sexual abuse
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Fairy Tales, Trauma, Writing into Dissociation
Our bodies are incredible and intelligent things.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Amber Dawn
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Leaving Deficit
Feathers are a gift and flexible protein. Mom put down tobacco and ran her fingers over its exposed parts. She told me the salmon run is coming and this bird would have wanted for nothing.
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Narrowly Avoiding the Spotlight
It took me nearly twenty years and the power of a fine film to fully realize what happened to me in the confessional was an inappropriate act by an adult against a child.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Zoe Zolbrod
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Zoe Zolbrod about her new book The Telling, pushing against victim narratives, how the conversation surrounding sexual abuse has evolved, and the melding of research with memoir.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jennifer Whitaker
Jennifer Whitaker discusses her new collection The Blue Hour, persona poems, the violence in fairy tales, and writing about sexual abuse.
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The Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer
To refuse to disappear at mid-life—I am forty-two as of the writing of this essay—is perhaps the best rebellion a woman poet can make to the literary world and to the world at large.
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In Plain Sight: The Vanishing of Ellen Bass
Putting her experiences into a broader context, [Bass] now saw, was essential to “creating openings for readers to enter her poems and for the poems to enter her readers.”
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Laurie Jean Cannady
The author of the new memoir Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul talks about growing up impoverished, abused, and in love with words.
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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.

