Rumpus Original Fiction: New Build
“What do we do about the new build?” I ask. “Do we finish it? Sell it? Finish it, then sell it?”
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Join NOW!“What do we do about the new build?” I ask. “Do we finish it? Sell it? Finish it, then sell it?”
...moreAppearance aside, my boss took his work seriously.
...moreI used to be able to teach sex without thinking about sex.
...moreA week before our reception, three days married, I beckon Peter to come listen to the song I’ve chosen for our first dance.
...moreTo be a woman in this world is to be adopted by other women.
...moreUltimately, this is a story in which redemption is not a possibility.
...moreThis is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
...moreI know lots of people/the international press is making a huge deal out of everything, but it’s still just me, your girl Meghan, and my fiancé, His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales.
...moreI’m writing about the border through the eyes of children because the border is a problem of the imagination.
...moreEach bug in the water is one less bug on my fruit, I tell myself, ignoring the truth: under the soil, another is born.
...moreMy uncle and I had shared many silences together and, in those silences, I felt as if we knew each other.
...moreI’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve ventured beyond what I came to see. The end of the road, the limitless sky—I still haven’t found our prairie.
...moreCharacters like Mary and Rhoda hadn’t been turned into stereotypes of single women in their thirties or career women or divorcees. They couldn’t be: they were the first.
...moreJason Diamond discusses his memoir Searching for John Hughes, confronting his childhood abuse, avoiding his parents, and writing about all of it.
...moreTime is king. Believers, agnostics or atheists—humans or not: time rules us. We submit to it, surrender to it, and are shaped by it.
...moreIn her voice, I am held, cradled even. I am equal parts longing and hope. I am home.
...moreFor The Hairpin, Ella Riley-Adams delves into the phenomenon of the wedding hashtag, and the ways we control and shape the narrative around crucial life milestones.
...moreIf you follow the script, people will judge you as having a genuine Japanese heart.
...moreAlia Volz’s artist, expat mom needed to leave Mexico and go back to the United States for a heavy-duty chemo treatment, which meant it was time for a mother-daugther road trip.
...moreAny Nigerian will tell you that a woman without a husband is nothing.
...moreOf course, it’s not only parents who teach us about gender roles. Sometimes it feels like we’re absorbing them with our first gasps from the womb.
...moreWe suffer, after all, not because of the ways we speak, but because of the ways we exclude ourselves with internalized external narratives about how different we feel from others.
...moreLindy West on what it was like being a fat bride, and the public politics of private acts: But “beauty” is a fraught concept. There’s an awkward three-way tension between wedding culture and feminism and fat acceptance – because of what “acceptance” demands of women in our culture, a lot of fat activism takes the […]
...moreThe pomp and ceremony of events like weddings and anniversaries often require writers to write, whether it’s a gifted poem or the script of a wedding ceremony. Novelist and ordained Universal Life Church minister Kim Triedman explores the difficulties of writing for special occasions at Beyond the Margins: In trying to accommodate what I saw […]
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