suicide Archives - The Rumpus

From the Archive: The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation

I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope.

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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 children of parents who had already died that way.

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From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I Left My Heart in Taos

You might gasp. You might gasp and your heart slips out. You whisper and let red willows drift toward the river.

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Voices on Addiction: The Neighbor

I wanted to write about opioids because I didn’t have an opioid problem.

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A Childhood Story

My father didn’t like my movie choices. He said they weren’t realistic. He’d been in the Air Force and was deployed in Vietnam. He’d brought back his own war stories.

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