New Essays & Columns
Rumpus Original Fiction: "Im Musa" by EB Ramzi
"Pressed close against him, she could hear his soft breathing. She held him for a while, cradling the basket in her arms, the heave of the sea under her feet causing her to stumble in her heels."
Rumpus Original Essay: "The Comfort Room" by Megan Savage
"She used to joke, On which date do you reveal your inoperable brain tumor?"
Rumpus Original Essay: "Dream Futures" by Lisa Ko
"I challenged myself to write a visionary future for my characters—not an idealized, utopian, fantasy future...but a future that made space for both reality and possibility, heartbreak and joy." |
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| Join us THIS
SUNDAY, JUNE 23 for . . .
Queer Coming of Age: Personal Narratives of Belonging, Identity, and Finding Community |
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 | Join us Sunday, JUNE 23 at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST for a conversation and Q&A with writers Greg Mania (author of Born to be Public), Jacob Tobia (author of Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story), Jen Winston (author of Greedy: Notes From a Bisexual Who Wants too Much), and Jason Yamas (author of Tweaker World). Co-hosted by Greg Mania and Reema Zaman and presented by The Rumpus.
These four authors will share their experience crafting personal experiences into public narratives. They’ll contribute their insights on writing distinctly queer stories, finding an audience, and (most importantly) finding a creative community. Suggested donation of $20. Pay what you can, no one turned away due to lack of funds. All proceeds after processing fees will help keep The Rumpus going. As an independent volunteer-run lit and culture magazine, the vast majority of the magazine’s funding comes from reader support. This event is co-hosted and organized by Rumpus board member, Reema Zaman. This is the first in a series of author and publishing industry conversations with people we admire and hope to learn from. Themes and topics will vary widely, but all events will connect to our mission of being a platform for risk-taking work and bringing historically underrepresented voices into the literary conversation.
Can't make the event live? This event will be recorded, so you can still rsvp to have access to watch/re-watch at a later date/time. |
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| Introducing a new Rumpus original column:
Parallel Practice |
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 | Introducing Parallel Practice a column curated by Essays Editor, Anna Held exploring the other practices and disciplines that inform, but are separate from, our writing practice. The essays highlight how the other things we choose to do with our one and precious lives allow us to think expansively, take risks, pursue technical excellence, show up for ourselves, and everything else that goes into generative work. Expect to see them bimonthly.
Our inaugural essay in the series is "Aftermath" by Joshua Roebke. Josh’s synthesis of the world through math and art made me think differently about both, their expansiveness as well as their limitations. What works at the level of the column is how we see the evolution of the relationship between practices and the author's life, how it transforms from its most basic level at which we all understand it—as much as we may try, there's no completely avoiding math—to the insights that come only with living inside of a practice for years. He starts from one point with math which then changes again and again based on new perspectives forced both by greater knowledge of math itself and the inevitable joys and heartbreaks of living. While there is some direct acknowledgement of the relationship between math and writing, the essay goes beyond analogies and instead shows us what it is to be a person who sees the world through those lenses, and the things we reach for when language fails us.
Our lives and our work exist in a feedback loop: practice changes our lives, and our lives change our practice. We are looking for examinations of that system. Read the piece here, and submit on a rolling basis via Submittable.
---Anna Held, Rumpus Essays Editor |
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Interviews & Reviews
Cass Lewis interviews Nancy Miller Gomez about Inconsolable Objects
"When I gave myself permission to become a poet, I noticed that I began to experience the world differently. I started to really pay attention."
Thomas Larson reviews Adam Phillips's On Giving Up
"What we should never give up is our ability to adapt to broken ideals, though that doesn’t mean we won’t fall down the wishing well again."
Naya Clark interviews Sidney Morrison about Frederick Douglass
"I wanted to make a case that complex human beings are the result not only of individual drive but also of the influence of other people—especially in Douglass’s case." |
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| Do you want to establish a regular writing routine? |
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We recently launched a new Rumpus offering: The Writer's Welcome Kit, a 5-week asynchronous online course to establish your regular writing practice. This course was created by author and writing coach Paulette Perhach specifically for writers who are looking for a starting point as they begin to practice their craft in an intentional way. *Perhach's book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books / Penguin Random House and was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers.
If you're a beginning writer in any genre who would like guidance on establishing a dedicated writing practice OR any writer who wants to commit to an intentional routine, this course was built for you.
Ready to start? |
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
Up next, an author letter from . . .
July 1: Marcela Fuentes. Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and essayist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was the 2016-2017 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Texas Highways Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in New Stories from the Southwest, Best of the Web, and Flash Fiction International. Her story, “The Observable World” appeared in the Pushcart Prizes XLVII : Best of the Small Presses 2023 Edition. She was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas. Subscribe by June 30! |
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| Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Inconsolable Objects
by Nancy Miller Gomez x YesYes Books |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight July 15, to receive our JULY Poetry Book Club pick Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez and join our subscriber-only conversation with author Nancy Miller Gomez, a Rumpus editor, and a representative from YesYes Books.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of August and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to watch for FREE with your Member code anytime after.
About August's Poetry Book Club Selection: Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. The poems are populated with sentient tornadoes, fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, and birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. In her spectacular debut, Gomez offers a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection. These poems witness, interrogate, mourn, praise, and provide a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.
About the author:
Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024) and the chapbook Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, Rattle, and elsewhere. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails and Juvenile Hall. She received her J.D. from the University of San Diego and her MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. About the Press:
YesYes Books has been publishing provocative collections of poetry, fiction, and experimental art since 2011. We look for work that acknowledges and celebrates our passionate, complex, and boundless natures. |
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| COMING SOON: Our Summer 2024 Fundraiser Starts on Monday! |
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 | | Be on the lookout for summer 2024 fundraiser to directly support our 2024-45 contributors! Reaching our $15K goal by July 12 will allow us to triple our current monthly contributor budget and allow us to set a payment minimum for original work. We're asking our readers and literary community to show that we collectively value creative labor by DIRECTLY supporting the writers we publish. STAY TUNED for more information and how to make a tax-deductible donation on MONDAY, June 24. |
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability.
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