Navigating the Messy, the Scary, and the Beautiful: A conversation with Marisa Crane
I think humor is so important to who we are as people, how we deal with pain, how we connect with one another. It’s essential to my being and my writing.
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Posts Tagged: rumpus interview
A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer
Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
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Inventing the Form of Yourself: A conversation with Maggie Millner
I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
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A rush of joy from complete strangers: An interview with Monica Macansantos
I think that it’s helpful to imagine your own people as your primary audience even when you are also writing for an audience that doesn’t necessarily belong to this community.
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Pinning myself like a butterfly onto the page: A Conversation with Kimberly Nguyen
I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
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Telling our necessary truths: A Conversation with Janet Rodriguez
Only after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.
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We’re more powerful if we’re not so embroiled in illusion: A Conversation with Irene Silt
Love is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.
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A Conversation with Adam Rosen about anthologies and the worst movie ever made
I was looking for people who had something to say beyond This is the dumbest movie of all time.
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Boys and Oil: Taylor Brorby on Making Space for Queer Stories on the Great Plains
I developed two books. One I called “The Gay Book,” and one I called “The North Dakota Book.” Well, those are the same book, as you can imagine.
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Threats of Violence: Discussing Pain, Form, and Cinema du Corps with Author Stephanie LaCava
There is a hyper self-awareness in all my work that acknowledges—teases itself, maybe—what it is addressing and from what entry point. I once modeled in a campaign for socks I designed for a skate label and on the box there was a small excerpt from one of my books.
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I’m a Firm Believer in Timing: An Interview with Rubén Degollado
For me, it is actually harder to write a book that is grounded in realism, as that is not how I see the world or how my family sees the world.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with C. Russell Price
The Rumpus Book Club chats with C. Russell Price about his poetry collection Oh You Thought This Was a Date?! (Triquarterly Books, June 2022), playlists, and the ongoing end- of-the-world.
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But tonight, a little more: A Conversation with J. Hope Stein
What’s the difference between sports bras and regular bras?—
What’s the difference between Jesus and God?
Nothing and Everything: An Interview with Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills on the Fragmentation of Adoption
Family relies on the antics of nationalism: who belongs, who doesn’t, to whom are we loyal, to whom are we not . . . I suppose “family” is another F-word that can be something that brings pleasure, or that might be deployed as a weapon if in the mouth of the wrong person.
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Stories help us be able to be brave: Adoption and Belonging with Mariama J. Lockington
It is okay to feel more than one thing.
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Scaling The National through Poetics: A dialogue between Rodrigo Toscano and Paisley Rekdal
Transient feelings about feelings of deliverance from (I’d say, national) anxiety. People are micro-dosing on sentimental poetry.
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Taking to Heart Unbearable Reality: The Rumpus Interview with Jorie Graham
As I say to myself, living under the reality of this new, second cancer, I am rich in minutes. Maybe not in years, or, who knows, even months. But minutes, yes. So, I try not to squander them.
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Embodied Voices: A Conversation with Sonya Huber
So many of the metaphors we use that come from the body and bodily experience are ableist and predicated upon a notion of “normal.” In educational systems, that idea of “normal” has led to serious accessibility issues, to separate and unequal classrooms.
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Can we be too alive together? A conversation with Chris Martin on poetry, autism, and our neurodivergent future
The way we arrange the conditions of our togetherness can allow all the writing to happen that beckons to happen.
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Finding Enchantment in the Ordinary: A Conversation with Meng Jin
The reason why so many of these stories have metafictional elements is that I was trying to write in an ethical way while feeling like a professional liar.
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Sustaining our Creative Practice: An Interview with May-lee Chai
Writing is what sustains me and gets me through. It’s the one place where we have control, and even if terrible things happen, it’s not someone else making the terrible things happen.
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Knowledge alters things forever: A conversation with Anuradha Roy
. . . it was clear in my head that the dog in the book would not die, that he would bring people together, and also function as a kind of barometer for good and evil because, in my experience, that is how dogs are.
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If You’re Bengali, Food is the Center of Everything: An Interview with Madhushree Ghosh
But food is not just a tool for memory, but also important in terms of social justice issues which Indian Americans don’t talk about because we are the model minority. We don’t want to get in trouble.
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A General Truth Through a Particular Lie: An Interview with the Creators of the Podcast Penknife
I personally find this myth of authenticity extremely insidious and damaging, because it often leads to purity tests and the constant need to prove one’s cred . . . rather than leading to constructive thought and action—
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Make something inexplicable happen: An Interview with Morgan Talty
What’s funnier than somebody having a mental breakdown? We all experienced it, so why can’t we laugh at that?
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Form as a Metaphor for Fatness: A Conversation with Stephanie Rogers
Is it ridiculous to say don’t give up? Because I mean it.
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Poetry, Performance and the Little Black Dress: An Interview with Michael Chang
A conversation with Michael Chang, “the bad boy of poetry.”
...moreSound & Vision: Brendan Toller
Allyson McCabe talks with Brendan Toller about his love of vinyl records, buying music in local stores, and his latest documentary film Danny Says, an examination of publicist and manager Danny Fields.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview With Alejandro Zambra
Alejandro Zambra discusses his latest book, Multiple Choice, inspired by the Chilean exam administered to students seeking college admission
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The Rumpus interview with Stuart Dybek
Stuart Dybek discusses the forthcoming The Best Small Fictions 2016, the invisibility of anecdote, and why the art of transition is the art of the short story.
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