Clik here to view.
Ungumming the Keys
On the cusp of my 30th birthday and just days before the birth of our second child, I decide to do the practical thing and purchase a pair of nonfunctioning typewriters.The first might’ve been chalked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
At the Museum
We play a game, my husband and I, whenever we visit a museum. In each room of an exhibit, we each get to select one piece of art to own. Monetary value doesn’t play a role since our one rule is that we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cheaters: A Life in Eyewear
When I was nine I faked a vision test to get a pair of pale pink cat eyed beauties. Because I wanted them. Braces, too, though they were scarcely necessary. I got them on the bottoms only, that’s how...
View ArticleClik here to view.
True Romantic #6: Off Balance
I used to have an old red suitcase where I kept my journals, about fifty or so notebooks, each filled with stories and poems, travel notes, bits of this and that I’d glued onto the pages: A note from...
View ArticleVonnegut’s Secret Weapon
Without his wife Jane’s faith and encouragement in his writing, it’s highly likely we wouldn’t know Kurt Vonnegut’s name from Adam. The New Yorker explores Jane’s influence on her husband throughout...
View ArticleThis Week of Short Fiction
New motherhood: it’s common but totally strange, completely natural yet weirdly alien, a beautiful miracle and absolutely disgusting. It can also have some strong effects on a woman’s perception of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Mortgage Arrangement
The day my husband and I told our nine-year-old son we were separating, he went into his bedroom and pushed all the furniture in front of the door. The two of us stood in the hallway and listened to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Man’s ABCs of Miscarriage
A is for Alphabet. Long before Patty got pregnant, my Facebook friends populated my newsfeed with articles discussing the importance of words in a child’s development. So when, a couple years later,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Real Evan
Character whose name is Evan. Not the real Evan, but sharing some of the real Evan’s qualities, some of the real Evan’s failings. Character Evan may run through the neighborhood in the evenings while...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How I Lost My Memory
It started with a kiss. In early 1987 my first wife’s lips lingered in a long goodbye on those of a close male friend as I emerged from the bedroom with two winter coats, one his, one his wife’s. As...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Meer-Kin in Paris
I have never seen locusts swarm a field of wheat, but I bet it looks a lot like Paris when the tourists arrive. Each year fifteen million of these creatures descend on the city, stripping the stores...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: An Audience with the Husband
You know, I’ve never felt very certain of anything. The dogma of my life so far has been to retire—in the British sense, I mean. Let the men have the opinions. Not because they deserve them more, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Falling into Fear
My wife left me grousing on the couch. She had to get up early but told me before she went to bed, “Come get me if something happens.” We had gone to the polls early that morning, before ours even...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Learning to Live Alone through the Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore
In the early months when I was first separated from my husband, I came home from work in the evenings and watched reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. The separation had not been my idea, nor...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Way to Make Sense of the World with Suzanne Buffam
Ever since I was a child, a good night’s sleep has eluded me. When my mom tucked me in bed at night, I peppered her with questions to make her stay longer. Once alone, I listened to my parents talking...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Day the FBI Tapped Our Phones
I remember the young wife with a vivid clarity that only comes in those “change of life” moments, as they like to call them on health insurance forms. Outside it was the height of summer, but you’d...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
No one ever said affairs weren’t messy. Ratika Kapur’s second novel, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, is the story of a missed connection at a train station in Delhi that actually connects. Renuka...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Aura of Baby Einstein, the Child, the Toy
My daughter D swipes her finger across my phone. A face lights up; her head turns in. She asks to look at family pictures. She likes to take some of her own—mostly shots of the floor or ceiling....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Zhiyu/Jerry
Zhiyu wants the fattest duck. He points it out to the woman standing behind the cage. She nods approvingly and leans over to nab the bird by its neck, then carries it, flapping against her clutch,...
View Article