Clik here to view.
No, Lolita
His face is so large, like the moon, looming. His eyes blaze and his whole body crashes into hers like a continent. Forests of hair where she has none, he is a man. She is a girl. Opposites attract....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Mini Interview Project #75: Deborah Kampmeier
I met Deborah Kampmeier at a workshop in November. We were two weeks post-election; the room was raw with emotion, and electric with conversations about resistance. This tall, badass woman dressed in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
It took five seconds for me to fall in love with Alice Anderson. When we met last year, I became captivated by her charm and hilarity. Plus, she has this magic, otherworldly quality that made me feel...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ready for Change: Discussing Sexual Assault with SafeBAE
SafeBAE was founded by three teenage survivors of sexual assault and cyberbullying, Daisy Coleman, Jada Smith, and Ella Fairon, along with Daisy’s older brother, Charlie Coleman, with the assistance of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Object Lessons
Next to the mirror, in the tiny hotel bathroom, above the toilet, there was this wallpaper: white background with black text, kerned and spaced artistically. The disjointed phrases popped out at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Ways of Being Seen
You can conjure the picture in your mind if you try. The end of World War II. Parade in the street. A young sailor and a young nurse in an embrace, kissing. Around them, the parade, the confetti...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Actual Bodily Harm
I am not an actor. Yes, that was me, at five years old, standing in the spotlight at the edge of the stage, dressed as a pumpkin in Cinderella. That was me playing a dwarf in Snow White, a maid in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Mother Me
Rapunzel has been haunting me. Rapunzel, one of the few Grimm’s fairy tales that has an active, living mother as a main character. More commonly, most of the mothers, all of the good ones, are dead. Of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Volcanoes
“We are volcanoes…” Ursula K. Le Guin said in her graduation remarks at Bryn Mawr in 1985. “That’s what I want—to hear you erupting.” Women are angry. At least, that is what we’re hearing. It’s the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Look What You Made Me Do
A red lip. A bared leg. A slinky black dress with a very long slit. A high heel. Higher. A voice that sounds like sex. A smoky eye. She wants, but what she wants is ulterior. Indirect. She gets there...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Goddesses and Monsters
In the old days, the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves but how can we explain the way we hate ourselves?1 It started with simple directives. You’ll need a coat. Those shoes are too...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: The Masked Man
In the beginning, He was the word. The word of the house, the word of vocation, the word of study, of thought, of art. When Western writers wrote an everyman, of course, they wrote about themselves:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: American Garbage
I enter the courtyard and my eyes go up. Rusting bicycles and extra wheels hang from the ceiling. Roped together with Christmas lights, white chain link, twine. The gears and the chains like obelisks,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emboldened to Ask: A Conversation with Natalie Singer
It was the cover that first piqued my interest in Natalie Singer’s debut memoir, California Calling: A Self-Interrogation. The wide, bright, concentric, circles in rainbow colors, the sans serif...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Near Miss
In 1991, I was ten years old. I lived in a tiny, picturesque mountain town on the north shore of Lake Tahoe—the kind of place with a definable “tourist season,” the kind of place where “nothing” ever...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: All in My Head
Standing in front of a closet full of beautiful clothes that don’t fit me anymore, I am crying. Some of it is sleep deprivation; some of it is postpartum hormones. Some of it is frustration. This is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Dress Codes
Over the summer, my daughter and her preschool friends were playing “superheroes.” Because her school has a strict “no TV characters” policy, the children came up with their own superheroes based on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Forged in Fire
I’ve been dreaming of Medusa. Waking and sleeping. Mornings and midday, in the blue light of my monitor screen. Snake haired, cackling. Medusa, the beauty; Medusa, the victim; Medusa, the horror....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Outside the Gaze
I sat in my mother’s passenger seat—a beige pleather upholstered bench—and stared at my reflection in the flip-down mirror, flattening my nasal septum with my finger. I was in seventh grade; not a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Thread: Fatherless
My rage came early. So early, in fact, that I have a hard time remembering when it came. I didn’t have the word rage, or the concept of disappointment. All I knew was the lack, the ache, the burning...
View Article
