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Blood Falls: On Self-Harm and Making Pain Visible
There is a place in Antarctica where the ice melts red, a wound on Taylor Glacier begging for a tourniquet. Scientists first attributed the strange coloring to a high presence of red algae in the...
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The Mania of Queer Desire: In Praise of Fever Ray’s Plunge
I remember driving a bird mad once. I don’t know why I’m telling you this; I suppose I feel a small sense of guilt. A mockingbird, in its exuberance, had determined itself to mimic the music that...
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Afrofuturist Triptych for My Mother
“This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.” – Mark Dery I. Transnational Spatio-Temporal Flows (the...
View ArticleOde to Girlhood: Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party
Last summer, around the time when Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party was published in New York, I was sleeping on friends’ couches in Tel Aviv. It was my annual homeland visit from Chicago, and I was...
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Fields of Light
My cousin Paul is a genius. He graduated from a special high school for geniuses when he was sixteen years old. Today, one of Paul’s projects is working for Google on the company’s virtual reality...
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Permadeath
I knew the video game would be painful. In my early twenties, when I played Heavy Rain, my day-to-day was full of misery, depression, and anxiety and a preoccupation with death. I’d heard the premise...
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Milked
I never noticed my breasts when they were round, fleshy, and upright. They were parts of me: a complete being. I notice them, now, when I step out of the shower. My self-image has fractured, narrowed...
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Bring the Inward Outward: Talking with Greg Mania
Born to Be Public opens with the most stunning photo of a young Greg Mania, dressed for prom, wearing those cute, in-vogue-again tiny sunglasses, with his now-signature Very Tall Hair. How does one get...
View ArticleThe Cost of Liberation: Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
A woman leaving her young daughter to seek out a life for herself in another country seems reprehensible. Shocking? Bold? Or perhaps, brave? When a woman is willing to separate herself from her child...
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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Some of the Places I Am Stuck
The Idea That I Have Is that when you’ve been in the same place for a long time, you stick there. Listen: Picture your park. Everyone has one. You went on the swings there, didn’t you? You squatted in...
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Weird and Grotesque and Disturbing: Talking with Elizabeth Gonzalez James
I fell hard for Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s writing during my tenure as associate editor of the Idaho Review, when I had the great good fortune to read and publish her funny, weird, iconoclastic,...
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Affliction: On Finding Relief in Pain
I. In the place I come from, once the Thai moon is fully swollen, the Kaumaras prepare themselves for Kavadi. For forty-eight days, they abstain from meat and sex and alcohol, sleep on cold floors,...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Forsyth Harmon
Forsyth Harmon is a writer of clean, precise sentences and an illustrator with an eye for the perfect evocative detail. She is author of the illustrated novel Justine, out this week from Tin House...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Elizabeth Gonzalez James
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Elizabeth Gonzalez James about her debut novel, Mona at Sea (Santa Fe Writers Project, June 2021), approaching difficult subjects like self-harm with humor, wanting to...
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Voices on Addiction: Nineteen
This is what you do when you’re nineteen. It isn’t terribly shattering, what you do, not the kind of thing, if you wrote it down, that the critics would call “searing.” It’s just a road you take for a...
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