How to Watch While Being Watched: Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis
The experience, rather than linear, is borealian.
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Posts Tagged: travel writing
Language as a Kind of Home: Talking with Anne Liu Kellor
Anne Liu Kellor discusses her debut memoir, HEART RADICAL.
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Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan
Suchitra Vijayan discusses her new book, MIDNIGHT’S BORDERS.
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Reading the Landscape of the Past: Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest
Learning to read a landscape can reveal a deep history.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #232: Mary Morris
“To really write, I need to hold a pen.”
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What It Means to Be a Human: Talking with Maggie Downs
Maggie Downs discusses her debut memoir, BRAVER THAN YOU THINK.
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Abstracting Yourself: A Conversation with Robin Hemley
Robin Hemley discusses his new essay collection, BORDERLINE CITIZEN.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #140: Alicia Kopf
“We need narrative patterns to understand reality.”
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Souvenirs and Slaying Dragons: A Conversation with Rolf Potts
Rolff Potts discusses his new book, Souvenir, the mythological element of souvenir collecting, and the inevitability of mortality.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Faith Adiele
Faith Adiele discusses what it means to be a good literary citizen, the importance of decolonizing travel writing, and how she wants to change the way Black stories are being told.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #73: Maggie Shipstead
I first met Maggie Shipstead in 2011 when she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She had not yet published her first novel, Seating Arrangements, which would later become a New York Times bestseller, but even then the magnitude of her ambition, shrewdness, and intellectual generosity was evident. After her first book debuted in […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Abeer Hoque
Abeer Hoque talks about coming of age in the predominantly white suburbs of Pittsburgh, rewriting her memoir manuscript ten times, and looking for poetry in prose.
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The Read Along: Christina Nichol
Christina Nichol, author of Waiting for the Electricity, takes a deep dive into Korean literature and catches up on some classics of anthropology and psychology.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
...moreTravel Writing as Artifact
At the Public Domain Review, Nandini Das revisits The Principle Navigations and argues that the massive folio of travel writings compiled by Richard Hakluyt in 1589 is more than an artifact of British colonialism. It also memorializes, “the elusive traces of those who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of […]
...moreThe Sights and Sounds of Delhi
In a wonderful piece at Electric Literature, Amy Yee gives a full taste of life in Delhi, India. She follows author Akhil Sharma, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner and recent recipient of the International Dublin Literary Award, as he reconnects with family and visits the house where he grew up. It’s both profile piece and travel […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
...moreBraving the Cold
As both a storyteller and a stylist, Braverman is remarkably skilled, with a keen sense of visceral detail … that borders on sublime. Over at the New York Times, Bronwen Dickey has written a powerful review of Blair Braverman’s debut book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, a memoir about her experience living in Norway […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Blair Braverman
Blair Braverman discusses her latest book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, gendered travel narratives, and the pressure to write about personal trauma.
...moreAntigua through the Eyes of Jamaica Kincaid
Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid has often made the island a centerpiece of her writing. New York Times travel editor Monica Drake recounts visiting Antigua alongside Kincaid’s words—an alternative to the dominant, colonialist narrative around the island: The tension that we’d accumulated in our daily lives seemed to float into the distance. We could have stayed […]
...moreA Quiet Corner of the World
At the New York Times, Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., writes about how a national park in Montana left an indelible mark on her and her marriage: We were both intoxicated by the place, not only by its beauty but by the feeling of remoteness that is as much psychological […]
...moreRecollections of Home
The woman looked at me when she finished reading, smiling, expecting me to compliment her English. But I couldn’t speak, moved beyond words by a sense of homecoming in this place so far from home. Over at Travel + Leisure, writer Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You, recalls a fortuitous meeting with an […]
...moreHave Fish, Will Travel
Italian novelist, essayist, and scholar Umberto Ecco passed away last Friday. The Paris Review has republished an essay by Ecco that originally appeared in its pages back in 1994. “Traveling with a Salmon” is about traveling with a salmon, but also about communication: My recent journey was brief: one day in Stockholm and three in London. In […]
...moreA Neapolitan Adventure
As I discovered during a visit in September, the series of books offered a unique view of this complicated city, leading me away from popular tourist sites and helping to explain the city’s social, economic and geographic divisions. To view the Naples of Ms. Ferrante is to view Naples like a native. Can’t get enough […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks allows us a peek into psychological disorders of the animal kingdom, the most elite bars in the world, and more in “Just Some Jokes.” Then, in the Saturday Interview, our own Arielle Bernstein talks with blogger Josie Pickens about identity, gender, race, and class politics. The “uplifting” influence of readers on social media provides […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kevin Oderman
Traveling abroad, of course, the world insists, asks, Where are you from?
...moreTravel Writer’s Burden
In a thoughtful essay for Boston Review, Jessa Crispin reflects on the gender dynamics of travel writing, and the genre’s penchant for a colonial mentality that persists in today’s narratives: Any travel writer who deviates from gender-defined roles risks being overlooked. And that is a shame because we do not need men to explain the […]
...moreThe Secrets of Paris
To form secrets with a city is to treat it like a lover, to imagine you know it better than anyone, but to still expect it to surprise you for years to come. It is the secret to all rewarding travel and to inspired living. In “Re-defining Travel, Re-experiencing Paris,” Los Angeles Review of Books […]
...moreLiterary Tripping
All of which adds up to a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words. And though the list of Louisiana writers — both homegrown […]
...moreWay Back When
In the middle of a digression on the bar scene in Kansas, Edmund White took a moment to question its authenticity: Sometimes gay friends my age or older ask me if I ever miss the good-bad old days before gay liberation. Surely, they suggest, it was more fun in the Fifties when you had to sneak around […]
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