Search Results for: The Rumpus

American Gun Culture Is Literally Killing Us: A Reading List

“You look like you’re saving the world. Are you saving the world?”

I looked up from my notebook into the face of a tipsy, friendly woman, glammed up for her night out. We were in the narrow aisle of our local pizza joint. She’d shared a quick snack with her friend, and my sandwich and soda were half-finished. Writing here has become a Friday night tradition: When I wrap up my shift at the bookstore, I head here to eat, read and sketch out last-minute ideas for my reading lists.

If she knew what I was reading, she wouldn’t ask me that. “No!” I laughed. “I wish.”

“Well, good luck with it, whatever you’re doing,” she said. I thanked her. She left with her friend.

I was reading—am reading—about guns. About their magnetism, their effect, their handlers. About the people caught in the literal crossfire, the innocent and the marginalized. Read more…

Call and Response: Roxane Gay Reflects on Tragedy

Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension.

All too often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.

This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings. We do this maybe, just maybe, to know we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.

We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly. Life is a mess.

At The Rumpus, Roxane Gay guides us toward compassion as we navigate the anger, grief, sorrow, and frustration we feel in times of tragedy.

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‘Don’t You Write Anything Happy?’: Chinelo Okparanta on Learning from Public Readings

Once, I did a reading in New York where an older lady came up to me afterwards and said, “Your writing is beautiful, and there’s no doubt you’re a great writer, but I’m sorry I won’t be reading any more of that story. That was just too painful for me.” Then, a year or two later, I did a reading in Florida where another lady raised her hand and asked, “Don’t you write anything happy?” After a couple more of those, it finally clicked. I realized that for many people attending a reading is like watching television at the end of a long day. They don’t want to be sad. They want to laugh. Chances are they’ll pick the sitcoms over the horror movies. This writing business is all about learning. So I learned. I learned that, while one’s larger body of fiction can have quite a bit of sadness and conflict and tragedy in it (and in fact, most good fiction does), in a reading environment, the average audience member seems able to tolerate only a little bit of sadness. They’d much rather the reading be sexy, funny, intelligent, and witty. But little to no sadness. Life is hard these days. There’s more than enough sadness in the world, so I certainly can’t blame them.

At The Rumpus, en route to the Wordstock Festival in Portland, Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta–author of the recently released novel Under the Udala Trees, and the 2013 story collection Happiness, Like Water–talked to Ryan Krull about waiting until stories feel ready to be written, trying not to bum out the people who come to readings, and Americans’ naivete about the dangers faced by LBGTQ people in other countries.

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‘What If It Comes Out Shaped Like a Fin?’: Mike Albo on His Fears as a Sperm Donor

Mike Albo
Mike Albo. Photo by marqNYC

We ordered $14 glasses of wine and a small plate of “sour olives” that was as expensive as an entrée would have been in 1998. And because financially I still live in 1998, I quickly scanned my head to see whether my debit card could survive being gored of $60 for a dining experience that contained zero nutritional value. Then Caroline popped the question:

“Pat and I want you to think about being a sperm donor for us.”

This was the last thing I thought she was going to say to me. A donor. For one of my closest friends and her girlfriend. This was not something I had considered, ever. I was flattered and frightened, and, confronting a new paradigm, I was also speechless, like a 1500s Portuguese Marquis trying to get his mind around the concept that the world is round. Me? A child? A family? That stuff people have who wake up early in their heirloom apartments for their six-figure-income jobs?

As usual, I joked to cover my nerves. “The idea of having a baby freaks me out. I mean, what if it comes out shaped like a fin?”

“Then I’ll call it Fin,” Caroline said.

-From The Cut’s excerpt of Mike Albo’s funny, touching, all-around excellent new Kindle Single, Spermhood, about his experience helping a lesbian couple start a family. This is Albo’s second Kindle Single. In 2011, he released The Junket, which is loosely based on his experience being fired from his freelance job as a columnist for The New York Times for accepting a free trip.

Back then I got to speak to him at The Rumpus about his choice to publish with Amazon, and to playfully fictionalize his experience (in the introduction to Spermhood, he says he only very lightly fictionalized this time).

I personally hate reading books on a tablet, but I’ll make an exception for anything written by Albo, who always makes me laugh and think, and moves me.

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Putting a Writing Life on Display

It’s not uncommon for writers to document the writing process via an anxious dream journal, or on Twitter, or in emails to their friends. Artist and author Gabriela Denise Frank took this impulse one step further. Frank moved her living room furniture into Seattle’s Central Library. For 30 days, she brought her laptop and headphones and set up shop on her own couch, in the middle of the library. And her laptop? It was hooked up to a giant monitor, displaying her every typed word. Her roughest rough drafts were privy to observation and commentary by library patrons. Read about her “novel performance” at The Rumpus.

Around that time, I discovered a quote by John Green that cemented my resolve: “Writing is something you do alone. It is a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.” Why is it cool for writers to perpetuate their own isolationism? I wondered, and how are we to expect anyone to value our craft if we, ourselves, mystify it?

On Halloween, the day before my installation opened, my boyfriend and a friend helped me construct a simple wooden stage near the library’s Teen Center. Michael, Jeff and I draped the platform in black cloth then set down a Persian rug and my green microsuede sofa and ottoman along with a rustic floor lamp and a hand-painted side table. We trimmed the set with plants, a framed photo and red velvet throw pillows. By noon, the library’s Living Room contained an exact replica of my own.

Are writers really introverts, or do we hide our craft out of insecurity? I was about to find out via a large screen positioned behind my couch which, when connected to my laptop, allowed visitors to watch, word by word, as I wrote. Within the first hour, I realized that I would have to push myself in order to work under the eyes of the same strangers I hoped to inspire. I would have to endure people reading my unformed thoughts before I deleted and rewrote them again, sensing the cast of their unspoken scrutiny. My hands shook for most of the first few days; perhaps I was more of an introvert than I thought.

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Phoebe Gloeckner on ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ and the Women of Juarez

At The Rumpus, Whitney Joiner recently interviewed Phoebe Gloeckner, author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the controversial illustrated novel about a girl who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, originally published in 2002, and just made into a feature film. It was the second time Gloeckner sat down with Joiner—a senior features editor at Marie Claire and co-founder of The Recollectors, a website and storytelling community for the children of parents who died of AIDs—the first time being a dozen years ago, for a Salon piece. This time, Gloeckner confessed that the story is autobiographical. The two also talked about the projects Gloeckner has been working on in Juarez, Mexico, including a novel based on one of the many young Juarenese women who have been killed there in recent years.

Rumpus: In the transcripts of our conversation last time, there’s a lot of discussion of why you didn’t want to call it an autobiography. At this point you’ve answered that so many times. I know you don’t like answering it. You talked about how, if it you’d written it as an autobiography, then you would hate her. You needed that separation because you needed to protect her.

Gloeckner: I had to look at her and accept her as any girl. But myself—I was ugly, I kept getting kicked out of school, I had no future, no one really liked me…

…I always resisted this thing about an autobiography, because honestly, what does it matter if it’s me or not. Every work of art is about the artist.

I’m finally admitting, yes, that’s my experience. I’ve given up trying to explain to people. It’s not like I just took my life; it’s not a document. I had no interest in saying, “This is me and this is my story.”

Rumpus: It’s easier to find compassion for a fifteen-year-old girl going through that kind of experience if it isn’t you.

Gloeckner: No one gives a fuck about an old woman trying to deal with her stupid past and problems!

I had all my old diaries and I was working from those. And I realized when I was reading them, I actually really liked that person.

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A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self

Photo: Omer Wazir

This week I’m turning 25 and have decided (based on anxiety attacks and several recent horoscopes) to say what I really want: to pursue writing seriously. It terrifies me, because I’m having the following thoughts: 1) now it’s no longer a secret and everyone will see me fail; 2) my best writing samples are several years old; 3) so many folks I know who are younger and far, far more talented than me are Living Their Best Lives Now, and I feel hopeless in the face of so much talent. What do I have to offer? What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

But then I read something, and I realize I do have opinions and original thoughts. I can contribute to a larger conversation. I only need to commit to my potential and take risks. I need to contact the folks who’ve made offers I was too scared to accept, and I need to seek out these opportunities for myself. I need to believe in my value, and I need to hold myself accountable.

This list is a birthday gift to myself and, I hope, of use to you, too. It’s a mix of practical advice for freelancing, things that make me feel good, and examples of excellent writing. I included advice from professional women who get shit done, slideshows, links to YouTube videos, interviews with my favorite celebs, and other stuff. (Oh, and a post from Arabelle Sicardi’s Tumblr that makes me cry and is always open in my tabs.) Read more…

Jennifer Nix on June Carter Cash’s Influence on Her Life

Photo via Jazz Guy/Flickr

In our hotel room that night, I broke out “Press On” and we took turns listening to songs on my Discman. Johnny and June’s duet “The Far Side Banks of Jordan” visibly stirred my dad, and at song’s end he said, “I wonder which one will go first. The other won’t last long after that.” A room service tray holding two plates relieved of pecan pie sat on the bed between us—I remember that detail because it was the last time I was alone with him. Three months after he walked me down the little white church’s aisle, and just three days short of a new millennium, my 57-year-old father collapsed by the Christmas tree in our cottage and died of congestive heart failure…

…I first set out to write a tidy piece about my love for June’s voice because it is equated with some of my greatest happiness, and with pretty much the whole world I shared in celebrating the popular myth about the love between Johnny and June. After digging into the reality of that love and life, I am boundlessly inspired by the real woman’s story and my heart is open wider. Anchored in Love showed me June not only had to deal with Johnny’s continual addictions, but she saw her son and two daughters, Carlene Carter (from her first marriage to Carl Smith) and Rosie Nix Adams, struggle with alcohol and drugs, which also led to various estrangements. That they found roads to rapprochement before her death gives me hope and some courage to try to find a way back to my mother. I am a writer, and after five years of impasse, this is how it had to start for me.

—From “Pressing On,” an essay by writer Jennifer Nix about the impact of June Carter Cash’s music on her life, and the parallels between Carter’s family struggles and her own–originally published at The Rumpus. It’s now included in Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives, a new anthology edited by Jeff Gordinier and Marc Weingarten, which includes essays by Rosie Schaap, Elissa Schappell and many others.

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Gravity

"Views of a Foetus in the Womb" (c. 1510 - 1512), drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Elizabeth Bachner | Hip Mama | June 2015 |  8 minutes (1,874 words)

 

This essay, recommended by Longreads contributor Maud Newton, is by the writer Elizabeth Bachner and appears in the current issue of Hip Mama magazine. The first issue of Hip Mama was published in December, 1993, by the founding editor, Ariel Gore, as a multicultural forum for radical mothers. Our thanks to Elizabeth Bachner and Hip Mama Magazine for allowing us to reprint this essay here. Read more…

The Perils of Writing About Your Own Family: A Conversation with George Hodgman

George Hodgman and his mother Betty.

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2015 | 15 minutes (3,752 words)

 

Sometimes life’s most inconvenient surprise detours ultimately yield great rewards we never could have predicted. For writer George Hodgman—who’s been whisked away indefinitely from his tidily self-contained life in New York City to care for his ailing mother—one of those rewards was a chance to better know and appreciate Betty (now 94) before she’s gone. Another benefit: the conditions he hadn’t even known he needed to finally, at 55, write and publish his first book. The New York Times Bestselling memoir, Bettyville, is the result. Read more…