Notable Chicago: 3/30–4/5
Literary events and readings in and around Chicago this week!
...morePosts Tagged: Wendy Willis
Notable Portland: 2/15–2/21
Literary events and readings in and around Portland this week!
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Stitching America Back Together: A Long Late Pledge by Wendy Willis
It is late for our country. We must look back in dialogue with the founders, examine a patched-together country, an embattled flag, and consider how to stop floundering.
...moreThis Week in Essays
Oh, the simple pleasures of life before the Internet. Emma Rathbone hilariously takes us back to that arguably better time over for New Yorker. At JSTOR Daily, M. Milks comes to claim their queer identity thanks to the most radical of groups: book club. Gloria Harrison’s life splits in two after a terrible accident, and she attempts […]
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Peeping under the Goddamn Door: The Price of Empathy in S-Town
[F]or the first time, I really see the tradeoffs between privacy and honest-to-god, up-close empathy.
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Reckoning with the Bros: Trump, Bly, and Swimming in the Sea of Grief
There are dark forces roiling beneath the surface of American life.
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I Hear the Place That Can’t Be Named
It is remembering and loving anyway—not forgetting—that binds us even if the recollections are absurd, undignified, cruel, or humiliating.
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Eat Your Peas
Having some novelist (or poet or playwright) assert an individual consciousness—in and of itself— is a profoundly threatening act if you’re a dictator.
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Where Are the Trees Going? by Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Wendy Willis reviews Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Where Are the Trees Going?” today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, in the Saturday Essay, Alana Hauser remembers the evil spirit from David Lynch’s eerie TV drama, Twin Peaks. The “parasitic” spirit, named Bob, is “a frightening reflection on the pervasive reality of male violence.” Hauser looks to the shocking ruthlessness of Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill for a feminist reply to Bob’s personification of male […]
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Pictograph by Melissa Kwasny
Wendy Willis reviews Melissa Kwasny’s Pictograph today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Fate of the Writer: Shuttling Between Solitude and Engagement
I’d propose that we learn better ways of speaking up for and protecting that space, that valley; that we prescribe uselessness as a core nutrient, one we’d surely wilt without. That we write with very fierce love.
...moreNational Poetry Month Day 6: “Swim Lesson No. 3” by Wendy Willis
Swim Lesson No. 3 Syracuse, New York June 2012 I can’t find my bearings in this landlocked country, riverless and briny. Not waterless exactly but curveless and motionless, a chlorophyll kingdom. A viney
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