writing
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Elitist White People Trying To Make Themselves Feel Better
(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 be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains…
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VIDA Counts The Rumpus
Two female writers from VIDA: Women in Literary Arts crunch the numbers and let us know how The Rumpus is doing in the gender disparity department.
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Let Us Now Raze Famous Men
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 life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it…
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Shalom Auslander
As someone who was raised with reform Judaism, my negative experiences with religion pale next to Auslander’s.
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Love in the Time of Terror Babies
“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 program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said,…
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Who Do You Write Like?
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 Write Like just for fun; the page analyzes your word…
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A Conversation with Shya Scanlon
“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 wonder, but most of the time I write to escape…
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A Dog Is Barking Everywhere
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 today I discovered that “a distant barking dog” appears in…
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I Have Written The Most Important Fictional Novel On Earth
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 a privilege that not everybody can do, or even should…
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Demanding a Degree of Strangeness
“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 the page and, like a magician, plucks out of the…
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“The reader is always doing you a favor.”
The Daily Rumpus is an email Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott writes and sends out anywhere from two to five times a week. Most of them are not posted online, but subscribing is free. Just send an email here. This is…