As a Matter of Fact
Why show the mundanity of your life when you can make it glitter?
...more
Posts Tagged: truth
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses her new book Abandon Me, choosing to be celibate for six months, letting go of our own mythologies, and the sexist reaction women receive when they write nonfiction.
...more
A Proof for Truth
Truth is perspective—a plane or a sphere—which makes it feel slippery. Truth is not absolute in the ways that we want it to be.
...more
The Mirror’s Shards
In the face of colossal and destructive political lies, we need a more nuanced understanding of the world than simply truth versus lie.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, discusses oppression, objectivity in journalism, and millennial politics.
...more
There Is No Such Thing as a True Story
Perspective is a fickle beast, and memory is an unreliable traveling companion through the years.
...moreNecessity of Truth
Over at Book Riot, Hannah Engler discusses memoir, when the absolute truth is necessary, and why it is okay—even unavoidable—to fabricate facts: Fabrication is inherent in memoir writing. Number one, it’s impossible to have an unbiased view of your own life, period; number two, it’s impossible to write about something in the past tense and not […]
...more
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #19: Truth
Truth—a higher, bigger truth—is what I want when I read. I want to nod my head in radical understanding. I want to grasp our complex, fragile humanity better. I want the ancient truths on every page, shown in unique ways. These books deliver. Not a false note in any one of them.
...moreTruth or Consequences
I was a kid. In many ways, I’m still a kid, trapped in the extended adolescence of the post-irony, post-sincerity millennial era; I came of age in America under the Bush Administration, a world where words, masquerading as truths, became tools for war. Fictions posing as nonfictions created disaster. Why would I even want to […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Mary Karr
Mary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
...more“Who the Hell Cares About Anne Sexton’s Grandmother?”
When we read a piece of fiction, we don’t assume—or at least we know we’re not supposed to assume—it’s a faithful recreation of an event in the author’s life. But what about when we read a poem? For Poetry, Kathleen Rooney writes about realizing Brian Russell’s poems about a wife’s terminal illness were not actually about the […]
...more“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she was done, and the Q&A started, the first question was: “Miss Atwood, how did you […]
...moreQuestioning Truth in Photos
Errol Morris, the truth-seeker/director of the documentary The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War is once again having us question the facts. His collection of essays, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) considers our undiscerning trust in photos, though their reliability is as questionable as any story-telling medium. In his […]
...more