ENOUGH: He Could Kill Me
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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Posts Tagged: shame
(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Brighde Moffat
If there is going to be pain, let it be by choice.
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The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
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House Rules: Lessons in Autofiction
You try to pass yourself off as a rock and the water just laughs. You try anyway.
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Unsettled Terrain: Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
If shame works by convincing us that we are bad, by pinning us into a definition of badness, then the poems in Rummage resist by refusing to be pinned at all.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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I Thought You Were Different
I don’t tell him that just because I happen to be black and he happens to be dating me means that there’s no chance that he could be a racist. I am not a pass.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
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Mixed Feelings: Am I Too Fat For Love?
We don’t like to think that love traffics in the same biases that shape our culture—but of course it does.
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Those Freemartin Girls
Meeting that freemartin was a revelation for me: justification for my off-gender mannerisms and body, another creature bridging the space between male and female.
...moreThe Kids Are Alright (and Their Music Is, Too)
Guitar music is alive and well in South London.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Earthworms
In one dream, I was naked and they crawled inside my belly button. I felt them wiggling inside my stomach. When I woke up, the place between my legs was damp.
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TORCH: Twitch
America: land where anything can and does happen. Doors blow open by magic when you step on a rubber mat.
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The Tongue Goes
“In a nutshell,” he said, “they’re going to excise a dime-sized piece of your tongue and replace it with muscle and tendons from your left wrist.”
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ENOUGH: The Conversation Is Just Beginning
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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Horses and Dyslexia
I often feel as if there is something just beyond my reach, as if I had another set of eyes, and if I could only open them I could see all the things I needed to see.
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It’s Never Too Late to Be Found: A Conversation with Rene Denfeld
Rene Denfeld discusses her latest book, The Child Finder, the ways in which trauma traps us, and the important role of imagination in finding resilience and escape.
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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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Beautiful Liar
I tell myself that all I need is practice and maybe much better shorts. I wonder: when did I become such a beautiful liar? Walk, walk, walk, and fly.
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
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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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #87: Kai Cheng Thom
Rarely is birth silent for anyone involved. Silence, instead, is a learned phenomena. Unlearning silence can become its own birth, as it seems in Kai Cheng Thom’s debut poetry collection a place called No Homeland, opening with, “diaspora babies, we are born of pregnant pauses.” Pausing for readers to meet her at this natal location […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cost of Intimacy
Chasing intimacy can feel cheap—and yet intimacy we pay for can be meaningful. I find traditional therapy as awkward as sex, exposing my emotional self like I expose my body.
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Written in Chalk: What It Means to Be Crazy
As truth becomes more elusive, as fact blends with fiction, we ought to take notice of how we categorize people, as categorization seems to be married to suppression, to disenfranchisement.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #22: Poverty Is Never “Genteel”
Poverty may have been beloved of St. Francis, but not so much by the rest of us. Nobody likes to look at advanced poverty, toothless and drooling, clutching the hands of children who have running sores on their filthy legs. Poverty is a crackhead who pisses on the pavement, and sleeps with fleas and stray […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr discusses his memoir Sirens, writing for his daughter, and why he values art that trusts its audience.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
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 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.
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What I’ll Tell My Children: On Being ‘F***Able’ under the Regime of President-elect
It’s time to take responsibility for compliancy.
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The Rumpus Review of The Light Between Oceans
I wanted so badly to invest in the characters, to cry and feel their pain, but I felt detached.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Trouble in Mind
I wasn’t blue always; my campus rape didn’t ruin my life. But at times I’ve found being a woman exhausting.
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