rumpus interviews
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The Correlation Between Love and Essay-Writing: An Interview with Jill Christman
Practicing deep curiosity and close observation is fundamental to writing essays. We need only to look at our small children to teach us these lessons.
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Accommodations are not accessibility: An interview with Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Being disabled in higher education takes a psychic toll, whether you are faculty or a student. Yet most institutions do the bare minimum to remain “compliant” with the law rather than doing the work to make their spaces accessible and…
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A void that migrates to the surface: An Interview with Juliet Patterson
That was my singular personal motivation for doing any of this work: to prevent the threat that this might happen to me. I naïvely believed that my parents would not die by their own hand because they had suffered as…
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The Dream Does What It Wants: Talking with David Santos Donaldson
. . . I advise any fiction writer who can afford it, to an get a Jungian analyst . . .
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We Should Be Embarrassed by Most Things: An Interview with Leyna Krow
I think that is the dream—to have such a strong voice that people know your work as your work.
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I Am No One’s Graveyard: An Interview With No‘u Revilla
Sometimes a poem is a rock, and sometimes rocks turn into flowers. And no matter how many poems I write about aloha and decolonial futures, they may still try to kill me
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When Silences Need to Be Broken: Talking with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Language is inexact, and will always be an approximation. In my own experience of amnesia, there was a period of time where things didn’t have names, and it was in that nameless, getting-to-know-something that I felt I knew it better.
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If You Eat It, It Becomes Authentic: A Conversation About Red Sauce with Ian MacAllen
There is this moment where you must first cut yourself off from doing more research because that rabbit trail goes on forever in some cases . . . You have to ask yourself, “Do I have enough?”
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Life has a way of taking that out of you: A conversation with Tom Perrotta
. . . the novel exists as a form because it allows you to see both the character’s thoughts and the character’s actions, and they rarely line up.
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Accessing the Sublime: An Interview with Dalia Azim
Creating a site-specific installation in the middle of nowhere is somewhat akin to writing a novel—who knows if an audience will ever find their way to it.
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Making Magic in New York City: A Conversation with Emma Straub
I’m trying to move into my Ina Garten years. Hydrangeas. Cocktails. Let’s see if I can fall into that sometime this decade. Want to come?
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The Present in Its Most Vivid Colors: A Conversation with Ben Shattuck
What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?