Novelist disappears into illness, addiction
Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections...
View ArticleMutations of Meaning
A first novel by playwright Jillian Weise tackles the moral and ethical questions surrounding both medical research and human relationships.In her first novel, The Colony, poet and playwright Jillian...
View ArticleThe Magic Bullet
In the first season of the Showtime psychological drama Homeland, audiences meet Carrie, a bipolar CIA agent whose investigation into the loyalties of Brody, a former prisoner of war, is called into...
View ArticleThe Car that Brought You Here Still Runs
The fresh-air cage at the asylum is small and only visible from the street if you know where to look. I used to stick my fingers through the gaps in the bars just to flex a tendon on the other side and...
View ArticleWhat the Websites Tell Me to Do
Google search: setting boundaries for demanding friendsGoogle search: new bipolar diagnosis Google search: stress related insomniaGoogle search: manic episodes vs. normal behaviorGoogle search: Midwest...
View ArticleWhen The Writing Gets Tough
Over at Electric Literature, Joseph Rositano contemplates the relationship between writing and mental health. Though he admits that creative writing has been associated with “mental abnormality” for...
View ArticleThebes
Oh, my soul murmured, as your mouth confessed to mine.–Else Lasker-Schüler, “Es kommt der Abend” (“The evening comes”)[1]Else Lasker-Schüler confessed. But unlike many of her compatriots in the...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Once I wore a Band-Aid on my finger when I did not need it. I imagined that the others could sense a good ache underneath and maybe the Band-Aid and my finger colluded to make a new rubber finger,...
View ArticleVoices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
In the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,/ half out of shame perhaps, half out of/ some secret hope.” Shame is a treble hook that tells me that...
View ArticleDisease Cloaked in Ambition: Gorilla and the Bird by Zack McDermott
Whether it’s Allison Britz, Abby Sher, and David Adam’s OCD, Jaime Lowe’s lithium journey, Ron Powers’s son’s schizophrenia, John Elder Robison’s Asperger’s or Daphne Merkin’s depression, important...
View ArticleVoices on Addiction: One More Conversation
My father died alone at dawn on a Sunday in December. He was fifty-seven, and had been living with his parents in his childhood home in Tucson, Arizona. His father went to wake him for breakfast and...
View ArticleBeyond the Elegant Veneer: Talking with Greer Macallister
Greer Macallister’s latest novel, Woman 99, takes place in 1888 when a young lady’s independent streak could land her in an insane asylum. That’s what happens to protagonist Charlotte Smith, and her...
View ArticleFree Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue in H Minor
THEMES How could she, how could she – From “Thirteen examples of free indirect discourse in late Earth narratives, translated from the archaic postmodern,” published in the year 3841 Please I...
View ArticleThe Past Is Living: Jennifer Militello’s Knock Wood
Midway through Jennifer Militello’s essay collection Knock Wood, she asks, “So, how do you tell it? To someone who doesn’t know. To someone who’s never felt the rush. The chill. The risk. The promise.”...
View ArticleA Rope to Grab in the Chaos: Talking with Esmé Weijun Wang
In late June, when I saw that Esmé Weijun Wang was going to be the guest writer featured in Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer daily email, I was ecstatic. I was in the process of interviewing Wang...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Shira Erlichman
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Shira Erlichman about her debut poetry collection, Odes to Lithium (Alice James Books, 2019), writing the “unodable,” how visual images can accentuate poems on...
View ArticleA Kind of Bliss: Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman
In 1848, a tamping iron flew through the head of a railroad worker named Phineas Gage and changed the way his brain works. Described post accident by doctors and family as “no longer Gage,” he became a...
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