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Radical Enough
The first time I visited your house, there was a rifle in the corner. I called to mind the latest news reports detailing the violence committed by white men with guns. Then, detecting no tendency...
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Variants of Unknown Significance
My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done. I don’t see how knowing or not knowing will make a difference—my mammograms will start at twenty-five anyhow. And you didn’t...
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In Protest of a Body that Refuses to End
I grew up in a town nestled at the base of two peninsulas. At night, my friends and I drove out of city limits and onto the limbs of the land, reaching around our bay, whose blue was hidden in the...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Brave Is a Decision”
Let me explain to you what I looked like at nineteen. Physical self-description is one of the harder things for a memoirist to do. Especially a female American one. Self-deprecation is expected, and...
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The Mentor Series: Emily J. Smith and Chloe Caldwell
In the tenth addition to the Mentor Series we meet Chloe Caldwell, a writer whose career has looked quite different from the often touted “traditional” path of college, graduate school, and...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Lauren J. Sharkey
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Lauren J. Sharkey about her debut novel, Inconvenient Daughter (Kaylie Jones Books, June 2020), how the book began as a memoir but turned into fiction, life in suburban...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Sacred Stories”
When I was a little girl, my favorite room in our house was my father’s study. Furnished with a wall of scientific books, an old Macintosh, and a leather recliner, it had an air of intellectualism that...
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Acclimation
I first understood the dog thing in eighth grade Honors English, thanks to a man whose name I’ve lost to the years. It was at the end of a short string of Veteran’s Day events, the kind of experiential...
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An Obligation to Dream: Talking with Noé Álvarez
Noé Álvarez is the debut author of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land, a memoir that chronicles his life as the son of agricultural workers in Washington, and what...
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The Meaning Is in the Scale: Talking with David Adjmi
I met David Adjmi when we were just little sprouts at Sarah Lawrence College. I think we were at a dinner at an apartment in Park Slope and David had come with a bunch of bananas. It’s funny the things...
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Divestment
As we dressed, my college roommate Kate stood off to the side, mixing drinks. Shelby, a friend, told me to close my eyes, while she worked an eyeliner pencil along the lids. When it bore into my...
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Voices on Addiction: None of This Is Bullshit
I Was on That Bullshit June 10, 1998, I decided my father had abandoned me for the last time. My father didn’t attend my high school graduation and as far as I was concerned, he could fuck off forever....
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Life Gets in the Way: Talking with Emily Hashimoto
The cover of Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel, A World Between, features loops of different shapes, sizes, and colors that overlap and intersect. It’s a metaphor for women and their relationships with...
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The Debt Never Promised
The winter before I graduated high school, my father packed his truck with a cooler of food, drove me to Wilderness State Park, and left me in a cabin for three days to ruminate on the kind of man I...
View ArticleHell Is a Young Man: Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent
At the college I attended, fraternities weren’t formally recognized by the administration. Without frat houses—the ramshackle, portico-embellished kind Animal House made famous—the boys had to display...
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How Beautiful and Rough: A Conversation with Ashley C. Ford
Ashley C. Ford isn’t so much an internet personality as she is a cultural presence. Everywhere you turn, she’s writing celebrity profiles, hosting podcasts, developing media, teaching writing...
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Searching for Sleeper Trains
There aren’t enough trains in Los Angeles. Not enough for me to sleep. Everyone knows that this city belongs to cars, that roads and freeways construct the complex helix of its DNA. Fairly or not,...
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What Russian Grammar Taught Me about Death
Professor Kun flew into the classroom as she normally did, wearing a long skirt and shirt in muted colors. She was a petite woman with an abundance of energy, darting between her podium and the...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Self-Possession
You’re done with your classes for the day, and your roommate Melissa asks if you want to join her on a walk with some of your shared friends to the other side of campus. It’s warm for March, and...
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction—The Christmas Party
This piece was first published on November 13, 2019. When I meet Georgia at the subway station she pretends not to see me, and when I wave in her face she glances up with a look of practiced surprise,...
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