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Seven Almonds
As the door in the back of the courtroom opened, I watched the jurors file in. I looked at my three trial partners and my client before I fixed my face into its well-worn litigator mask, presenting a...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Across the Divide
Long before more modernized versions of sisterhood were showcased on HBO television shows such as Sex and the City and Girls, there was the 1988 film Beaches. When I was a teenager I used to watch it...
View ArticleThe Adjunct Crisis
Nearly a third of all adjunct college faculty live below the poverty line. But its not just low pay that make these jobs miserable: lack of job security, long hours, and the expectation of filling...
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A Clean Break
“Love involves, it seems, helpless submission to pain.” An act of surrender—is that really a part of love?This sentence appears deep within James Merrill: Life and Art, a massive new biography by...
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True Romantic #18: A Particularly American Belief
I’d waited for months to see pages from Marius’s first book in English and, when he finally gave it to me, I read it all in one sitting. It was brilliant, with all of his humor and energy, his...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wanting To Dance
“So let’s give them a big hand and make them feel real welcome. YAAAAY!” Kermit yelled, waving his green felt arms wildly. The curtain is pulled to reveal a band of bugs, or beetles, who begin to play,...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Taking Comfort in Futurama
A red-headed man with eyes bugged out in shock sits, motionless, in a glass tube. The beer in his hand has frothed, but is frozen. Outside, ten centuries pass. New York is destroyed, rebuilt,...
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Odysseus at Telepylos
In August, when you move to Philadelphia, you pack your father’s little sedan to the brim, just as if you were going back to college, and you drive all night through the foggy Appalachian foothills,...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: All The Time Every Minute
The tattoo studio is dingy but I am eighteen, so it doesn’t matter, and I don’t feel any sense of alarm or frustration when the men are too friendly, because I am eighteen and it doesn’t...
View ArticleLearning the Hard, Creative Way
In my father’s world, which still bore the markings of the class system he had fled seventeen years before, thinking that you were better than the life you had, which had actually allowed him to...
View ArticleThe Keeper of Weirdness
Our love of libraries is nothing new, but there are a particular breed of libraries less discussed—the college library. Book Riot has written a love letter to collegiate libraries and all the weirdness...
View ArticleWoman-Size: Female Image-Making and PJ Harvey
Her mouth, like her eyes, is a little too large for her face. When she leans into the video camera, it looks like she could swallow the screen. When she wears red lipstick, she reminds me of when I...
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The Girl Who Wanted to Fly
“I want to fly,” she says. She is four, she is five, she is six, and this is always her birthday wish. She is my first child, my smallest child, five pounds at birth.She is the child I was always...
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Greyhound
Stephanie Anderson’s “Greyhound” was selected by Emily Rapp as the winner of the second annual Payton Prize, which seeks to honor one excellent nonfiction essay each year in memory of Payton James...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Making a Murderer and “Bad” Families
When I was thirteen, my mother and I moved from the Central New Jersey shore to Millville, a city in rural South Jersey. I had grown up only 115 miles north in the same state, but for the disconnection...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs
A dozen years ago, I came back from class to a dorm room of unfamiliar music. My freshman roommate Tara handed me a silver CD with “Ben Folds—Rockin The Suburbs” scrawled in black Sharpie. “It’s really...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Swans and Other Lies
Leda meets Patterson in a dive bar named Three Thimbles, just past Atascadero. She is hitchhiking south to Indio for a music festival during a drought, and the gentle hills along Highway 5 are barren...
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Different Love
“Female homosexuals are somehow more complex to study….”–psychologist Andrea Camperio-Ciani, Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2010Within ten minutes of riding in my colleague’s car, I know she’s a lesbian....
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Against Silencing: Why All Writers—Even White Men—Should Discuss Gender
What does it mean for men to talk about being men? Mostly it means not talking at all, at least, not in an unguarded, safe, real way. Self-censorship is a twisted birthright passed down to boys by...
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Used-Car Salesman
On the phone, the man had struck me as not uncomfortable with English. Was I the guy who’d advertised a used car for sale? Was it still available? Could he come by to see it? Despite his jagged accent,...
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