Drugs and Creativity
Gila Lyons has a strikingly vulnerable essay at The Millions about her decision to start taking anti-anxiety medication. Typically, artists who suffer from mental health issues opt to ride against the...
View ArticleAnnie Dillard and the Art of the Essay
“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”Read an essay on Annie Dillard’s philosophy of the essay and its writer over at Brain Pickings.Related Posts:Dr. Critic and Mr....
View ArticleRoxane Gay and Leslie Jamison Get Personal About Essays
Rumpus essays editor and author of the forthcoming essay collection Bad Feminist Roxane Gay sat down to talk with The Empathy Exams author Leslie Jamison and Michele Filgate; the three women had an...
View ArticleFiguring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do...
View ArticleI Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
I stared at the line of boxes under the Race and Ethnicity section of my college application unsure of which to check. Based on my features alone, I was just another white boy: pale skin, brown hair,...
View ArticleOne Giant Cliché
“You can never write about that,” a friend once said of my first marriage, which lasted all of about six months. It wasn’t that the story was too painful or might damage my ex-wife in some way—no, it...
View ArticleThe Last Laugh
Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates:I think there’s something dishonest...
View ArticleThe Unteachable Dark
Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is...
View ArticleA Footnotes Advocacy
Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You...
View ArticleSlouching Toward Didion
The Daily Beast takes a look at the history of the female essayist from Didion to Dunham:From cultural critic Susan Sontag and journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist (and Dunham’s mentor) Nora...
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The Big Idea #10: Eula Biss
The cover art for Eula Biss’s new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, surprised me at first. I’d expected something stark and edgy—maybe a shiny hypodermic needle against a blank background—to...
View ArticleThe Essay Makes a Comeback
2014 has already been called “The Year of the Debut” as a way of recognizing all the amazing debut novels published over the last twelve months. Now Jason Diamond is calling 2014 “The Year of the...
View ArticleCharles D’Ambrosio’s Fast Friends
For the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering, and explains why he thinks that D’Ambrosio, in essays, has “found the perfect medium.”Related...
View ArticleThose Kinds Of People are The Only People Here
Electric Literature posts a graduation speech from Vonnegut; he riffs on World War II, busboys, ambition, and suicide notes:A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for...
View ArticleChipotle to Publish Student Work
Chipotle’s Cultivating Thought campaign, which has put essays from the likes of George Saunders and Aziz Ansari on takeout bags and soda cups, will expand next year to include a contest for young...
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Dinty W. Moore
Creative nonfiction, in its modern incarnation, is a relatively new genre, and Dinty W. Moore is, through both his writing and his stewardship of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction,...
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick’s recent book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, has caught fire in an unlikely way, defining the national conversation. A New York Times bestseller, this hybrid text straddles two...
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Back in May of 2014, I reached out to author Elisa Gabbert and pitched a possible interview. We had followed (and still follow) each other on Twitter for some time, one of those online...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: A House, a Girl
“I am ashamedI never had the wordsto carry a friend from her deathto the starscorrectly”–Joy HarjoI.The day you follow me to that mound of oyster shells on the beach is the day I realize muscle and...
View ArticleMeet Elissa Washuta
Washington State Book Award finalist and Rumpus Saturday Editor Elissa Washuta was interviewed by Moss about her writing, living in the Pacific Northwest, and pop culture.Related Posts:The Rumpus...
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