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The Rumpus Interview with Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo’s poems live with me long after I read them. I close my eyes and see a skeleton walking around town; I see mice infected with tumors; I see lovers who have turned into a buried bulb. The...
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A Study of Homeland in Displacement
When I dream of Brazil, I dream of it as I left it in 2004, a land static in my childhood memory of it. In this Brazil, the lot in front of my grandparents’ house is nothing but dormant red-clay earth,...
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Sound & Vision #25: Brendan Toller
Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. Up this month is my discussion with the...
View ArticleSaturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie
Fixed IncomeWhen I landed the McDonald’s job, I was surprised to learn that I was the only teenager. I thought fast food was the only place where teenagers could get jobs. But most of the workers were...
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Readers Report: Harvest
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Harvest.”Edited by Susan Clements.* * *Thanksgiving was her least favorite day of the year, but the weeks leading up...
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Crybaby College Students and Their Bogus Trophies
I’m a small blue dot living in a blood-red corner of a red state, so I’ve grown accustomed to hearing right wing talking points. I don’t like them, but they surface as regularly in my southwest Florida...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity
What’s your favorite song?My fingers hovered over my phone and Tim’s text. We’d both anticipated hearing Damages, Jimmy Eat World’s eighth and newest album, the month leading to its June 11, 2013,...
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, VICE’s 2016 Fiction Issue is out, with work from exciting voices like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Roxane Gay, and more. This year’s fiction issue, like the magazine itself, is an...
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The Trouble with Confidence
“I envy your freedom,” I say to my wife’s nephew. Confusion flickers in his blue eyes. He’s a slouched statue, a blond David—plus jeans, plaid shirt, modest goatee—come to life. It is Thanksgiving...
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The Alienation of an Irish Abortion
When I was seven, my aunt sat me at my grandmother’s kitchen table and gave me the “needle and thread” test to determine how many kids I’d have in the future. The narrow room smelled of wet clay and...
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My Voice for Their Drugs
I’m down on my knees again, like I was an hour ago and the hour before that. Here is a large brick building in the middle of a college campus, in the middle of America. Here is where I teach college...
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FUNNY WOMEN #148: The Hindenburg Review Writers’ Workshop
Dear Participant, Welcome to the Hindenburg Review Writers’ Workshop! You were selected out of a pool of thousands of candidates by our unpaid summer intern, who put the manuscripts you submitted with...
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No Stars
He asks me do you ever come out of your shell, and I look at him from across an ocean and just shrug, ever evasive. Do I ever. Come out. I guess not, I say. What is there to say? Islands don’t have...
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A Dyslexic’s Guide to Infinity
The pen squealed on the whiteboard as my hand traced the infinity symbol over and over again. Twenty times, to be precise. ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞. This task was made harder by the fact that I was...
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Vocabulary Lessons in Bucharest
The day my “teach yourself Romanian” book and CD arrived in the mail it was late August and I was living with my parents in Montreal for the summer. I was thirty-two years old, engaged in heavy...
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Wanted/Needed/Loved #16: Allison Crutchfield’s Sewing Machine
My birthday is right after Christmas, and since there’s no space in between it’s never really that big of a deal, unlike friends of mine whose birthdays are in June or July. It’s also a shared birthday...
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The Rumpus Mini Interview Project #75: Deborah Kampmeier
I met Deborah Kampmeier at a workshop in November. We were two weeks post-election; the room was raw with emotion, and electric with conversations about resistance. This tall, badass woman dressed in...
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A Certain Frequency: Radio’s Appeal Across 75 Years
Other than family and friends, radio was my first contact with the outside world, providing palatable lessons in enculturation. More encouragingly, it taught me that there might be intelligent life...
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Written in Chalk: What It Means to Be Crazy
When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a story about a boy who used a butter knife to cut his wrists instead of slices of bread. We were barely two minutes into critiquing the piece when my classmates...
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Back to the Places I’ve Left
One Sunday afternoon I take a drive down the spine of California and then cut inland, where I pass through dry brown hills. The landscape is a much hotter, much emptier place. Here, I find a graceless...
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