The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #158: Paige Cooper
“The leaps that fill in the gaps between ideas are the best thing about reading.”
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Posts Tagged: revision
Myths and Mothers: A Conversation with Daisy Johnson
Daisy Johnson discusses EVERYTHING UNDER.
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Any Day Now: A Conversation with Anjali Sachdeva
Anjali Sachdeva discusses her debut story collection, ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD.
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The Life of the Mind: A Conversation with Elizabeth Scanlon
Elizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #127: Tara Skurtu
“A poem is not a perfect puzzle, yet it is precisely a perfect puzzle.”
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Setting aside Time for Magic: Talking with Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba discusses her new memoir, MEAN, her writing process, and why she has hope for patriarchy’s dissolution.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #116: David Lazar
“Becoming an essayist has always seemed to me as a bit of a pratfall.”
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At the Boundaries of Genre: Talking with Lily Hoang
Lily Hoang discusses her first essay collection, A Bestiary, the importance of genre, and the lessons of teaching.
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The Logic of the Book: Talking with Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich discusses The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, the importance of narrative structure, and the difference between facts and stories.
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The Inner and Outer Self: A Conversation with Sylvia Brownrigg
Sylvia Brownrigg discusses Pages For Her and returning to its world of characters, the inner voices she heeds and those she silences, and who she imagines her readers to be.
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Can We Even Trust Ourselves?: A Conversation with Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc discusses The Grip of It, revision, and returning to the theme of trustworthiness again and again.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman […]
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Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
Jess Arndt discusses her debut story collection Large Animals, accepting love from other people, human bodies, and fear of the written word.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, the writers and books that influenced it, tackling addiction with compassion, and the magic of teenage girls.
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Writing Romance: The Rumpus Interview with Sonali Dev
Sonali Dev talks about her latest novel, A Change of Heart, the romance genre, writing non-white characters, and the parallels between writing and architectural design.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Abeer Hoque
Abeer Hoque talks about coming of age in the predominantly white suburbs of Pittsburgh, rewriting her memoir manuscript ten times, and looking for poetry in prose.
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The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy
D. Foy discusses his latest novel, Patricide, the evolution of “gutter opera,” his writing process, free will, and memes.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Tommy Pico
The more of us there are out here sharing our work and telling our own stories and flying our freak flags, being our intricate, strange, and idiosyncratic selves, the less power the monolith has.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Maryse Meijer
Maryse Meijer discusses her debut collection Heartbreaker, the importance of tension in writing, revision as a shield against criticism, and life as a twin.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jonterri Gadson
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Jonterri Gadson about Blues Triumphant, her love of editing, and the intersection of poetry and comedy.
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The Rumpus Interview with Karolina Waclawiak
Karolina Waclawiak discusses her latest book, The Invaders, the dark side of human nature, and what it really means to be a “beach read”.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore
We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jonathan Travelstead
I try to…consider the writing process as seriously as I do entering a house with black smoke puffing from its eaves.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Liz Prato
Liz Prato talks about her debut story collection, Baby’s on Fire, why she enjoys the process of revision, and what the phrase “literary citizenship” means to her.
...moreTechnology Never Forgets
Draftback is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to watch every keystroke of every revision made to a Google Doc played back to you, opening up a new way to study how writers write. Chadwick Matlin at FiveThirtyEight tried the extension, however, and he sees a dark side: Embedded in Draftback’s ingenuity is also […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.
...moreThe Joy of Writing
What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the work leading to a final draft rarely is: The only way to finish something is […]
...moreFirst Novels and the Art of Revision
Most first novels are really second novels, since most first novels go unpublished. Writing for ZYZZYVA, Rumpus contributor Aaron Gilbreath talks through his experience having his debut memoir rejected, eventually leading an agent to suggest he write a novel instead: He wasn’t telling me to call a novel a memoir, or to capitalize on a […]
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