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The Mentor Series: Maggie Smith and Kathy Fagan
For National Poetry Month I’m pleased to bring you the second interview in The Mentor Series between the poet Maggie Smith and her mentor Kathy Fagan. Currently the director of the MFA program at Ohio...
View ArticleA Cleansing Tornado: Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
I had the privilege of spending a few days with Sara Borjas at the CantoMundo retreat in the summer of 2016. She is electric—smart, funny, sassy, vulnerable—and these qualities come through immediately...
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Amber van de Bunt
In her debut memoir, Overcome, Amber van de Bunt is living life as Karmen Karma, porn star extraordinaire and alcoholic addict careening off the rails. Between childhood depression and a sex work...
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Consumer Science Gone Wrong!!
Related Posts: Couple’s Vacation How To, in Short VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts Burger Butler, the Complete Series (w/commentary) Lonli Inc – Obscure Dating Sites
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Sardines
There are three couples on vacation: Jessica and Dennis, Hong and Daniel, and Jenny and David. The exact individuals of this group vary year to year—Dennis was steady with another girl three years ago...
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Pig on a Stick
There’s a fine line between speed and sloppiness when you’re preparing meat on a stick. I made the mistake of moving too quickly, knowing we had close to one hundred pounds of sliced pork to get...
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The Thread: Art Monsters
I wake up every day at 5 a.m. to write. I greet the lingering darkness, and sit in my office as it gradually fills with the peachy light of sunrise. It’s a habit I started years ago when I was trying...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Softest Part
You ask me what the softest part of the body is. I say it is probably the lips and you ask which pair. I tell you both. It is a night when you and I are lying on the floor, looking up. We’ve broken...
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I Am the Ignition
The rain beat metronomically on the roof of my mother’s Palm Beach home. It was mid-July of 2015, some weeks after my husband had disappeared from a South Florida psych ward after the expiration of a...
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Voices on Addiction: How to Stay
One night in my early forties, I came to bed and said something curt to my husband. His reply jolted me. “Have you noticed how we only fight at night?” he said. “Why is that?” He wasn’t joking or...
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Day Trip
On Sunday we drive to prison. I have packed snacks for the children. They have charged their phones. We start early, when the roads are empty. I used to cry on this drive. Now I don’t. I don’t seethe...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Gauri Kalyanam
Her heartbeat is a history folded into a vessel. When she is born her mother counts three beats where two should sound: an arrhythmic omen embedded in a baby’s chest. She is born black, not brown, and...
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Welcome to South Bend: How to Change Your Name in Indiana
*** This is a comic adaptation of excerpts taken from the author’s essay “My Viking Name,” originally published in Colorado Review.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Someone Will Come and Get Us
“Watch me,” I say, a signal for Hamish to counter my weight with his, a warning that I may be in trouble. My fingers peel off the wall, sandstone dimpled with handling. Falling, I’m supposed to...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Pirate Radio, Like Desire”
I used to think being a pirate radio DJ was important, that this made me special in some way: a dissident, a rebel, subversive. I considered pirate radio a resistance to conventional life, whatever the...
View ArticleLove under Capitalism: Sally Rooney’s Normal People
A couple of weeks before I read Sally Rooney’s Normal People my best friend told me he didn’t believe in love. He wasn’t heartbroken or disillusioned—on the contrary, he has recently married and moved...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #192: Lara Vapnyar
I read Lara Vapnyar’s first novel, Memoirs of a Muse, when it came out in 2006. At the time, the Russian-American author who, by her own admission, did not even dream of being a writer just a few years...
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Rumpus Exclusive: Cover Reveal and Excerpt from Home Making
We’re thrilled to bring you this exclusive first look at the cover of Lee Matalone’s debut novel, Home Making, forthcoming from Harper Perennial in February 2020. Below, book designer Robin Bilardello...
View ArticleEveryone You Love Is Broke: The Not Wives by Carley Moore
“I’m ruining my life,” laments Mel, a character in Carley Moore’s debut novel The Not Wives. “By wanting to fuck guys and by never having enough money.” Ruining? Well, nothing wrong with lusting after...
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The Myth of the Lazy Mothers
My mother-in-law bought me a sturdy, wooden stool right after I gave birth to Chi. When we came home from the hospital, I found the stool waiting in my room. The seat was small and square, as though it...
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