You’ll look back and you’ll think the scars seem almost invisible, like maybe they’ll be gone one day. But then you’ll realize you’re just looking at the smaller ones, and yes, the bigger one is still right there.
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Elizabeth Gonzalez James discusses her debut novel, MONA AT SEA.
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“Yes: in terms of an authorial presence, I tried to tread lightly.”
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Hurting heightened everything, both within and without it.
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Elizabeth Gonzalez James discusses her debut novel, MONA AT SEA.
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I lived there, suspended in the moment before I chose to move.
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When was the first time you remember seeing yourself in a book you were reading?
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Patsy’s imagined freedom in America, she discovers almost immediately, was an illusion.
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Greg Mania discusses his debut memoir, BORN TO BE PUBLIC.
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All your efforts and still you must reckon with this end.
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Light reflects differently off near and faraway objects. It’s all about the light.
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The world that suffocates girls still has a lot to learn from them.
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This is what I think of when I think of home; Africa is my altar.
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I remember driving a bird mad once.
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Always present and never heard, like the pain I feel but don’t know how to share.
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Do I have a public self that is separate from my private self? I’m not so certain about that.
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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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I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
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Jenny Valentish discusses her memoir, WOMEN OF SUBSTANCES.
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So I said nothing. To protect you, and to protect myself.
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Maybe you were whistling before you could talk, too.
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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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[W]e wanted something different from each other’s bodies than what was actually there, which might be why our bodies sometimes came together.
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Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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“No one knows how to handle it,” I tell her, but I can see she’s angry and I’m speaking into the wind.
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The world is a merry-go-round, a sawed-off shotgun, a ticker tape. There’s no struggle now. There’s only darkness, breathlessness, exit—
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Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.
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The strings of our DNA mark us as one, but it’s the roots of our memories that bind us.
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