve got to make a budget […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr discusses his memoir Sirens, writing for his daughter, and why he values art that trusts its audience.
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The Truth About Lying
My gut is a red, fiery drum, a beacon of rosy light. My instinct to run is a bright radioactive pink arrow, a bloody blade. I was correct.
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My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air.
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The Body and the Blood
The world around me looked suddenly sharper, more sinister, the female body where I lived appearing so much more penetrable, exposed, and impossible to hide.
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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized.
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The Middle Season
My doctor told me to begin with adding five minutes to my morning walk. During those five minutes, I recalled the life I’d once had—that intense life that ambition gave me—and the man I’d once been.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #1: Are We Amused Yet?
Here is something I’ve always believed: Just knowing I am an artist, asserting that identity, is more important than what I produce. It is a victory in itself.
...moreDance, Write, Love
Before this semester in Italy, I had enjoyed writing for school, but now for the first time I was driven to write for myself. I began to need to write like I had needed to dance. Was I replacing one language with another, one way of communicating with another? Over at Catapult, Sari Wilson recalls […]
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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 Sunday Rumpus Interview: Patrick O’Neil
Patrick O’Neil talks about his debut memoir Gun Needle Spoon, being big in France, the drug/recovery genre, and writing through trauma.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
In “Hunting For The Little Prince,” Sigal Samuel invites us to tag along as she pursues the real-life inspiration for the blonde-haired protagonist of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous children’s book. No spoilers, but this particular missing person search ends happily. Then, in the Sunday Essay, Rob Roberge tackles his demons and the continuing fallout from […]
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