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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Great Elk
I’m on the way to visit Cahokia with the Osage Nation Historical Preservation Department in a chartered bus that is less than half full. Many Americans don’t know that an agrarian civilization was...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce about the recently released translation of Justine, Mondrup’s 2012 Danish novel about a young artist and the world of art in Denmark,...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wa
wá. n. snow, snowflake (if size indicated) Wašíču n. fat taker, white person wašíŋ, n. lard, fat. n.n. (nickname) ex. Wašíŋ, Ray Little Weasel /Levoi’s name, given to him by his dad, the clichéd...
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Your Patriotism Isn’t Love, It’s Blindness
Like most American tales, this one begins with baseball. The unusual sight of an entirely left-handed battery on an otherwise empty diamond; father catching son. A splitter—fast and cutting—fools the...
View ArticleA Community of the People: Tommy Orange’s There There
Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There is grounded in place, specifically Oakland, California. Early on, Dene Oxendene, one of Orange’s dozen characters, encounters a smug outsider who inaccurately...
View ArticlePresence: The Heartspeak of Indigenous Poets: Laura Da’
As a poet, I struggle with language—the English that America force-fed down my ancestors’ throats during assimilation and the Boarding School Era. My mouth struggles to reclaim the language of my...
View ArticlePresence: The Heartspeak of Indigenous Poets: Jake Skeets
As a poet, I struggle with language—the English that America force-fed down my ancestors’ throats during assimilation and the Boarding School Era. My mouth struggles to reclaim the language of my...
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A Confluence of Narratives: Talking with Debra Gwartney
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman might seem an unlikely heroine nowadays. The Christian missionary is commonly considered the first white woman to cross the Rocky Mountains, and the first to bear a child in...
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On Tragedy and Strength: Making Space for Our Stories
It wasn’t hard to dive into a conversation with author and friend Erika T. Wurth to discuss women, and particularly women of color, in the publishing world. We hunkered down at a favorite local hangout...
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Westward, Onward
The sunset seems to linger for hours, a band of orange stubbornly refusing to fade into the blue black of night. But finally, the strange silhouettes of the Joshua trees become indistinguishable in the...
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