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I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You
He wears a Greek fisherman’s cap, the kind John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie wore, and though you don’t know him, it suits him. He’s a salt-of-the-earth type entertainer, a people-meeter, friend-maker,...
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A Travel Guide to the City of Ghosts
Accommodations “What do you mean the inn’s haunted?” my wife Meredith asks as we peer up at the structure before us. What I mean is that the 17Hundred90 Inn—one of Savannah, Georgia’s oldest inns, as...
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Building the Muscle: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
When Kristi Coulter self-published an essay on Medium in July 2016, she was a high-ranking Amazon exec who’d earned an MFA in fiction years earlier and had since written essays. Writing wasn’t her day...
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The Promise of a Shampoo Bottle
Alba Honey Mango Bath and Shower Gel You’ll have no trouble hopping out of bed with this tropical treasure waiting in the shower. Packed with pure botanical emollients, our replenishing bath gel...
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Facing a Lived Reality: A Conversation with Kelly Sundberg
I started reading Kelly Sundberg’s personal essays in 2014, when her essay, “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” was published in Guernica. I was amazed by the way she used precise, evocative language to...
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People You May Know
In a 300 x 300 pixel square, a metal mask covered with what looked like the pelt of a small mammal—perhaps a mink—stared back at me. The animal’s face and teeth were preserved, wide-eyed, crazed. The...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Any Good Wife
Ping looked up from his papers to watch Airong in the kitchen. She cracked an egg into the bowl with one hand. Her apron was bright blue with a tea cup print, white buttons where the straps around her...
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The Inward Place: A Conversation with Claudia Dey
I spoke on the phone from San Diego with novelist, playwright, and clothing designer Claudia Dey while she was in her Toronto study on the top floor of an old house in the West End. Her husband, a...
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
Kristi Coulter is funny and reflective, frank and feminist, the kind of friend you meet at a donut shop for coffee because you are both sober, and instantly start telling your secrets, your stories....
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Babysitter
For my daughter Stella’s first birthday, we got her a babysitter. We decided to celebrate without her because we’d attended several first birthday parties and the format didn’t appeal. The one-year-old...
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Love, Marriage, and the Bicultural Identity: Talking with Huda Al-Marashi
Huda Al-Marashi’s memoir, First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story is a fresh take on immigration, love, and virgin sexuality. Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry,...
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Mixed Feelings: Two Roads Diverged at a Picket Fence
Dear Mixed Feelings, I’m a thirty-year-old gay man who has never been in love or in a long-term relationship. I’ve had a series of short-term relationships that never stick. I don’t feel lonely,...
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Grape Leaves
I hadn’t seen my sedo for a decade after he was widowed, until he met me for dinner one night at a Middle Eastern restaurant. Having not seen each other for ten years due to my father being a drug...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Beginnings
1. The Beginning I find you impossibly beautiful, the man tells me. Give it a year, I tell him, and you’ll find me impossible. 2. The Beginning We are in a bar, the man and I. We came to this bar...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #156: Steph Auteri
Writing is a slippery business. In 2009, Steph Auteri and I were just two underemployed writers working for a love and relationships website, churning out content, cobbling together freelance jobs, and...
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Killer Whales
The morning after we first call my family to tell them I’m pregnant, my husband awakes from an awful dream. I’m sitting in the kitchen rebooking our plans for his upcoming birthday, a weekend trip...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: An Other Man
It’s late July, and you’re sitting on a stoop covered in faint cracks. The scorching brownstone beneath your thighs is crossing slowly into unbearable when, suddenly, the postcard across the street—a...
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Voices on Addiction: War Hero
On April 20, 2010 at 9:56 p.m., the day my husband’s body was found, an explosion occurred on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, killing eleven crew members and injuring...
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To Love a Place: Talking with Susan Blumberg-Kason
In 2013, both my novel and Susan Blumberg-Kason’s memoir had just debuted, and our books were repeatedly placed on book lists featuring white female protagonists and Asian male love interests. We met...
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Four Courses
1. Mother My mother cooks laksa, a spicy, sour, brown-red noodle soup native to her hometown in Malaysia. It’s so thick and gravy-like that there are fibers in the soup, texture from the herbs and...
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