Save St. Mark’s
St. Mark’s Medical Center is the iconic rural hospital politicians on all sides claim to be saving; it’s also where my mother has worked as a surgical nurse for over thirty years. In this tucked-away...
View ArticleIf My Body Were a House
My body is electric with desire when I realize I haven’t been held for months. I swipe back and forth on photos of strangers in an eternal quest for that rat-pellet hit of dopamine: a rainbow in the...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Mike Alberti
If Mike Alberti weren’t a fiction writer, I imagine he’d be a master builder, the kind with the square pencil behind his ear who constructs a house so every inch is level and sturdy and glowing. His...
View ArticleAlways in Flux: A Conversation with Shy Watson
The poems in Shy Watson’s new collection, Horror Vacui, speak to the many different lives we lead within a single lifetime and how we understand ourselves within the context of our varied experiences....
View ArticleThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kayleb Rae Candrilli
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Kayleb Rae Candrilli about their new collection Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon Press, April 2021), the seriousness of love poems, normalcy, a creation...
View ArticleThe Desire for a Pain-Free Existence: Talking with Karen Tucker
Irene, the protagonist of Karen Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness, narrates with a distinct brand of raconteur’s energetic storytelling that will immediately put readers at ease. Set in the fictional...
View ArticleMalus Domestica
When my great-grandmother, Susan Bishop, was fourteen years old, her parents traded her to a man named Henry C. Hazelwood: a marriage for an apple orchard. He was seventy-four. There are nearly 8,000...
View ArticleReimagining Place in the Pandemic
How has our sense of “place” changed during the pandemic? Are you a knowledge worker who migrated to a “Zoomtown” on Planet-COVID? Were you a cashier who’s now called a front-line worker because you...
View ArticleHaunted, Beloved: A Conversation with Jacques Rancourt
A Maine transplant to the Bay Area, Jacques Rancourt writes at the intersections of queerness and the pastoral. The winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, Rancourt’s first collection Novena...
View ArticlePickled Tree Cookie
In 2013, while dredging around Joe Leary Slough in Bow, Washington, two farmers discovered an abnormally large rootwad rising from the mud along their property. Near the stump, they unearthed a tree...
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