This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: tattoos
Tracing the Wolf
To brand myself with something I feared and sought to subdue seemed like a reclamation.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Hibiscus Tacos
It’d been a while since I’d spent time in a body.
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How to Name Dead Babies
Let’s not pretend first means there’s a good place to start.
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Drawing in Circles
Wondering is exhausting.
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Living, Breathing Art: A Conversation with Bradley Silver
Tattoo artist Bradley Silver discusses the political intersection of body art and street art, and more.
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How We Cycle through Our Lives: Talking with Chelsey Clammer
Chelsey Clammer discusses her new essay collection, Circadian, her writing process, and the body as text.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #94: David Burr Gerrard
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel The Epiphany Machine is one of the more ambitious books you’ll read this year, centering on a device that can reveal the epiphany of your life by tattooing the words onto your arm. “ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST” is just one example of the sort of permanent self-owns that get written […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Isaac Fitzgerald and Wendy MacNaughton
Isaac Fitzgerald and Wendy MacNaughton on their new book Knives & Ink, cooking with pigs’ heads, and long-distance collaboration.
...moreWritten in Ink
In a powerful essay at The Establishment, Evelyn Deshane discusses rejecting the medical narrative around transitioning, and how tattoos allowed them to reclaim their own body: When the physicality of my gender—that “place” that could be home—feels out of reach, tattoos are my way to be present in my body, and to control what happens to […]
...moreThe Next Bukowski of Tattooing?
Jonathan Shaw is a writer and tattoo artist who has inked just about everybody. He’s at the top of his game. Check out this podcast and find out more.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Do You Have a Beau?
Shame is the haunting that’s hardest to scrub away.
...moreAll Perspectives Are Personal
Sarah Galo interviewed Molly Crabapple for Guernica. They talked about race, violence, innocence, and narrative voice: Lately, I haven’t been putting myself into my work that much, because I’ve just found the stories of the people I’m talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them. But I also think that, for what I […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: All The Time Every Minute
I lost a best friend and that means something, but you cannot deny that to go on the grief has to stop killing you, eventually.
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What We Want Now
Near the end of my Disney tenure, I filched a Magic Music Days sign from the Epcot entrance and hands shaking, brought it to a tattoo artist.
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Waved Albatross
How do we make the good thoughts stay? Can we make them stay? It’s so hard to keep in mind the slivers of time that change our lives for the better.
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The Part of Stories One Never Quite Believes
And maybe that’s the ticket: grace. It was the year I expected harsh karma. But instead, I called my friends from the gutters of Hollywood and they picked me up. Every time.
...moreWriting the Invisible
The work of the writer has always been about making the invisible visible. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, talks to Salon about Ferguson and fear, selfies and tattoos, and what it means to be a writer in the modern world.
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The Last Book I Loved: Pen & Ink
I was so very tired of being judged and dismissed. The more others pressed their expectations upon me, the more I turned to tattooing to protest.
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Bring It On Home
A house is just a set design, and sometimes we run lines with ghosts.
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SELF-MADE MAN #28: The Lion, the Lamb, and the Grown Man
The story of the lion and the lamb is itself a blur, as illusory as these hands bare-knuckling a speed bag, faster and faster until all you see is blood and ink so bright it glows.
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Self-Made Man #27: Fool
I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
...moreArt as Ephemera?
David Ulin writes about Shelley Jackson’s new project at the Los Angeles Times. If you didn’t hear about her previous project, Skin, now is a good time to do so. Her new project is similar. The story is told one word at a time but written in the snow. Jackson makes that explicit by rendering […]
...moreLiterature in Your Skin
If you need a few minutes to break away from your day, why don’t you head on over to Tattoo Lit, where the word is made flesh. It is updated regularly with submissions of tattoos inspired by literature. Virginia Woolf, Shakespere, and even Shel Silverstein are represented.
...moreEd Hardy: Way Cooler than You Knew
Did you know Ed Hardy is not just a brand name, but an actual person? And that after becoming “the first Westerner to work with a traditional Japanese master” of tattoo art, he led the “current tattoo renaissance” with an emphasis on individualized expression rather than the mere copying of classic designs? For the LA Review […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Rage
“The heart is a fist, and he taught me to make mine hard.” Laura Bogart makes her Rumpus debut, exploring the link between rage, power and grief.
...morePen & Ink Seeking Submissions for Book
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a tattoo might be worth a book. If that sounds like the kind of book you’d like to read, good news: Pen & Ink, the blog about tattoos and the stories behind them by Rumpus compadres Isaac Fitzgerald and Wendy MacNaughton, is jumping from web pages to paper […]
...moreTao Lin Tells Tattoo Tale
If you didn’t already know, Rumpus co-owner Isaac Fitzgerald and Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton run a spiffy little blog called Pen & Ink, which documents “tattoos and the stories behind them.” Today, alt-lit luminary Tao Lin reveals the meaning behind his impulsively acquired wrist tattoo. We’ll just say this: any tattoo that addresses both existential anxiety and […]
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ALBUM #1, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Stephanie Tamez
Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work
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