From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Even the Moon
When you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
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Posts Tagged: secrets
Trauma as Inheritance: Adam P. Frankel’s The Survivors
The survivor is left to ponder whom he has become.
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Everything Tastes Better in Winter
Perfection over pasta. Beauty over bread. The more it hurt, the better.
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Food, Family, and Strong Female Characters: A Conversation with J. Ryan Stradal
J. Ryan Stradal discusses his new novel, THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #180: De’Shawn Charles Winslow
“Everyone, to varying degrees, is in everyone’s business and life.”
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The Internal and the External: A Conversation with Wendy Willis
Wendy Willis discusses her new essay collection, THESE ARE STRANGE TIMES, MY DEAR.
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The Inward Place: A Conversation with Claudia Dey
Claudia Dey discusses her first American release, HEARTBREAKER.
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The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Last Civilized House” by Lee Martin
Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife and a child that the wife decided she didn’t want.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Brighde Moffat
If there is going to be pain, let it be by choice.
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ENOUGH: Because Women Bear the Whole Wet World
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: One of Them Dies
We seldom forget when people promise to give us something, whether we need or want that thing or not. I promise you death, you want a death.
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The Narrator-Guide: A Conversation with Sharon Harrigan
Sharon Harrigan discusses her memoir, Playing with Dynamite, writing through the gaps in memory, and how the book has changed real-life relationships.
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The Gate of Permission: A Conversation with Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel discusses her newest novel, Before Everything, living through and beyond grief, and why she loves secrets.
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses Abandon Me, confessional writing, Billie Holiday, reenacting trauma, cataloguing narratives, and searching for identity.
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Sound over Water
We tell the stories to fit the narrative we need. But within each story we must maintain the grain of truth that will provide the urgency.
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The Alienation of an Irish Abortion
Was it a dream? A nightmare? I felt like I’d been sold a lie. There was no husband or caring partner, no safe home or solid income. Just me, pregnant and alone, in an abortion clinic with my rapist.
...moreThe Story of A New Name
Earlier this week, Aaron Brady wrote presciently in his column for The New Inquiry about the ethical implications of revealing Elena Ferrante’s identity. He pointed out that in searching for her “real” identity, reporters were forgetting that one of the greatest things about Elena Ferrante is her fictions, and that at the heart of it, they are still […]
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Boy of My Youth
In my desperate attempts to keep my secret I learned to shut everyone out, to become as closed as a fist.
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Keeping Secrets from the Stupid
I was four years old when my mother taught me to lie. There were certain instances, she explained, when lying was acceptable, when it wasn’t even lying, really.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Bruce Owens Grimm
The more secrets I wrote about, the fewer I wanted to keep. And the more secrets I made public through my writing, the more I gained.
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The Rumpus Interview with Rob Roberge
Rob Roberge talks about his new memoir, Liar, the differences between writing fiction and writing memoir, and why every narrator is an unreliable narrator.
...moreKeep Your Secrets
For Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes on the importance of secrets in a person’s individual development. In addition to psychological and sociological research, Jenkins traces the vital role secrets and secret-keeping plays in classical children’s literature.
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Shark’s Teeth
My kink used to be my Deepest Darkest secret, and now it is an integrated part of my everyday life.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Karrie Higgins
The more narratives that approach reality “differently” get treated as “insane” or “unreal,” the less readers are exposed to them, and the more “unreal” or “insane” they seem. It’s like a feedback loop.
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Bollen
Author Christopher Bollen talks about his sophomore novel, Orient, secrets and privacy, sexual orientation in fiction, and the lost art of the whodunit mystery.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
There’s a ray of nuclear longing at the center of Transparent…
...moreNever Left Behind
In an interview with Daniel Olivas for the Los Angeles Review of Books, debut novelist Natalia Sylvester talks about growing up in Peru, learning characters’ secrets, and what happens when you set aside a story for nearly six years. “Our pasts are never left behind,” she concludes ominously. Chasing the Sun has just been released […]
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Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone
Does it seem now like I believe in God and he is a comfort to me? I don’t, and he isn’t. And yet this story is a comfort to me.
...moreSecret Paintings Magically Appear in Old Books
If you haven’t yet seen these secret fore-edge paintings—paintings that appear on the side of the book opposite the spine when you squish the pages into a slanted line—they’re well worth a look. Both Flavorwire and io9 have posts with various photos, animations, and videos. Some of the paintings are thematically fitting (a depiction of […]
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