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Rumpus essays

  • The Lucky Ones
    Jill Christman

    The Lucky Ones

    I live my life through the twin tenets of curiosity and close observation. I believe imagination and storytelling are central to our survival as a species—and yet, it’s my imagination that makes me jumpy.

  • Voice On Addiction: Another Thing to Chase
    Tracy Morin

    Voice On Addiction: Another Thing to Chase

    She’s still somehow always thirsty . . . At least none of these drinks will kill her, even if the hunt for mood and mind-altering, for distraction, for something out there to help, may follow her to the grave.

  • Fat Ghost
    Lu Chekowsky

    Fat Ghost

    Only now can I finally see how this had been our pact all along. We’d decided between us, somewhere along the way, and without any real discussion, that my mother would be the flower and I would be the wax…

  • The Dark Mothers’ Club
    Val Kiesig

    The Dark Mothers’ Club

    I know all the hours intimately as any lover, the lucid high of four a.m. as familiar as the adrenaline drunk of noon.

  • Call for Submissions: September ’22 Themed Month
    Eve Ettinger and Gretchen Schreiber

    Call for Submissions: September ’22 Themed Month

    Education is perhaps the most vulnerable and intimate experience people can have with each other that is not familial or romantic. It’s so easy for the classroom to be either harmful—consider the destruction of a person’s curiosity and confidence in…

  • Honey
    Amanda Oliver

    Honey

    That cafe smelled like fresh-baked bread and cookies, and the baristas were all women with warm, soft hands who called everyone — the Senator, the mothers, the babies, the businessmen — Honey. So many baristas would have called you Honey, David. And swayed along…

  • From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair
    Lyz Lenz

    From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair

    No word is wasted. No story is told in vain.

  • Sons and Daughters
    Ben Jatos

    Sons and Daughters

    Boys were boys and girls were girls and gender norms were there for a reason. We didn’t realize the reason was to keep women down. Maybe we just didn’t care.