Weekend Rumpus Roundup
We hope you were so busy taking your mamas out to brunch and showering them with love and appreciation that you simply had no time for The Rumpus this weekend.We celebrated Mother’s Day with two very...
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A Brief History of Swans
I like to imagine that they are waiting for us. I like to imagine that they check the reservation (“Burton, for three, are you sure?”), that they bite their nails and tap at their watches and wait...
View ArticleThe Doris Lessing Movie Adaptation No One Talks About
Amanda Shubert, who recently interviewed Ronee Blakley for the Rumpus, has a thought-provoking piece up about Adore, the film adaptation of Doris Lessing’s novella “The Grandmothers.”It’s a challenging...
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Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone
First, late on the night of September 11, 2001, I got up to go to the bathroom, and upon stepping into my living room, which separated my bedroom from my bathroom, felt the physical presence of the...
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We Who Leave
My grandmother died this past January, and I did not attend her funeral.I live in Boston now and she lived in Hisarya, Bulgaria, and I could not afford the plane ticket. This is the equation every...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stars Hollow, Revisited
Friday nights, Rory Gilmore visits her grandparents in Hartford, Connecticut. She brings her single mother, Lorelai, who had her at sixteen, and whom she mothers now. Emily Gilmore—all WASP reserve and...
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Daisy Duke and the Manosphere
At my grandmother’s funeral in western Kentucky, near where, three thousand years ago, the Mississippian culture built their earthwork mounds to rise up their dead, there were five kinds of banana...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: Do You Have a Beau?
The scarlet letter of my teenage motherhood seared into my skin like a brand, reminding me to feel dirty and afraid even when I’d woken up content, my breasts swelling with sustenance.“At least she...
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Spotlight: “Distance” by AshleyRose Sullivan
“Distance” is part of a growing collection of graphic essays in which AshleyRose Sullivan tries to make sense of her oddball family history by looking at it through the lens of popular...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: We Be Bleeding
1. Commercials instruct us that our period should be blue. That we can be contained in scented pads. That wings will make us fly. These are lies. It will be red like your skinned knee after having...
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The Rumpus Interview with Naomi Jackson
Writer Naomi Jackson worked on her debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, across years and continents—bringing the story from city, to island, to graduate school in Iowa. Thirty-five-year-old Jackson...
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Multitudes: (Re) Writing Mother
We are pleased to announce Multitudes, a new column at The Rumpus, which will feature the work of writers of color, actively seeking underrepresented voices and perspectives. We hope that the writers...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “In the Kitchen”
At 7 p.m. on a recent evening, I’m standing in my kitchen scrubbing the broiler pan in our double-basin stainless-steel sink. It was a mistake, this sink, neither basin really big enough to wash the...
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Curse of Beauty
My daughter posts a bikini selfie on Instagram. Half her ass is showing. I rush to her room and swing the door open so hard the knob makes a hole in the wall. I say, “Take it down.” My daughter is...
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Food, Family, and Strong Female Characters: A Conversation with J. Ryan Stradal
For me, and thousands of American readers, a novel by J. Ryan Stradal is an occasion for sitting down in a comfortable place, like a porch or couch with a great beverage and a long shot of time—because...
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The Spot You’re Standing In: A Conversation with Chris Dennis
There is something of the divine in Chris Dennis. He is such a magical combination of humor and brilliance; he quotes cultural theorists, seems to have read everything, and yet maintains that...
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Skin
I’ve called every butcher I can find on Yelp and none have had the cut of meat I need, if you can call it a cut: one pound of pig skin, hair removed. Despite the heavy rain, I convince my girlfriend to...
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Teddy Ruxpin
A fat and juicy cockroach scurries up the wall in the bathroom. This one is bold, a Burt Reynolds of cockroaches, and just as hairy. The cockroaches are cocky in The Apartments. My mother has trained...
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Body Inheritance
My mother, my aunt, and I inherited our faces from my grandmother. Wrapped in different skin, set on different bodies, our faces are screen-printed copies with sloppy ink, imperfect duplicates born of...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Neither Wicked Witch nor Fairy Godmother”
I have always read fiction to find models for how to live, how to be. I am not alone; we search for ourselves in story, often seeing our own lives in fictional plots and imagining our potential futures...
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