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.
...more
Posts Tagged: the empathy exams
Strong Island’s Horizon
Whose lives are visible? Whose pain is just? Whose grief is vocal? Such inquiry is not rhetorical.
...more
Going Off-Script: A Conversation with Mandy Len Catron
Mandy Len Catron discusses How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays, what makes for a thoughtful love story, and the politics of love.
...more
What to Read When You Want to Feel Thankful
Kick off the holiday season with a list of books that Rumpus editors are thankful for!
...more
What to Read When Everyone Is Talking about Healthcare
Here’s a list of wonderful books that look at physical and mental health from many different perspectives. By the time we read through the entire list, maybe Congress will have come to their senses.
...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.
...moreMeasuring Emotion
At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA program: “I hated this sort of smug assumption that we all knew what was bad.” […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Hepola
Editor and writer Sarah Hepola talks about her new memoir Blackout, how gender affects alcoholism, writing about female friendships, and the writers who’ve influenced her.
...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.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider puts us in the right frame of mind and Steven Kraan personifies Sunday. In the Bay of Fundy, between Maine’s northeast coast and the western shores of Nova Scotia, lies an island called Grand Manan, whose windswept landscape serves as a source of inspiration and meditation for Alison Hawthorne Deming. Lobsters are […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Jamison
In which we discuss Frozen, Taylor Swift, the limits of empathy, the problem of happiness, and why we listen to sad songs over and over.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with M.E. Thomas
M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, discusses writing a memoir, being a lawyer and a Mormon, the unreliability of memory—and, of course, being a high-functioning sociopath.
...moreThe Cover Design Exams
A heart, the source of empathy, or at least what we use as a visual for love, was an initial starting point. As a nod to the medical part of the essay, a graphic illustration of a heart is used. Kimberly Glyder was responsible for designing the cover of Leslie Jamison‘s essay collection, The Empathy Exams. […]
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Leslie Jamison
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Leslie Jamison about The Empathy Exams, vulnerability, creating hybrid nonfiction, and the benefits of working with an indie press like Graywolf.
...more“Yes. Of course. But yet. Anyway.”
Harper’s Magazine interviews Leslie Jamison about her debut, home-run collection of essays, The Empathy Exams: Essays. On the complications (and yet! necessity) of empathy, Jamison writes: So there’s a lot of danger attached to empathy: it might be self-serving or self-absorbed; it might lead our moral reasoning astray, or supplant moral reasoning entirely. (See this fantastic piece by Paul Bloom […]
...more
HORN! REVIEWS: The Empathy Exams
Trails of grief and confinement, environmental trauma, and systemized suffering…
...more