rumpus interviews
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The Fragile Ecology of Teenage Boyhood in Shy: A Conversation with Max Porter
We have to be urgent and radical in our belief that some solutions exist . . .
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Very Little of This Book Is Made-up: Talking with R.F. Kuang about her Novel
I don’t think there are easy answers. Should we make judgments about rudeness when we talk about artistic freedom?
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Broadening the Scope of the Environmental Canon: An Interview with Camille T. Dungy
Some books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from any genre. Is it memoir or environmental literature?The book covers…
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the strange, the surprising, the slightly off-center: A Rumpus Conversation with J. Bailey Hutchinson
part of my fixation with textured and torqued language . . . stems from growing up in the South, where figurative language isn’t limited to formal literary spaces.
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The Poem is Second, Living is First: An Interview with Tim Z. Hernandez
Above everything else, people come first.
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I Freed Myself from Needing to Make Sense: A Conversation with Leila Chatti
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so…
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Loving the questions: Religion and poetry with Jennifer Michael Hecht
Thinking in terms of the poetry of your life is about noticing that you are one of the sentient beings in a universe with billions of galaxies, and your experience is the universe knowing itself and it is weird and…
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Strength and Feeling in Motion: A conversation with Henri Cole about Gravity and Center
Horses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I…
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A reflection on reflection: An interview with Katherine Indermaur
I did some research on how the vertical slash was used in different contexts, and fell in love with the Sheffer stroke.
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Migration and return: De’Shawn Charles Winslow on going back to West Mills
I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to…
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This Is All the Time We Get: A Conversation with Felicia Chiao
I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
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All the World is a K-Drama: A Conversation with Matthew Salesses
I wanted to be able to frame the story within this understanding that these are powerful forces and that these are stories we’ve heard a lot before, and that these stories get in the way of, or make it hard…