Tag: The Rumpus

This week, we’re sharing stories from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Anna Merlan, Sara Tatyana Bernstein, Connie Pertuz-Meza, and Emma Beddington.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Masha Gessen, Molly Osberg, T. S. Mendola, Alexander Chee, and George Murray.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Libby Copeland, Patrick Blanchfield, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Cory Taylor, and Tabitha Blankenbiller.

“We fought for years so you didn’t have to dress like that.”

There is no grand unified theory of motherhood. Within every paradigm, mothering may vary a million times over.

The spookiness doesn’t have to end with the weekend—indulge in classic creepypasta, scary podcasts, and Ms. (Shirley) Jackson on your lunch break.

Six stories about all the nuances of Alaska.

On the importance of artists helping and influencing one another, and of acknowledging that help once you succeed.

If your commencement speaker disappoints, you can read these beautiful addresses from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ursula K. LeGuin and Joy Ladin.

This week, I’ve collected stories about new moms, missing moms, dead moms and boomer moms, if only to demonstrate that there is no one way to have a mother or not have a mother.

These essays and the others stories in this list will take you all over the world, to the hotels we call our temporary homes.

Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

Roxane Gay examines her own feelings on tragedy and atrocity and in doing so, helps us find compassion in grief and anger.

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 […]

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 […]

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.” […]

This week, I’m sharing four stories about snakes and the people who love, hate, and tolerate them in equal measure.

Recently, we published “This is Living,” an exclusive excerpt from Charles D’Ambrosio’s most recent essay collection, Loitering: New & Collected Essays (Tin House). Because we just can’t get enough D’Ambrosio, here’s a reading list featuring interviews old and new, another essay featured in Loitering (“Seattle, 1974”), and more. * * * 1. “Seattle, 1974” (Charles D’Ambrosio, Front […]

What are the stories behind our storytelling tools?

Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends, what the Irish call anam cara. It’s what the Wrinklies did for one another, what the French resistance fighters in Auschwitz did for one another, what women do for one another in real relationships with real […]

“I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten […]

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things,” wrote Henry Miller. Travel changes the traveler, obviously. Here, authors look at themselves, their societies, and their conceptions of home. 1. “Fat and […]

“The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert.” —Rachel Khong, The Rumpus More from The Rumpus More from Gilbert

A writer examines issues of racism he witnessed while growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, and running a grocery store with his father: When I went back for an event for my college fraternity, I introduced myself to one of the new guys, my brother who is the first ‘black guy’ in my fraternity. When I […]

A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader: Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle. […]

Cheryl Strayed’s collection of advice pieces, ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’, is one of our favorite collections.

A woman confronts memories of abuse: When I was little, I thought the word was ‘rake.’ I imagined a man standing over a woman, in a pile of leaves. He dragged a rake over her naked body. I imagined it happening in my own back yard. Now, as an adult, I’m not sure that this […]

An open conversation with a man who pays for sex, and why he does it: Rumpus: With any other job, it would be “working an extra shift” the doing more in order to buy shoes or pay for a vacation, but you’re also talking about another aspect of sex work: The part where one crosses […]

On Manny Pacquiao and gay marriage: It’s here at this church that Manny Pacquiao comes to pray after his fights. He kneels down and gives thanks. In that same way we knelt with a rosary all day when my kuya died of AIDS. All day for seven days, with lots of food, and lots of […]