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I went to a book launch last week, my first since February 2019. Aside from the masks, Powell's Books in downtown Portland was a familiar friend. I saw writers I hadn't been around in two and a half years. I held the little rock turtle I was handed upon entry in my hand. I wept a little as Lidia Yuknavitch read from her phenomenal new novel, Thrust. I felt, if only for an hour, like I had some hope.
I can't even begin to write something that captures this past week's timeline. Another mass-shooting. State after state enacting the largest rollback of reproductive rights in my lifetime. Gun violence and reproductive violence clamoring inside my imagination like they clamor through headlines. The awfulness is monumental, the scale of loss overwhelming. It feels easy to sink into the gray, endless swamp of despair. To wonder what in the world I'm supposed to do with this horrible, awful, no good, very bad set of political nightmares. The hopelessness and inertia fill my chest cavity, packing so close together I can hardly breathe. There is no point to any of it, I think. The floor is as good a place as any to lose oneself these days.
And yet. I have a seven year-old to dress and feed and take to camp and pick up from camp and cook for and kiss and cuddle and assure.
Sometimes I have to talk to myself like I am my own child. Sometimes I tell myself things like "I know it's hard, but it will be okay somehow. There are still whales. There are poems. There are babies. There are flowers and mushrooms and a beautiful community of writers out there that you love and some of them even love you back."
I think about something that Lidia said last week at her book launch. How each generation comes forth like a wave. How we push forward until we fall back, and then another generation has to roar forth. How beautiful we are, wave after wave of us, storming toward the shore, hoping that the waves behind us make it even further.
Rebecca Solnit put it this way in her book Hope in the Dark: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. . . To hope is to give yourself to the future--and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."
Find your hope where you can get it. In the beautiful crown shyness of trees (picture below!), or in the blanket of fog that crests over twin peaks in my hometown, or in the laughter of a one year-old at her birthday party, sitting on a throne of flowers. Or in the smile across the room from those friends you haven't seen in so long, still there, still loving you.
Now move like a wave. It is our turn.
---Marissa Korbel, Managing Editor (filling in while Alysia is away)
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New Voices of Addiction essay by Jen Shin. 1st line: The first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting I attended was near the local university, where I had transferred to finish my college degree at the age of twenty-two.
Accessing the Sublime: An Interview with Dalia Azim. Chris Albani discusses his new poetry collection Smoking the Bible. And author, filmmaker, and literary academic, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, discusses her novel The History of Man.
New original fiction by Ark Ramsay. 1st line: She has recently read that saints can do miraculous things like taste blood in eucharistic wine, heal the sick, bleed where Jesus bled, even translocate.
Chloe Caldwell's Red Zone reviewed by Alexandra Middleton & Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, reviewed by Josh English.
Books to look forward to during the 2nd half of 2022. We really need something to look forward to!
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Our reading period for Essays opened on July 1 and goes through July 31. Senior Editor, Robbie Maakestad put together a thread of some the team's favorite Rumpus essays to inspire you.
The usual summer open reading period for poetry is on pause. We received thousands of submissions during the last open reading period earlier this year. Out of fairness to the poets who submitted their work to us and our volunteer editorial team, we'll catch up and return to our usual response times before opening to the public again.
Reminder, annual Rumpus Members can submit their work in any genre all year long.
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Letters in the Mail (from authors)
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Letters in the Mail (for adult readers) authors include: Natalka Burian, Adrienne Celt, James Greer, Kathleen Rooney, and Kate Beaton.
Letters in the Mail for Kids (ages ~8-12) authors include: Kaitlynn Wells, Elisa A Bonnin, JC Peterson, Nick Courage, and Michelle Mohrweiss.
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Every month subscribers get a book in the mail handpicked by The Rumpus staff. We search for titles that we are truly excited about!
Next up: All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews for our (prose) Book Club (excerpt below!) and Aldo Amparán's Brother Sleep for our Poetry Book Club selection. If you're not already a subscriber, join by midnight July 15 to receive either or BOTH!
As a subscriber, you'll also be invited to an exclusive online discussion with the book's author the last week of every month and we'll send you a pass code to join. These will take place on the brand new Rumpus Crowdcast channel and will remain available to members for 1 month after they take place in case you miss the live event or you'd like to re-watch the conversation later.
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This week we're sharing an excerpt from our August Book Club pick ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews, to be published on August 2, 2022 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Sarah Thankam Mathews. Join the Book Club by July 15 to receive a copy of this novel and an invite to our subscriber-only discussion with the author.
C1
In college I had not known how to get women. Not in person. In secret I’d posted on Craigslist in the sleepless reaches of the replied to personal ad or two. These assignations had given me a degree of confidence. Were bulwark against the terror of total inexperience. Now I had moved to a new city and wanted the real thing.
Some damp July night, I walked an hour to a bar I had heard was right. I was wearing the makeup from work and a filmy blouse. It showed my body’s clean lines. My hair my collarbone.
It all gave the wrong idea. Dykes in hiking boots and windbreakers took one look at me, few that did not prefer white girls in that wordless unexamined way made a beeline.
No no no, to say, not you. We could be friends. Move together in a pack. shrugged off the tall butch in her brown vest who was bearing down on me, thumbing the curve of my waist. As bad as any man. I crossed toward the girl who’d just walked in. A white little face set against dark hair, a Pulp Fiction bob. An uncertainty in her eyes that made her soft. She was at the bar, drinking wine out of a doubles glass. I looked down at her red, bitten mouth and felt my clit jump.
I smiled a wolf’s smile with my eyes. In the past I had tried to be suave, elaborate, and things had gone a mediocre route. This time I simply said, hello. When she laughed, leaned close to me, I looked for the aging woman in the brown vest. Our eyes met and she looked so sour. In her mind Pulp Fiction and I both should have been hers. My lips twitched.
Washed-up old dyke. I knew how beautiful I was in that moment, felt it burned into me, a brand. This is how I felt: alone and powerful. This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.
In undergrad I had been required to study a near-unreadable German novel about a young man who runs away from home to escape the pressure of his family’s desires for him. For years he roams around, joins a theater troupe, gathers the friends that become the extension of his family, but by the end he chooses his destiny, chooses the staid sensible life that his parents wanted, finds a wife, all of his own free will.
That’s what a true adulthood had come to signify for me, a bowing down before the inevitable. For the lucky, this could be preceded period of freedom, the latitude of youth.
That’s what I have right now, I thought, tracing the outline of my debit card, leaning my elbows against dark acetate of the bar.
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Summer Flash Sale: now through July 17!
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All mugs (except the latest Write Like a Motherfucker mug) and our "Sugar Says" poster are on sale for $5/each (normally $12-$15) now through July 17 or until we run out!
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~*Free*~ Online Craft Talks @ The Writers' CenterPoetry w/ Erika MeitnerTONIGHT, July 7 @ 7pm ET
Memoir w/ Edgar GomezTuesday, July 12 @ 7pm ETFiction w/ Gabrielle Lucille FuentesThursday, July 28 @ 7pm ETWednesday, July 13Crying in the Bathroom: Erika L. Sànchez IRL in NYC, 7pm ET @ Books are MagicThursday, July 14Brother Alive: Zain Khalid and Alexander CheeIRL in NYC, 7pm ET @ The StrandSaturday, July 16The Crane Wife: CJ Hauser and yours trulyIRL in DC, 5pm ET @ Politics & ProseMonday, July 18Gods of Want: K-Ming Chang, Meng Jin, and Rachel KhongVirtual @ 5pm PT via Powell's BooksWednesday, July 20Dirtbag, Massachussets: Isaac FitzgeraldIRL @ Harvard Bookstore 7pm ET
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