Why Write
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WHERE I WRITE #1: Hotels, Highways, Hotspots, Haiti
If I were independently wealthy, I would be less for it, because the chase for money to pay for food, shelter, babies, and now small children has taken me from sharing with two women an eighty square foot octagonal house…
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Febos and Marcus on Memiorville
In this conversation, Melissa Febos makes a good point: What’s great about writers talking with writers is that they talk about writing.
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Lorrie Moore at The New Yorker Festival
Notes I took on what Lorrie Moore said while in conversation with Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker‘s fiction editor, that I felt selfish keeping to myself: How to become a writer: -You can’t carve solitude out of loneliness–you need people…
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On Blowing My Load: Thoughts from Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” – Flannery O’Connor
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DIY Publishing & Marketing Seminar In San Francisco
On August 23rd, 826 Valencia in San Francisco is hosting their second Adult Writers’ Seminar from 7-9 pm. This seminar focuses on DIY Publishing and Marketing. The panelists are a full slate of Rumpus-friendly folk:
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THE BLURB #18: The Long Haul
Though I have doubted my talent, I’ve never doubted my conviction that this was the path I had to be on. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I…
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Write to Get Paid
“I really believe that most writers in America have taken on this idea that we’re never going to get paid–and so we accept so little for what we do, when what we do is so valuable. And it’s wanted.” —Ali…
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Henry Miller in Lotos Land: Paint as You Like, and Die Happy
Thinking back on his first stay in Hollywood, Miller often reminisced about the Green House, “where I made so many watercolors, sold them for a song or for an umbrella I had no use for, but where I also made…
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert McKee
Robert McKee is best known to the world in two ways: as the guy who teaches the popular STORY seminar in Los Angeles and around the world to would-be screenwriters, and as the character in the film Adaptation who teaches…
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Sigrid Nunez Remembers Susan Sontag
Here’s some weekend reading: Sigrid Nunez has written a beautiful memoir of Susan Sontag in the latest issue of Tin House. (The text is not available online, but I highly recommend you pick up this issue of Tin House: it’s…
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Listen to Metal on Metal and Everything Will Be Okay
Just because you don’t succeed the way others define success, you’re not a failure. You just chose to take a different path. And who’s to say that’s wrong? I just finished watching Anvil! The Story of Anvil.
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The Scholars and the Pornographer
Dame Helen Gardner and George Newton Bowlin Laws—it seems funny, but very good to me to see them in the same sentence. I first saw Helen Gardner, brilliant scholar, denizen of Oxford University, later to be made a Dame on her…