Yesterday we started our annual Member Drive. Our goal is 600 active members by Dec. 1, which will help us safely plan to cover our bare minimum web hosting, tech, and related subscription expenses for 2024. We are so appreciative of the 425 of you who have stepped up so far! If you haven't joined us yet, please consider being part of the community (and getting some perks for yourself!) now.
We're only able to give a paywall free home to the wonderful writers we published below (and the 350+ writers we publish every year) because of members and donors. And if The Rumpus wasn't around, where else might these voices find a home? We understand nothing lasts forever, but over the past couple of years we've lost some outstanding publications like Astra, Catapult, Freeman's The White Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other small, but mighty, literary outlets. Why? Because this is a ton of work mostly done by volunteers or underpaid employees and it's expensive to keep even an online-only publication going.
Running a literary magazine is not a get rich venture. However, as an independently (thousandaire) owned mostly volunteer-run publication, we also can't afford to lose money.
Become a member to ensure The Rumpus survives another year and get some perks (unique content, special insights, merch discounts, and more) for yourself! |
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New Poetry & Columns
Rumpus Original Essay: "A GenderPunk Love Letter" by Alice Paige
"Knuckles dig into my back in a pit and propel me toward a me that is unafraid."
Rumpus Original Column VOICES ON ADDICTION: "This is Not a Story About Sobriety" by Iris (Yi Youn) Kim
"I want to shriek in lucid joy when I get the justice I deserve."
Rumpus Original Essay: "What She Kept" by Na Mee
"The only English phrase my umma knows is I’m sorry."
Rumpus Original Essay: "The Beat Goes On" by Debbie Dewall
"Babies know their mothers by smell, by sound. Did this one know something was amiss?" |
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Interviews & Reviews
Hilary Nelson Jacobs interviews Carolyn Hays about her book Letter to my Transgender Daughter
"I think every parent trying to protect their child wants to be the bulletproof vest."
Sophie Van Well Groeveveld reviews Lauren Elkin's Art Monsters
"Elkin describes linking as a way through the rich feminist history in art and literature..."
Susan Devan Harness interviews Susan Kiyo Ito about her memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere
"I had to give myself permission to write it, to tell myself that I had the right to tell this story."
Basia Wilson reviews Dimitri Reyes's Papi Pichón
"...an incisive and dynamic exploration of what it is to be a Puerto Rican living in America." |
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Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
How to Be a Good Savage by Mikeas Sánchez, translated by Wendy Call and Shook
x Milkweed Editions |
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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 Dec. 15th, to receive our January Poetry Book Club pick How to Be a Good Savage by Mikeas Sánchez and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Mikeas Sánchez and translators Wendy Call and Shook.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of October 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 subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About November's Poetry Book Club selection: How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love. Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground. About December's featured indie press: Just as the common milkweed plant is the site of metamorphosis for monarch butterflies, Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. They take risks on debut and experimental writers, invest significant time and care in the editorial process, and enable dynamic engagement between authors and readers. They operate as a nonprofit to pursue these ends without overbearing financial pressure. And yet, though profits aren’t their primary focus, helping their authors succeed certainly is. Just so, since their founding in 1980, they’ve published over 350 books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and now have over four million copies in circulation. They believe that literature has the potential to change the way we see the world, and that bringing new voices to essential conversations is the clearest path to ensuring a vibrant, diverse, and empowered future. |
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| Interested in advertising in The Rumpus e-newsletter or on therumpus.net? Contact Monica at ads@therumpus.net. |
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What do editors want to read? What are some of the challenges literary magazines face?? Do you address an entire masthead in one cover letter? What’s the difference between a publisher and an editor-in-chief? How can I make my submission stand out?
During our annual Rumpus Membership Drive running Nov. 16 to Dec. 1, we’re hosting two Instagram Live AMA’s (Ask Me Anything) to answer your burning questions about what it takes to run an independent literary magazine and what editors do behind the Submittable screen.
Last night's AMA, watch the saved video on IG!
Join our publisher, Alyson Sinclair, and our managing editor, Stephanie Trott, for their AMA on Thursday, on Instagram Live.
Monday, Nov. 20 at 8 p.m. EST / 5 p.m. PST
Join our editor-in-chief, Aram Mrjoian, for his AMA on on Instagram Live.
Bring us all your questions live or submit them early through DMs, and we’ll see you there!
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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, author letters from . . .
December 1: Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage is the 2022 winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animations have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. Currently, she is a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library researching the history of the Jewish Labor Bund. (subscribe by November 30)
December 15: Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is out now from Soft Skull Press. |
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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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