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We’ve asked Rumpus editors to share the titles forthcoming between now and the year’s end that they are most eagerly anticipating. These books transport us to different worlds, give us glimpses into lives we might never otherwise know, share new perspectives to consider, and offer us respite from reality.
If a title is marked as a Poetry Book Club selection, you can receive this book before its release date and participate in an exclusive conversation with its author! Just head to our store and become a member today! Our subscription programs help keep The Rumpus running—so you can connect with your favorite writers and support The Rumpus with just one click.
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake–a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led–her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own. Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces–one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.
Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker
All it took was one night and one bad decision for fifteen-year-old Violetta Chen-Samuels’ life to go off the rails. After driving drunk and causing the accident that kills her little sister, Violetta is incarcerated. Under the juvenile justice system, her fate lies in the hands of those she’s wronged–her family. Denied their forgiveness, Violetta is now left with two options, neither good–remain in juvenile detention for an uncertain sentence or participate in the Trials. The Trials are no easy feat, but if she succeeds, she could regain both her freedom and what she wants most of all: her family’s love. In her quest to prove her remorse, Violetta is forced to confront not only her family’s grief, but her own–and the question of whether their forgiveness is more important than forgiving herself.
The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump
Drive by the abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts, and it doesn’t look like much. Definitely not a destination. But that’s exactly what it becomes, after a young Black Boston woman sees the country–in fact, the whole world–as an increasingly dangerous place. After losing their child and looking hard for a safe place, she and her husband begin to construct a separate society: somewhere nurturing, where everyone can feel loved and wanted, where all the Spike Lee movies play, where the children learn actual history–and somewhere underground, where they won’t need anything or anyone from the world above ground to make it work. She locates a Benefactor and soon it all begins to take shape. Two homeless men are told about the place and begin their journey by bus to get there. A young and disillusioned journalist stumbles upon it and wants in. And a former soccer player, having lost his footing in society, is persuaded to check out this place too. But it doesn’t take long for problems to develop, for conflicts to surface, for food to become scarce, for the children to crave life beyond this place.
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas
a Rumpus Poetry Book Club Selection (subscribe by July 15!)
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz–a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home–serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her. Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets. Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, growing or shrinking in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it.
Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai’i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua’a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman’s fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.
Son has lived his entire life inside the mansion. He is a good child. He reads, practices piano, studies, and watches ghosts tend the farmland through a window in the attic. When Father decides it is time for Son to venture outside, Son’s desire to please Father overpowers his fear, and he must contend with questions he never wanted to face. What are the relentlessly grinning ghosts hiding? Has a ghost taken control of Father? What answers or horrors lie in the forest? And who will stop the mysterious encroaching shadows? Nghiem Tran’s debut inverts the haunted house tale, shaping it into a moving exploration of loss, coming of age in a collapsing world, and the battle between isolation and assimilation.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay–playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized–has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories–moments of joy and oblivion–and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
Hush Harbor by Anise Vance
After the murder of an unarmed Black teenager by the hands of the police, protests spread like wildfire in Bliss City, New Jersey. A full-scale resistance group takes control of an abandoned housing project and decide to call it Hush Harbor, in homage to the secret spaces their enslaved ancestors would gather to pray. Jeremiah Prince, alongside his sister Nova, are leaders of the revolution, but have ideological differences regarding how the movement should proceed. When a new mayor with ties to white supremacists threatens the group’s pseudo-sanctuary and locks the city down, the collective must come to a decision for their very survival.
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Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, was published by Flatiron and Canongate in early 2023. Other essays appear in Outside, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Tin House.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Erica Berry: I recently read Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, which was just longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and which I bought while teaching in the U.K. last summer, in part because I am just always drawn to what is hiding behind the stark white and blue of Fitzcarraldo Editions covers. I found it a totally propulsive novel, lyrically exploring the contradictions and societal pressures of motherhood, womanhood, etc. I was also stunned by The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam, which unfolds over just a few days in a Sri Lankan refugee camp amidst the civil war, with a granularity that was so gorgeously, delicately rendered in a very short book, while also raising larger questions of how we love amidst crisis. What does it mean, really, to tie ourselves to another body? I’d also be remiss not to mention a few wonderful nonfiction books: I was awed by the intellectual inquiry in Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, and am currently loving Doreen Cunningham’s researched memoir Soundings, about whales and migrations and family more broadly.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Berry: I think of one day in middle school, when I was dreading a camping trip required for my whole class from school, and my father—he was in the driver’s seat—told me that it would be okay if it wasn’t all fun. In those moments, he said, I could think of myself like an anthropologist or a journalist, and thereby create a little distance from living the drama, I could be observing it instead. He told me he was looking forward for me coming back to tell him the stories I had learned. I already knew writing as a form of self-expression, but until then I had not understood that storytelling was also a way of making the world more bearable. Even things that were challenging to bear IRL could be made palatable—or at least a bit more legible—by wrestling them into story. I suppose I grew up feeling like I was always a bit too curious and too sensitive, and writing let me see both those things as assets. I was hooked.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Berry: My best friend from college and I have a very close, joke-y relationship, but our senior year, she slipped a note under my door explaining that the way I’d told a story about her at dinner had rubbed the wrong way, and she felt a bit hurt. I felt horrible, truly like the worst person, but, at the same time, overcome with gratitude—she knew our relationship could bear the honesty. I struggle with confrontation, and I was awestruck by how gracefully she’d pulled it off. For years I saved her note. It was a reminder of who I wanted to be as a friend—the sort of person who expected more from the people around me, and was always working to strengthen those ties.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Berry: Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear is a weave of memoir, history, science, psychology, folklore and cultural criticism, telling three central stories: my own coming-of-age encounters with fear, the story of real wolves coming back into Oregon, and the legacy of ’symbolic wolves’ across time and space. When I started the book, I didn’t even consider myself an ‘animal person,’ and a part of me wanted to try and write a wolf book that made space for readers who might not think they would have any reason to read one. Whatever a reader’s preexisting relationship with wolves, I hope the larger life questions resonate: How do we evaluate our fears, and at what cost both to ourselves and to the world? How can we best share the world with one another, human and animal?
Henriette Lazaridis’ novel Terra Nova (Pegasus Books, 2022) was called “ingenious” and “provocative” by the New York Times. Her debut novel The Clover House was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her short work has appeared in publications including Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and more, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, at henriettelazaridis.substack.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Henriette Lazaridis: I still have my copy of James Ramsay Ullman’s Banner in the Sky, and you can tell from how beat up it is that I read it and over and over. I loved that book. I imagined myself as Rudi, the main character who climbs a mountain that’s a lot like the Matterhorn to succeed on the climb that killed his father. I loved to hike, and this mountain climbing adventure captured my imagination and got me into reading all sorts of other adventure books, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Among the many recent wonderful books I’ve read, I keep going back to Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson. It’s not my favorite of hers, but it’s her latest, and it filled my need to be in the presence of her narrator once again–a narrator who does things I don’t think I’ve seen any other narrator quite do. Reading Atkinson is almost painful, she’s so good. It’s like speaking a language you know you can communicate in but whose real meaning keeps eluding you.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lazaridis: I talked the talk starting in middle school, and wrote for the school magazines and all that. I left my career in academia after fifteen years to return to fiction writing. But I didn’t really understand that that was what I wanted to do until I’d gotten yet one more letter in a stream of rejections and decided to burn all my manuscripts (Really. I looked up the regulations for a bonfire in your backyard and I was good to go.). I got some excellent advice from those who best knew me, and I didn’t light that bonfire. I realized I had to go all in, no hedging bets, no self-sabotage, no easy way out, if I wanted to really call myself a writer.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Lazaridis: I can quote it by heart. It was one of the pieces of excellent advice I got, from my then husband, when I was trying to figure out if I should just quit this whole writing thing. “You can’t burn to reach a dream while seeking to protect yourself in case of failure.” Dammit, he was right.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Lazaridis: Terra Nova is about two Antarctic explorers in 1910 and the woman back in London who loves them both. While the men are racing to be first to the South Pole, Viola aims at new achievements of her own, as a photographer and artist involved in the suffrage movement. The book explores questions of ambition and rivalry and kinds of love. I would hope readers would come away from the novel asking themselves how far would they go to achieve their own ambitions? How much would they be willing to sacrifice–and to ask others to sacrifice–in order to reach their goals?
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Lazaridis: During my childhood summers visiting my family in Greece, I’d go to the local kiosk and buy that week’s edition of the Mickey Mouse comic, in Greek. My grandmother and I would read it together, with the images helping me figure out the words. When I went back to the States for the school year, my grandmother would send me those comics from Athens every week, to help me keep up with my reading. (Greek was my first spoken language but the second one I learned to read.) Those comics came like clockwork, delivered in brown wrapping paper to my mailbox in New England, decorated with an array of Greek stamps, week after week. I loved the stamps, I loved the comics, but most of all, I loved having mail addressed to me–just me–every single week.
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Our April 2023 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection is Katie Farris‘s, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. Read an excerpt below and subscribe by March 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.
The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—
This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
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“Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World” (poem) from Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris, Alice James Books, 2023
A list of books we love by Black authors. All are absolutely worth your time, regardless of the month, some which have appeared on this list in previous years because we are still shouting their praises.
— The Eds.
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Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions–those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.
The Islands by Dionne Irving
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women–immigrants or the descendants of immigrants–who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother–who is also a touring comedienne–at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves–to grow where they find themselves planted–in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.
Inheritance by Taylor Johnson
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.
The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb
The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions.
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. What follows is a heartrending and unputdownable exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.
Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks
It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion–or worse–from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town. Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks’s heartfelt and riveting debut is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America.
Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die by Tawanda Mulalu
Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image.
Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys–as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself–have decided to turn around the farm’s bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a “stockman” to impregnate them. But the women are determined to protect themselves. Now each of the six faces a choice. Nan, the doctoring woman, has brought a sack of cotton root clippings that can stave off children when chewed daily. If they all take part, the Lucys may give up and send the stockman away. But a pregnancy for any of them will only encourage the Lucys further. And should their plan be discovered, the consequences will be severe. Visceral and arresting, Night Wherever We Go illuminates each woman’s individual trials and desires while painting a subversive portrait of collective defiance. Unflinching in her portrayal of America’s gravest injustices, while also deeply attentive to the transcendence, love, and solidarity of women whose interior lives have been underexplored, Tracey Rose Peyton creates a story of unforgettable power.
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.
Composition by Junious Ward
In his debut full length collection, Junious ‘Jay’ Ward dives deep into the formation of self. Composition interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens. Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his readers an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.
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Our April 2023 Rumpus Book Club selection is Allegra Hyde‘s, The Last Catastrophe, a revelatory collection that reminds us our world is precious, and protecting it has the potential to bring us all together. We asked this month’s Book Club author a few questions to help readers get a sense of their work. Read our Q&A with Allegra Hyde below and subscribe by March 15 to the Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
Tell us about your book The Last Catastrophe? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
The Last Catastrophe is a collection of stories that speak to the idea of global weirding—meaning the ways in which our environments, social systems, technologies, politics, and more are being “weirded” by our changing climate. The stories use magic, metaphor, and absurdity to unpack what it means to live through late-stage capitalism and the grim realities of the Anthropocene. There are vegan zombies, unicorn girls, endangered artists, and parents wearing moose costumes. I hope readers find joy and possibility in the
stories, even as the collection wrestles with many forms of crisis.
Have you ever been in a Book Club as a reader? What’s been one of your favorite or least favorite picks and/or experiences?
There’s a gaping hole in my life where a Book Club should be.
What’s currently on your TBR list?
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt
Tell us about your favorite writing accompaniment (music, snacks, etc.).
Music is key. I try to set a vibe that relates to what I’m writing. The other day, I was writing a scene set in a cave, so I played subterranean sounds. For a beach scene, I played spa music that incorporated ocean noises—crashing waves, seagulls, etc.—so music was thematic with the bonus quality of being calming. I’m also a big believer in hydration. I usually have at several vessels on my desk at
once—coffee, water, tea, Gatorade. Our brains are 75% water; I like to stay liquid.
What does your writing routine look like?
I preserve as much of my morning as I can for writing. Sometimes that means I’ll get in a half hour of work, sometimes a couple of hours. I like to read a little as a warm up, then free-write in my journal. From there, my process depends on what I’m working on. Often,
I’ll hand-write pages, then type them up, print them out, and handwrite them again. In this way, I really get to know the contours of my sentences; I try to spend time with every word.
What advice would you give to beginning writers?
Be loving and expansive in your early drafts and ruthless in your revisions. Take no prisoners. Take your time, but hold fast to your own sense of urgency. Listen carefully to the world around you and the one inside you as well. Be brave. Tell the truth.
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Allegra Hyde is the author of the novel Eleutheria and the story collection Of This New World, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, The Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from Asale Angel-Ajani and Idra Novey, and Elly Swartz and Anya Josephs, respectively.
Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of A Country You Can Leave and Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in The International Drug Trade. She’s held residencies at Djerassi, Millay, Playa, Tin House, and VONA. She is a recipient of grants from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. She has a PhD in Anthropology and an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in New York City.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Asale Angel-Ajani: I lived in the library, basically, so many, many books made me a reader. The first books would have been every Encyclopedia Brown and then, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, followed by Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Mikail Bulgakov’s, The Master and Margarita. Currently, I am loving Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan. It’s so good. I love books that flips a narrator’s insides and lays them out on the table. I also just started and so far, am enjoying, Tracey Rose Peyton’s Night Wherever We Go. I can’t resist stories that take a new look at historical truths.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Angel-Ajani: There was a brief period in my childhood when I went to church with my grandmother. I was eight and these Sundays belonged to the Holy-Ghost. The church had everything, from speaking in tongues to spontaneous healing. Since my mother was a staunch atheist and I lived in fear of god’s wrath, I wrote an appeal to “him,” asking for my mother to see the error of her ways. The church published my letter in their Mother’s Day newsletter, on the front page, no less. I was so thrilled to see my name in print, followed by words I wrote, that I didn’t shed a tear when my mother beat me for putting her sinner’s business out in the streets. That’s when I learned the power of words and importantly, the power of an editor, because I was a terrible speller back then.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or a note?
Angel-Ajani: I would say that the best note I received was from my twin sister, after I proudly sent her a stack of unfinished stories. She wrote back saying, “This is a good start. But none of these will be stories unless you finish them.” Sometimes we just need to be confronted with reality.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Angel-Ajani: My novel, A Country You Can Leave, centers on a mother and daughter, each trying to figure out who they are and how they are supposed to be in America and to each other. The narrator is a Black bi-racial girl and her mother is a dynamic and demanding immigrant from Russia. It’s also a book about books and love and community. My hope is that readers will find a bit of themselves in the book and that the characters or the setting stays with them for a day or two. And I hope readers laugh. Laughter is always good.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Angel-Ajani: My worst story was when I was a feral kid (so I think its way past the statute of limitations) running the streets of my crappy neighborhood with all the other feral kids. There was, what seemed to be, an abandoned house and one day we stole the mail and I brought it home, stuffed it in a drawer. Weeks later, my mother found it, waving all of the social security checks in front of our faces, saying we could go to prison because it was a crime to steal someone’s mail. She made all of us back to the house and put the mail back and apologize to the old woman who lived there.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Angel-Ajani: There is an excellent piece by Stefani Cox, “Searching for Sleeper Trains” published November 4, 2021. It’s a clever piece that does the thing I love in essays: takes seemingly disparate concerns, in this case, insomnia, trains, race and mobility, and the creative process and links them all together to explore history and meaning making. Plus, the writing is lovely.
Idra Novey is the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series; The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award; and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. She was awarded a 2022 Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Glacier.”
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Idra Novey: I relished reading the same fairy tales as a child over and over, seeing how my mind would catch on a detail, or creepy allusion, that didn’t strike me when I read the same words before. Rereading fairy tales and experiencing them differently became a marker to myself of unseen ways I was changing that were imperceptible to my parents and siblings. That habit in childhood of rereading, of anticipating the discovery of a deeper meaning that had escaped me a year before, has remained a habit into adulthood. I’m still drawn to fiction with the deceptively spare prose and foreboding tone of fairy tales, to stories that shift from lightness into darkness in slippery, unexpected ways. A recent favorite book with a fairy tale quality that merits rereading is Claire Keegan’s Foster. Also Patricia Engel’s novel Infinite Country.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Idra Novey: Last summer, I came across Christian Detisch’s beautiful piece in The Rumpus addressed to poet Jay Hopler. Instead of a review, Detisch, who has a day job as a hospital chaplain, had the instinct to write an epistolary piece to Hopler directly, who died a month before the publication of his last book. I found it beautiful that the Rumpus staff allowed for that change in format. It’s so rare to see anyone break with the traditional review format and in this case, given that Jay didn’t live to see the publication of his extraordinary last book of poems, the direct address to him felt right, a way to recognize the haunting absence of Hopler himself in the reception of Still Life.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Idra Novey: Take What You Need is a novel about familial estrangement and what role art can play in revealing the psychic cost of writing off family members and friends for years. It’s taken me ten books of translation, poetry and fiction to figure out how to write with honesty and complexity about the Southern Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where I grew up. I hope readers will start Take What You Need for one reason and end up appreciating it most for another reason entirely. I tried to write the novel that way, open to the possibility that every character and scene would subvert my intentions and reveal something about art, trust, and libidinal forces that I didn’t anticipate at all.
This is the last month of our beloved Letters for Kids program <3
March 1 LFK Elly SwartzElly Swartz loves writing for kids, visiting schools, Twizzlers, walking her pups, and doing anything with family. She grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, studied psychology at Boston University, and received a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. Elly is the author of 5 contemporary middle grade novels. Finding Perfect, Smart Cookie, Give and Take, Dear Student, and Hidden Truths (coming 2023). All her books touch on issues of mental health. Connect with Elly at ellyswartz.com, on Twitter @ellyswartz or on Instagram @ellyswartzbooks.
Anya Josephs was raised in North Carolina and is now a therapist working in New York City. When not working or writing, Anya can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping their cat, Sycorax. Anya’s short fiction can be found in Fantasy Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and Mythaxis, among many others. Their debut novel, Queen of All, is an inclusive adventure fantasy for young adults available now, with the rest of the trilogy coming soon.
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s March selection,
SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang
forthcoming from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press on March 15, 2023
HAPPY WARRIOR
she fell off her scooter staring at me, determined as a drillbit
don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink soda, we want lots & lots of pop
write poems in my head how other azns do math
u don’t need my help dazzling co-eds
my mouth pretty for when u come to town
so hot u cook an egg on it
so hot sunglasses come out all warped
so hot u get the chili pepper on ratemyprofessor
my mother knew better than to pretend-leave me someplace
i would’ve said ok peace i’ll let u know either way
discerning as shibboleth, daylight savings can’t buy shit
i hate that most memoirs are abt other ppl
see how they huddle, pretending to be something they’re not … beefsteak tomatoes
unpitying boy im going to love u like sweet corn congee
teach u different ways to say calves like cantaloupes
make u mushroom soup from scratch
caress u furry creature
ditch our umbrellas in a rainstorm, get soaked like last week’s dishes
dog & bone is a lazy name for a restaurant
try: the rooster, reluctant poet, & little halfwit who invented the universe
the same grave, the height of ridiculousness
ur lime jello, im fruit suspended in u
we hear the excited cries, think: he looks good out there
***
Excerpted from SYNTHETIC JUNGLE by Michael Chang. Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Reprinted by permission, courtesy of Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s March selection,
HAPPILY by Sabrina Orah Mark
forthcoming from Random House on March 13, 2023
GHOST PEOPLE
My son’s teacher pulls me aside to tell me she’s concerned about Noah and the Ghost People.
“Ghost People?”
“Yes,” she says. She is cheerful, though I suspect the main ingredient of her cheer is dread. “Can you encourage Noah to stop bringing them to school?” She is whispering, and she is smiling. She is a close talker and occasionally calls me “girl,” which embarrasses me.
“I don’t know these Ghost People.”
“You do.”
“I don’t think so.”
“He makes them out of the wood chips he finds on the playground. They’re distracting him. He isn’t finishing his sentences.”
“Okay,” I say. “Ghost People.”
She smiles wide. One of her front teeth looks more alive than it should be.
As a toddler, Noah always had a superhero in one hand and a superhero in the other.
Like the world was a tightrope and the men were his balance pole. Now he makes his own men. Out of pipe cleaners and twigs and paper and Q-tips and string and Band-Aids, but mostly wood chips. I eavesdrop. With Noah there, the Ghost People seem to speak a mix of cloud and wind. They are rowdy and kind. They comfort him. If Adam looked like anything in the beginning, I suspect it would be these wood chips, the color of dry earth. He, too, would be speaking in a language from a place that doesn’t quite exist.
But also I know as Noah gets older the world will make it even more difficult for him to carry these People around.
“For god’s sake,” says my mother, “let him carry the freaking Ghost People around. Who is he hurting?”
“Maybe himself?” I say.
“Why himself?” she asks. “How himself?”
“They’re distracting him,” I explain.
“From what?”
“From his sentences.”
“Who the hell cares?” says my mother.
In Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the first thing Pinocchio does, once his mouth is carved, is laugh at Geppetto. And the first thing he does once his hands are finished is snatch Geppetto’s yellow wig off his head. And the first thing he does once his feet are done is kick Geppetto in the nose, leaving him to feel “more wretched and miserable than he felt in all his life.” If what he is making hurts him, why does Geppetto keep carving? Maybe it’s because before he even began carving, he knew he would call his wooden son Pinocchio. Maybe because Geppetto understands that sometimes the things we create to protect us, to give us good fortune, need first to thin us into a vulnerability where the only thing that can save us are those things that almost erased us. Where the only thing that can bring us back to ourselves is what brought us to the edge of our being in the first place. Or maybe it’s just that Geppetto is lonely.
“What did you do today at school?”
“Nothing,” says Noah.
When I empty his lunch bag, I find three Ghost People inside.
In the world of fairy tales, Geppetto is the mother of all mothers. After jail, beatings, poverty, hunger, and crying, all brought on by his spoiled, lying wooden boy, he still—heartsick—looks for his boy everywhere. They finally unite in the belly of a shark. Pinocchio walks and walks toward a “glow” until he reaches Geppetto, lit by the flame of his last candlestick, sitting at a small dining table eating live minnows. He is now little and old and so white he “might have been made of snow or whipped cream.” Promising to never leave him again, Pinocchio (only a meter tall) swims out of the shark’s mouth, toward the moonlight and the starry sky, with Geppetto on his back. If an old man and a wooden boy ever shared a single birth, it would probably look something like
this.
Eli doesn’t make Ghost People, but his pockets are always filled with sticks and leaves. If I were to keep everything my boys have ever found and brought home, I could easily have enough for a whole tree. Maybe even a small forest. When the shooting happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, all I could think about at first was the name of the synagogue. All I could think about was the Tree. I shut the news off fast.
“What happened to the Tree of Life?” asks Noah.
“Nothing,” I say. “I think a branch fell.”
I haven’t yet read my boys Pinocchio, the story of a boy carved from a tree, and I don’t tell them about the shooting at the Tree of Life, either. I get an email from
our synagogue: “Join Us for Coffee and an Informal Discussion About How We Can Help Our Children Cope With Frightening Situations As Well As Anti-Semitism.” I go to the meeting. At the meeting, one mother maps out the Active Shooter Plan she’s drawn up with the help of her five- and eight-year-olds.
I say I’ve told my boys nothing. Some congregants say I’m keeping my sons in a “bubble.” Another congregant, feeling protective of me, interrupts with the word cocoon. “Cocoon is more like it,” she explains. What she means, I think, is that bubble implies a lack of air, whereas cocoon implies transformation.
“Her boys might not be ready,” says another congregant.
Who is ready? I wonder. At forty-three, I’m not ready. Ready to know we can be burst into smithereens at any
moment? Ready to be hated since forever? An Israeli congregant explains he keeps nothing from his children. He uses the word inoculation. Like if you inject little pieces of horror into your children, they won’t shatter when the horror comes.
I get his point. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth because I can’t shove the entire room into my mouth. Because I can’t shove all the windows, and chairs, and all the parents, and all their fears, and all their children, too. I don’t know how to save anybody.
When I pick Noah up from Sunday school, later that morning, an enormous paper hamsa dangles around his neck by a soft strand of red yarn. The hamsa is brightly colored and beautiful and heartbreaking. “It’s for protection,” says Noah. I watch the other Jewish children spill from the classroom wearing paper hands on their chests, too. “It’s the paper hand of God,” says Noah. He swings the yarn around so now the hamsa is against his back. He is so small, suddenly. He is wearing rain boots,
but I don’t remember it raining that day.
My child, I want to say at the meeting at the synagogue, carries Ghost People around so we’ll be fine. I want to say, I haven’t even read my sons Pinocchio yet. I want to say, How many minutes of all our children’s childhoods are left? Instead, I say, “My children ask me if their Black father was ever a slave. They ask me if they will ever be turned into slaves. They ask me if I would ever be turned into a slave for being their mother. As Black Jewish boys, my children will never be in a bubble. But if there was a bubble big enough, I’d move there in a second.” Everyone gets very quiet. “Tell me where the bubble is. Where’s the bubble?”
In late sixteenth-century Prague, when waves of hatred rose against the Jews again, a story brewed about Rabbi Loew, who made a golem out of prayers and clay, a golem whose job it was to guard the Jews from harm. There are two versions of how the rabbi brought the golem to life. The first is that he inserted the shem, a parchment with God’s name, into the golem’s mouth; the second is that he inscribed the word emet, or “truth,” on the golem’s forehead. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn’t speak. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn’t lie. But he can hear and he can understand.
In a 1969 painting by the surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington entitled The Bath of Rabbi Loew, the rabbi is in his bathtub dreaming up the golem. The rabbi glows white, not unlike Geppetto in the belly of the shark. In the doorway, carrying a water jug, is most likely the golem in a nightgown. A figure wearing a hat shaped like a gigantic teardrop or a black lightbulb stands behind the rabbi. The figure is holding a towel. Surrounding the bath are what look like the letters of an unknown alphabet or the footprints of Noah’s Ghost People. It’s hard to tell.
When the slander about the Jews using the blood of Christian babies in their rituals begins to quiet, Rabbi Loew decides the golem is no longer needed. In one story, the name of God is removed from the golem’s mouth, and he dies. But in another stranger and more beautiful story, a little girl rubs the aleph off his forehead and turns emet into met: “truth” into “death.” Because in Hebrew the only thing standing between truth and death is an aleph. In the Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest and most mysterious of all the cabalistic texts, the aleph is represented by silence, and its “value designation” is “mother.” I wonder what would’ve happened had Geppetto given Pinocchio an aleph. A small one, carved onto the bridge of his nose. Because, ultimately, aren’t silence and truth what Pinocchio is always missing?
Originally, Pinocchio was only fifteen chapters long. And in the last chapter, Pinocchio is hanged. Only at the behest of a pleading editor did Collodi save the boy. At the end of the expanded Pinocchio, the old wooden puppet sits on a chair with its arms dangling, its head bent, and the real boy Pinocchio barely regards it. He does not go to the puppet. Or fix its head. Or knock on its wood for good luck. He doesn’t even have the kindness to speak to it. “How funny I was,” he says, “when I was a puppet . . . and how happy I am now that I am a proper little boy.”
Noah has begun making paper clothes for his Ghost People. It’s winter, after all. I watch him cut out a tiny scarf and realize that I’ve never taught him to pray. I’ve taught him the prayers over the wine and the challah and the candles, but I’ve never taught him to pray. Or maybe praying isn’t taught. Or this is praying. Or praying is keeping the Ghost People warm. The mouthless, earless Ghost People. “Faith” in Hebrew is emunah. It appears in the Bible as “to hold steady,” but also as eman, which means “a nursing father.”
“This one,” says Noah, “has a fever.”
I feel the Ghost Person’s head.
“Is it a fever?” he asks.
“It is,” I say.
He makes for it a paper bed. With a paper blanket. And a crumpled pillow, too. When there is a shooting, and then another shooting, and another, all the politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” are with the families of the victims. “We don’t want your thoughts and prayers,” we say. We say this, of course, because it’s the thoughts and prayers of men and women we suspect have (like Pinocchio) an aleph missing. We say this because after each shooting, it’s already too late. The bubble has popped, and the Ghost People are already being buried.
My favorite drawing of Pinocchio appears in Edward Carey’s The Swallowed Man, because in it Pinocchio’s nose is a branch. The forking branch is the aleph. Right in the middle of his face, the branch is the silence and the mother. It is Pinocchio’s roots. Carey’s depiction of Pinocchio brings him closer to the golem than he’s ever been. Also, the branch looks exactly like the branch I lied to my sons about. Like the branch that never fell from the Tree of Life. “What happened to the Tree of Life?” asks Noah. “I think a branch fell.”
I look at my favorite of Noah’s Ghost People and think about Rilke. “It remained silent,” he wrote in his heart-stopping essay, “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel,” “not because it felt superior, but silent because this was its established form of evasion and because it was made of useless and absolutely unresponsive material. It was silent, and the idea did not even occur to it that this silence must confer considerable importance on it in a world where destiny and indeed God himself have become famous mainly by not speaking to us.”
I kiss the Ghost Person on the head. “What’s your name?” I ask.
Silence.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I think I know.”
More silence.
I don’t know how to protect my sons. I wear their names around my neck on a thin gold chain. Sometimes I lie to them. Sometimes I say nothing. Sometimes I have to tell them that people do terrible things. Every day I send them out into the world, and they come home with rocks and twigs and wood chips and acorns and dead bugs in their pockets. It’s been getting colder and colder here. If I could, would I have a golem sit in the corner of my kitchen, follow my boys to school, accompany us to synagogue, and stand at the door?
I look around my house. Maybe the golem is already here. “Hello, hello?”
More silence.
Maybe my house is the golem. And my neighbor’s house, too. And the synagogue is the golem and the school is the golem. Maybe all the buildings in our town are the golem. Or maybe the town is the golem. Or the country, or maybe the whole earth is the golem. Here we are. Inside the golem. Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s us. Us who? Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s us. Us who? Knock, knock. Who’s there. It’s us. Us who?
***
Copyright © 2023 by Sabrina Orah Mark. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from Matthew Salesses and Anuradha Bhowmik, and Eleanor Glewwe and Lee Edward Födi, respectively.
Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first collection Brown Girl Chromatography, published by Pitt Poetry Series. Bhowmik is a Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, The Sun, Quarterly West, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, The Offing, Bayou Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She can be found at anuradhabhowmik.com. Anaradha writes to us about seeking happiness in an unhappy world.
Matthew Salesses is the author of four novels, most recently The Sense of Wonder, and a book about writing and teaching writing, Craft in the Real World. He writes to us poignantly about feeling love after loss.
Eleanor Glewwe was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Minnesota. She plays the cello and once braved a snowstorm to perform in a chamber music competition. At Swarthmore College, she studied linguistics, French, and Chinese and worked in the music library, shelving composers’ biographies and binding scores with a needle and thread. She is the author of the middle grade fantasy novel Sparkers and its companion Wildings, both from Viking Children’s Books. In addition to being a writer, Eleanor is a folk dancer and a shape note singer. She now lives in Iowa, where she teaches linguistics at Grinnell College. Eleanor’s letter is all about musical instruments!
Lee Edward Födi is an author, illustrator, and specialized arts educator—or, as he likes to think of himself, a daydreaming expert. His books include Spell Sweeper, The Secret of Zoone and The Guardians of Zoone. During his free time, he’s a traveler, adventurer, and maker of dragon eggs. He especially love to visit exotic places where he can lose himself (sometimes literally!) in tombs, mazes, castles, and crypts. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and son. Lee Edward Födi writes to us about how growing up on a farm helped him become a writer.
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