Pickled 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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleSave 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 ArticleStories without Veils: Talking with Athena Dixon
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” – Miles Davis Athena Dixon’s debut memoir-in-essays, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is a nostalgic, compelling journey of...
View ArticleRe-Contextualizing Dolly Parton in Her Full Glory: Talking with Sarah Smarsh
In She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, author Sarah Smarsh dissects the decades-long career of a universally beloved but oft misunderstood country icon. Originally...
View ArticleNo Unnecessary Touching: A Conversation with C. Kubasta
A family remodeling their home who discover unsettling things in the walls. A woman haunted by an ex-boyfriend’s dying mother. Strategies for living with loneliness, shame, and how to remove a tick....
View ArticleThe Rumpus Book Club Chat with Alison Stine
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Alison Stine about her debut novel for adults, Road Out of Winter (MIRA Books, September 2020), finding the story’s origins in a dream, why she loves Appalachian Ohio,...
View ArticleQueering the Southern Gothic: A Conversation with Genevieve Hudson
I’ve been reading and loving Genevieve Hudson’s smart, strange, heart-wrecking work for nearly a decade. It was thrilling to see her work catch fire in 2018 with a fabulous story collection, Pretend We...
View ArticleA Very Queer Book: Talking with Carter Sickels
I’ve been a superfan of Carter Sickels’s work ever since I was a baby queer who came across his first (gorgeous) novel The Evening Hour in the Philadelphia bookstore Giovanni’s Room. Somehow that...
View ArticleLingering on Darkness: Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Bestiality. Bone squishing into brain. A child choked with extension cords. When Ashleigh Bryant Phillips lets loose, she can shock. Her debut, the short story collection Sleepovers, is lush with...
View ArticleRumpus Original Fiction: The Howard County Rapture
It was a Friday morning at 9:34 a.m. when the Rapture occurred. Dan Sapp of Dan Sapp Automotive and Dan Sapp Roadside Assistance was pouring himself another cup of Folgers from the twenty-year-old Mr....
View ArticleThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers about her new book The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books, March 2020), sonnet crowns, formal experimentation, the Mars rover,...
View ArticleBetween Illusion and Reality: A Conversation with Erin Pringle
Erin Pringle’s third book and debut novel, Hezada! I Miss You, was released earlier this month from Austin-based Awst Press. As a local Austinite, I’ve watched Awst Press move from an idea to a reality...
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