This week on The Rumpus &
1 week left to hit our member GOAL! |
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We hope you're having a peaceful holiday break. We have just 1 week left of 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 450 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?
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: "Telo" by Lena Crown
"I will never see you again, I thought as my laughter echoed off the concrete. I will never be seen by you again."
Rumpus Original Essay: "Mothership" by Maery Rose
"I was a child the first time I attempted to contact the Mothership, requesting to return home." |
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Interviews & Reviews
Janel Galnares interviews Arthur Kayzakian about The Book of Redacted Paintings
"...we as people are artworks ourselves, and I think we all underestimate each other."
Jonah Howell reviews Clemens Meyer's While We Were Dreaming
"This is, in the end, a nuanced and supersensitive translation of a soul-pummeling novel."
Janet Rodriguez interviews Diane Gottlieb about Awakenings: Stories of Body and Consciousness
"We need to shatter silence because silence is where abuse thrives." |
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Show Us Your Desk: Tuesday, Dec. 12 with Athena Dixon
Greg Mania's next guest for Show Us Your Desk is Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files.
Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her work is included in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol.2: Black Girl Magic and her craft work appears in Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction. Athena is an alumna of VONA, Callaloo, and Tin House and has received a prose fellowship from The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a Second Book Residency from Tin House. She writes, edits, and resides in Philadelphia.
In The Loneliness Files, Athena talks directly to people who feel lonely and disconnected despite all of the ways we are hyperconnected today. Her honesty about her feelings is a lifeline to anyone who finds themselves unmoored and uncertain of themselves in the post-COVID era.
Tune in to The Rumpus Live on Instagram Tues., Dec. 12 at 3pm PST / 6 pm EST for this IRL conversation where we'll get to see Athena's desk! |
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Small Press Sunday: Dec. 3 with Milkweed Editions
THE RUMPUS presents: Small Press Sunday hosted by Janet Rodriguez! Small Press Sunday is an inside look at the presses who make your favorite books, including interviews with publishers and editors and insight into why manuscripts are chosen and how books are ushered from submission to bookstore shelves. Our next small press is Milkweed Editions!
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.
Make sure to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in on 12/3 at 3:30pm PT/ 6:30pm ET for a conversation with Milkweed's Publisher and CEO Daniel Slager. |
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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 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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| 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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