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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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A Story That Won’t Behave: Talking with Molly Wizenberg
“I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self,” writes Molly Wizenberg toward the end of her searching new memoir, The Fixed Stars. The misbehaving story in question...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Alison Stine
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Alison Stine about her debut novel for adults, Road Out of Winter (MIRA Books, September 2020), finding the story’s origins in a dream, why she loves Appalachian Ohio,...
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The Price of Acceptance
I moved to a small city in northern England in 2019. My partner had been offered a job as an academic at a local university, so we packed up our lives in New York City and prepared to put down roots...
View ArticleIdentity Politics and the English Language: Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times
In Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, Exciting Times, twenty-two-year-old Irish expat Ava gets a job at a TEFL school in Hong Kong, where she is encouraged to correct children who use common features of Hong...
View ArticleThe Fluidity of Language and Identity: Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland
When was the first time you remember seeing yourself in a book you were reading? How often does that happen? For some, this question is easier to answer than for others. As a Midwesterner raised by a...
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Cure
It’s 7 a.m., and I’m sitting cross-legged at my desk, eating cereal and listening to NPR, when a smooth-voiced reporter tells me the first patient has been treated for an eye disease using CRISPR. The...
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Heat
I got to know The Redhead as my teaching assistant, though I’d first been introduced to him a year earlier. We met up in the student center, a great room of wooden rafters and a massive hearth, where I...
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That Moment of Transition: Talking with Musa Okwonga
I have long been a fan of Musa Okwonga, the football writer and co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Stadio. Reading In the End, It Was All About Love (Rough Trade, 2021) also put me firmly in the...
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An Imperfect Plan
The first time I came out, it was 2001, and I, like so many twenty-one-year-olds who just gained the right to buy booze, was drinking Long Islands in my favorite red velvet-lined bar. A group of...
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