Hard-Earned, Essential Grace: Anaphora by Kevin Goodan
No elegy is an island and this elegy is no exception.
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Posts Tagged: suicide
A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
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A Real Good Guy
Doesn’t murder exclude a person from being described as “a good guy”?
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Worth the Chuckles and Tears: Calypso by David Sedaris
Part of the magic of David Sedaris’s work stems from the simple truth that you really can’t laugh heartily until you’re hurting deeply.
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On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
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The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #131: Lisa Wells
“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
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Messy and Complicated and Real: Talking with Laura Pritchett
Author Laura Pritchett discusses her two most recent books, death, sex, and being rural in modern America.
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In Defense of Sinead O’Connor
“Remember Sinead?” I asked. My mom nodded her head and shrugged.
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Guns or No Guns: Mental Health Crisis in Schools
I do the best I can to reach out to those I see isolated or disturbed, but I have to also be careful I don’t make myself a target.
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A Spirit Born into a Human Body: Talking with Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi discusses her debut novel, Freshwater, her public and private identities, and deciding when to translate culture for readers.
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The House of Fiction Has Many Rooms: Talking with Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez discusses her seventh novel, The Friend, her fondness for writing about animals, and the ways the literary world has changed.
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The Sleepwalking American Male
After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Rest
“I wasn’t scared about being personal. It’s an open dialogue to myself, to my sister, to my father.”
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Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell
Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Gayle Brandeis’s The Art of Misdiagnosis
After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. I am looking for clues, for evidence. Answers.
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Breaking Through: Gayle Brandeis Discusses The Art of Misdiagnosis
Gayle Brandeis discusses her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis, out today from Beacon Press.
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R.I.P.: Who Died in This House?
Death stigmatizes a property. I also believe that it stigmatizes a person.
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The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg
The stories [in THE TRUTH ABOUT ME], like Marburg herself, are insightful, witty, to the point, and told with her wonderfully dry sense of humor.
...moreWorking through Trauma
Danilova says the act of making the album helped her to work through this shared existential trauma.
...more#SuicideGirls: Why I Teach Sylvia Plath
But let’s not forget: feminism is, at least in part, about choice, and portions of life are play, not politics. Play and relationships and creativity and whatever we want.
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Peeping under the Goddamn Door: The Price of Empathy in S-Town
[F]or the first time, I really see the tradeoffs between privacy and honest-to-god, up-close empathy.
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Albums of Our Lives: As Cities Burn’s Come Now Sleep
Most often, I do not speak when I am alone. That morning I sat on the couch and said Oh my God. I said it aloud, again and again, Oh my God.
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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 #25: Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Success?
In America, everybody, it seems, wants to be a success. Me, too. Recently, I confided to a family member that sometimes, in moments of deep despair (fortunately they are fairly uncommon), I find myself contemplating suicide as the most sensible retirement plan. The road ahead, paved with potholes and poverty, sometimes doesn’t look all that […]
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Voices on Addiction: Dynamite
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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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
Bite that apple, open that jar at your own risk and see how your garden grows, how hopeful you remain. Paradise is, after all, blissful self-ignorance.
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