Rumpus Exclusive: “The Ides of March”
Exactly seven days before the PNM rally, seven days before Mr. H was shot, Miss Ivy had gotten a mysterious message from her best friend, Agnita: “Come this evening. It urgent. Walk with the cards.”...
View ArticleWriting Hurricanes and Conjuring Ghosts: A Conversation with J. Nicole Jones
The South of writer and essayist J. Nicole Jones’s own Low Country is not the South mythologized in old movies, not the sweet-tea South with its Antebellum fantasies, front porches bedecked by...
View ArticleCherry Blossom Girl
When Ahmma visited us in New Jersey, I had nothing but greed in my heart. She was a first-rate smuggler of agricultural contraband from Taipei to Anchorage to Newark: wax apples nested in the cups of...
View ArticleThe 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 ArticleThe Isolation of Millennial Life: Ancco’s Nineteen
The millennial experience isn’t the same world over, but there are certain ties that bind us across oceans and continents. There’s the experience of becoming ensnared by the vile persuasive technology...
View ArticleTrying to See a Future: Talking with Beth Gilstrap
Beth Gilstrap’s second story collection, Deadheading, won the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Award and publishes tomorrow. It includes stories Leesa Cross-Smith characterizes as “little gardens—the...
View ArticleVoices on Addiction: Keep It Simple, Sweetheart
Turning Point: Fall, 1980s, Austin I sit in my one-bedroom apartment my first year in graduate school in a new city. It’s late, and I’m drunk. I am holding a paring knife, part of the moving-in gift of...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Christine No
Christine No’s poetry collection, Whatever Love Means, is an explosive debut that magnifies intimacy and the eruptions that occur when bonds are broken. Her language is both daring and realized,...
View ArticleWash
My grandmother pulls off her nightgown; bends at the hips; slips each sock off one by one with her other foot, her toes pinching and pulling the black socks with surprising ease; and then she is naked....
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini Interview Project: Carribean Fragoza
A young narrator silently watches her mother chop up nearly everything around her. A recent college graduate returns to her working-class neighborhood, cares for her terminally ill mother, joins a...
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