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On Hauntings and Huntings: Talking with Jihyun Yun
In her poem “Benediction of Disdained Cuisine,” Jihyun Yun declares, “Give me my heritage back. / Give me refuse, and I’ll make it / worthy. Let me suck meat off the shell / of every animal you won’t...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “A Kind of Fairy Tale”
Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved fairy tales. Her skin was freckled and unevenly tanned. Her legs always had bruises because she was easily distracted and clumsy. Her hair was not golden...
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Spotlight: “My Grandmother’s Pancake Recipe”
This piece was originally created for a Creative Nonfiction Seminar with Dr. Ruth Williams at William Jewell College during the Spring of 2020. In the piece, I use food—specifically, pancakes—to...
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On Resilience, Tender Rituals, and Responsible Love: Talking with Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon, the award-winning author of the best-selling memoir Heavy: An American Memoir, recently released a revised edition of his first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays titled How to...
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Finding Healing in Gospel Music
Although I haven’t attended a church service in years, the music came back to me one Sunday morning. While I was washing the dishes, a hymn tickled my throat until the words slowly crawled out of my...
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Allowing for Breathing Room: A Conversation with Jessica Lind Peterson
Jessica Lind Peterson’s debut essay collection, Sound Like Trapped Thunder, opens in a treehouse. This treehouse is a frame without walls. Cold air and creatures come in. It evokes a lofty structure,...
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My Grandmother Glitches the Machine
A few years ago, I took part in a research study at an institute of parapsychology, an underground sub-field of psychology that deals with psychic abilities. I did not think I was a psychic, but I was...
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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.”...
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Writing 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...
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Cherry 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...
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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 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...
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Trying 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...
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Voices 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...
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The 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,...
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Wash
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....
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The 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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