(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to…
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts): 1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his…
“My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science…
You read last week in The Rumpus about the new “statistical analysis tool” that tells you who you write like. Coding Robots, a group of software developers, seemingly created I…
“I’m pretty much a maintenance addict at this point. If I don’t write, I feel useless and pathetic. That’s not to say I don’t experience occasional bursts of joy or…
Foghorns show up in much of my writing, but that’s because I cultivate a disingenuously melancholy disposition that my actual life, full of hilarity and good-natured insults, completely belies. But…
I feel bad for most writers who want to get published or make money from their writing, including myself. But I never feel that bad — after all, writing is…
“It might be your own past, or even just the tomb of someone you’d forgotten and who, awakened from the deep slumber of oblivion, comes to life and steps onto…