Clik here to view.
Hypocrisy Is Ripe for Stories: Talking with Melissa Scholes Young
Melissa Scholes Young’s second novel, The Hive, is a book with a heart that grows bigger than its central metaphor. The “hive” is the home of the Fehler family in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In All the History of Wanting
1. The stories all begin the same way. At first, there is only her and the dark: a lone figure by a bus stop on a long and winding road. The night is thick around her; the air is so still that even a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
NONFICTION Que sais-je? In a dream once, I traveled toward my mother on the back of red-brown horse, through towns and cityscapes and heavy night and gray fog and merciless winds. Geography was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Purity Party
My fiancé wants us married in Seal City. He decides this at the aquarium, in front of the vampire eel and the blue-eyed socket fish. The blue-eyed socket fish is staring at me from the bottom of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Subverting the Wild West: A Conversation with Anna North
“In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn’t happen all at once.” So begins Outlawed, Anna North’s latest novel. Set in an alternative Old West, the novel follows...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hopeful Acts: Talking with Krys Malcolm Belc
What struck me first upon reading Krys Malcolm Belc’s debut memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child, is how relatable it is. Here is someone who has been through pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Legality of Love
Mom had a severe stutter as a child. She struggled with the letter B, and, since her name began with it, she could never say it. While still a child, she undertook to read the entire dictionary to find...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Daddies and Sons
When he was a little boy, Jeb Coleman would pick at the scabs on his knees and elbows, imagining how his daddy would suffer before dying. The old man would often get drunk on Four Roses whiskey and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Ugly Side of Ambition: A Conversation with Joy Lanzendorfer
Joy Lanzendorfer and I met through a workshop we both took with the writer Sheila Heti over a weekend this past winter. It was during the heart of pandemic lockdown and it seemed like many of us were...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It’s about Choices: Talking with Donika Kelly
“Vulnerable” is a word often used to describe compelling poetry. However, I can honestly say I have not read a collection as vulnerable as The Renunciations by Donika Kelly, who is a pillar in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Small Universe Set in Motion: Talking with Amanda Moore
Amanda Moore’s National Poetry Series-winning collection, Requeening, examines the life of women and all we receive and pass down as daughters, mothers, wives, and makers. Early in the book, Moore...
View ArticleCreating a Fractured Whole: Megan Culhane Galbraith’s The Guild of the Infant...
When I was a little girl, my older sisters and I watched a movie on television, Our Very Own, a 1950 melodrama about adoption. For the rest of that day, they convinced me I was adopted, until I ran...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pine Street
I had no expectations of loving anyone other than a roadrunner or, perhaps, a jackrabbit, that year. The jackrabbit with his beautiful long ears and spring thighs and the roadrunner with his tiny...
View ArticleBringing to Light: A Gathering and Tethering of Memory in Darla Himeles’s Cleave
I first got to know Darla Himeles through a mutual acquaintance in the literary world when she offered me an advanced reader’s copy of Himeles’s first full-length poetry collection Cleave, which sings...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Being the Baby’s Heart
If I stopped rocking the chair while holding the baby, his heart stopped with me. So, I just kept going. We rocked in the nursery, which had pale yellow walls and a brand-new changing table and a crib...
View ArticleENOUGH: How the President Broke Up My Marriage
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Last Poem I Loved: “In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden” by Matthea Harvey
I’ve never been much of a poetry person. A natural skeptic, I assumed for years that interpretations of symbolism and imagery were mostly projected onto texts by academic readers, people who couldn’t...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: What Wasn’t
The ride home from the funeral was dark and silent. From the passenger’s seat Joy watched the trees zip by, flickering in the headlights like a home movie. She was restless, unused to emptiness,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: My Mother Fires Guns
Six months after the divorce my mother retired from love and headed north up the coast to a slumberous little village in Washington State. To contain herself in her old age she purchased a vinyl-siding...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Voices on Addiction: The Road Less Traveled By
I met a man in 2003. He was soy chai lattes and Ben and Jerry’s “Everything but the Kitchen Sink” ice cream. He was flowy, red Hawaiian shirts, country music under neon lights, and moonlight strolls on...
View Article