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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Posts Tagged: recovery
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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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Who’s Crying Now
Faced with parenting children who have no qualms about bursting into tears, Zoe Zolbrod revisits her own stoic childhood, two generations of secret abuse, and whether crying may hold the power to protect.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Grief Magic
“I’m like an alcoholic who doesn’t drink anything but worst case scenarios…” In the aftermath of trauma, Emily Rapp struggles to give up being “on call” for grief.
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