| Will you help us get to 50%? |
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| We need your support to RAISE THE RUMPUS! This week, we launched a $15,000 summer fundraiser to better compensate the magazine’s 300 contributors we'll publish between August 2024–July 2025. As I type this 66 people have stepped up to show their support and helped us reach 42% of our goal in just a few days!
If you haven't donated already, can you help us reach the 50% benchmark this weekend? We only need $1,213 to get there! That's 25 people supporting at the $50+ level, 50 at $25+, 100 at $12+, . . . you get it. It all adds up!
Reaching our $15K goal by July 12 will allow us to triple our current monthly contributor budget from $400 to $1,250. This will allow us to set a payment minimum for original work. For example: - $50 funds one contributor
- $100 funds two contributors
- $300 covers six contributors
A tax-deductible donation is meaningful at any level you’re able to give—every dollar counts. While The Rumpus’s revenue improved in 2023 from previous years, fundraising and donor support are a new important part of our model. There’s still a large (to us!) gap between the funds we bring in and the amount needed to run a magazine we’re proud of. We’re asking our readers and the literary community to show that we collectively value creative labor by DIRECTLY supporting the writers we’ll publish in 2024-25. |
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New Essays & Columns
Rumpus Original Fiction: "Nosedive" by Spencer Seward
“How to explain how this water felt? Late winter, cool. It was like ice. But a good ice. Like waking up, but more than this: like a shock to the heart, an expansion of view.”
Rumpus Original Column Voices on Addiction: "Furry Dice, Milkshakes, and Meth" by Hannah Sward
“Looking around, I walk toward him with my file folders. Heart racing, sweat above my upper lip. The last time. How many last times have there been?”
Rumpus Original Column Beyond the Page: Undocupoets
“The desert burned even the spit in my mouth./ Every bird the same shade of ochre. / We watched them melt into a gold sky / Filled with just the bare wisps of white / You would not call clouds in any other place.”
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Cindy Juyoung Ok
“Blue is the most popular color, primarily because it is most common and so many colorless objects can be perceived as blue: a fire's core, the planet's edges, our veins and other casings.” |
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Interviews & Reviews
Jennifer Lewis interviews Emily Jon Tobias about Monarch
“The way I’m drawn to characters is through their wounds. I’m drawn to people who are obsessive and seemingly broken, and on the fringe, and naughty..”
Clem Macleod reviews Ann Rower's If You're a Girl
“Beneath the raconteur is a writer telling you the story of her hopes for survival and the love she discovered toward herself as she achieved it.”
Madhushree Ghosh interviews Rahul Mehta about Feeding the Ghosts
“This is the book I didn’t know I was writing until it was written.”
Crystal Hana Kim interviews Essie Chambers about Swift River
"That’s when I first I gave myself permission to think of myself as a writer, when I first developed a writing practice. It was my first writing community." |
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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 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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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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