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What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I am still reading Alison Stewart’s First Class and it keeps getting better. It’s part DC history, part chronicle of black education systems, part tribute to Stewart’s parents, part survey of Dunbar’s (America’s first black public high school and, for decades, its best) storied graduates. I love the attention Stewart pays to class issues, too, a topic sometimes neglected in otherwise triumphal histories of black Americans. Maybe a novel next week!
Claire is probably sleeping off her jetlag.
Lucy: I am reading Herbert Gold’s Lovers & Cohorts: Twenty-Seven Stories. I’ve been in a missing-San Francisco funk and much of Gold’s work is set there, so the tales are both tonic and torture. Isolation, wandering, bohemia: all those little needles to the heart are here.
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Hi there! Does The Rumblr accept poetry submissions?
I’m afraid not! The Rumblr doesn’t really post exclusive content (Madame Clairevoyant and the Daily GIF are notable exceptions), we’re just serving up the best of what The Rumpus has to offer. The Rumpus doesn’t really publish poetry either outside of National Poetry Month, though we do review it.
However, if you are feeling a submitting itch, indulge it! A great place to get started with submitting your work to publications is Duotrope. (Give the free trial a shot, it’s worth it.)
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What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
Rumpus Book Club and Poetry Book Club members have one great advantage over readers everywhere else: you get to read new work before anyone else (except some reviewers) gets to. (You can join at any time.) You get to talk about those books with a host of online members all during the month (around 350 between the two clubs) and best of all, chat with the authors online at the end of the month.
There’s still time to join the book clubs and get this month’s books, Elliott Holt’s novel You Are One of Them and Gregory Orr’s most recent collection of poems, River Inside the River.
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HAVE YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE FOR THE RUMPUS?
No? Why not?
We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.
Please send The Last Book I Loved submissions to LBIL AT therumpus.net
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What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I’m reading a history of DC’s Dunbar High School, which was the country’s first black public high school and, for a long time, its best. I’ll read just about anything that has to do with DC history, but First Class, by journalist Alison Stewart (whose parents are Dunbar grads), is a genuine page-turner. Accessible—she takes the time to spell out Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech—but not simplistic, its full of local and personal detail. I loved reading about this turn-of-the-century Dunbar clique: “the Ravens claimed [to be] devotees of the philosophy of Edgar Allen Poe and seemed ‘jovial’ but ‘pompous.’” I wish we had those kind of cliques when I went to DCPS.
Claire: I’m on vacation this week, visiting my sister in Istanbul. While she’s at work during the day, I’ve been walking up and down the Bosphorous and eating street food and reading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which is hitting me just right with its serious and brainy and innocent urgency about figuring out how to live and be rooted in the world.
There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. Yet it was here in the Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra.
Lucy: I’m a chapter into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while…but haven’t. I spent a summer in rural Northern California and thought I would never again encounter its particular rough-and-tumble medley of aging back-to-the-land-ers, motorcycle gangs, loggers, abalone divers, surfers, drug barons, and people with names like Zoyd. I was wrong. So far, Zoyd, Pynchon’s cereal-munching hero, has called a press conference, donned a fluorescent dress, and jumped through a candy window, baring his teeth for the news cameras in order to prove his need for governmental support. So…yeah, it’s a little like being back among the redwoods for a summer.
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Want to know what we’re reading in May?
The Poetry Book Club is reading Gregory Orr’s latest collection, River Inside the River, which won’t be available in stores until the first week of June. Plus, members get to chat with Orr online at the end of May.
The Book Club is reading Elliott Holt’s debut novel, You Are One of Them, which Karen Thompson Walker calls “a surprising story of friendship and loss, but also a meditation on history and a reminder of how global events can reverberate through the smallest moments of ordinary lives.” We’ll be chatting with Holt at the end of May as well.
Can’t decide which club to join? Why not join both? Great books and terrific conversation with both fellow book lovers and with authors. Where else can you find that combo? Only in the Rumpus Book Clubs.
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(Above, a video tribute from Kyle Kinane, below, a collection of Rumpus editors and contributors talking about the man who made this place so special.)
THE LOVE SONG OF ISAAC FITZGERALD - The Rumpus
When Isaac was in Boston recently, he told me he was going to leave The Rumpus. I started to cry. I didn’t want him to see me weak and vulnerable, so I stood behind him, and every time he tried to turn around to find out what that whimpering noise was, I would move to maintain my position. We were like a dog, chasing its tail, although neither one of us truly wanted it to be caught.
When I first began writing for The Rumpus, back in 2009, I would type up my reviews and mail them to Isaac, who would then enter them into the internet. He hardly ever made any typos, and when he did, I forgave him, because of his ongoing struggle with illiteracy. He’s been a key player in making me the successful Professional Reviewer I am today. I wish him good luck in his new venture working with his friend Mac Swinney!
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Isaac makes writers feel safe enough to tackle big, ugly subjects and politically fraught subjects and even the subjects that have our popular attention in any given moment. He is always there encouraging me to BRING IT, no matter what I want to write about. Without Isaac, I would have never had the courage to publish, What We Hunger For, the essay I am probably proudest and most terrified of. It was overwhelming to put something so personal out there, to say, “This terrible thing happened and then other terrible things happened but reading and writing saved me, and continue save me,” while also talking about my love for The Hunger Games and Peeta and his frosting abilities. As an editor andfriend, Isaac made me feel like I could blend the serious and the not so serious and still have something worthwhile to say.
When do you write for free? When you can put your work in the hands of an Isaac Fitzgerald. There’s always a story behind the writing, and when you’re lucky, there’s an amazing editor behind the writer. For the past two, almost three years, the story behind a lot of my writing has been shaped by Isaac. He is the editor behind the writer. Really, Isaac is the editor alongside the writer.
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Isaac Fitzgerald is the funniest woman I know.
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When I first met Isaac, almost two years ago, I felt at ease in his company. At the time I didn’t know exactly what it was that made me feel this way—his tiny bicycle? his affinity for knifes?—but since then, I’ve come to realize what it was: Isaac’s ability to bring out the best in people is at his very core. It’s what makes him an incredible editor, friend, and mentor. Everyday I’m so grateful to be a part of the Rumpus community, and I’m just as grateful to have had the opportunity to sit across from Isaac and learn from him.
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Isaac, I will love you forever and ever and ever and always. Thank you for making The Rumpus so beautiful. Thank you for being my friend. You are not leaving us. You are only moving forward. Deep blessings on the journey, sweet pea.— Cheryl Strayed, aka Sugar
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In conversation and laughter, in person and in writing, he always manages to find a way to re-introduce the writers he works with to their best self, the self that manages — somehow — to translate memories into words worth reading and sharing. What Isaac offers us is more than sound editorial advice: it’s a way forward. What did we do to deserve such light?
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And from Paul Madonna:
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What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I’m on day three of Home by Marilynne Robison, a writer whose prose is magnetic as it is (often) still, quiet, circumspect. Unlike Gilead, which I remember as a kind of beautiful dream of small town Iowa, Home, it’s sort-of sequel,rankles me. Its not the writing, which is as lovely and (against all odds) riveting as I remember: it’s the characters. The Reverend Boughton does not have the scholarly, lonely charm of his best friend and Gilead’s narrator, Ames, and I’ve decided I dislike him. (His indifference to the violence inflicted on civil rights protesters in Montgomery was the last nail in the coffin.) All of the quiet brooding that goes on in the Boughton household makes me want to scream. In a good way.
Claire: I’m (finally) reading Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life, and I am so absorbed by these tough and lovely stories about women living their lives, watching and waiting and doing things they can’t explain. I’m NOT reading Game of Thrones, but I got stuck carrying around my friend’s copy yesterday, and everyone on the subway kept trying to talk to me about it. Subway strangers never want to talk about Alice Munro and I’m annoyed about this (everyone should want to talk about Alice Munro!) but also, mostly, so grateful to be left alone with these stories.
Lucy: I’m reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. It’s slim and spare, but I am trying mightily to savor it. While writing Kitchen in the late 80s, Yoshimoto, like her protagonist Mikage, worked in the kitchen of a well-regarded Tokyo restaurant. The novel was an immediate success and sparked “Bananamania” throughout Japan and beyond. I was not reading chapter books in time to witness this phenomenon, but I can believe it. When her grandmother dies and she is left without any family, Mikage moves in with a Yuichi, a young friend of her grandmother’s, and his transgender mother Eriko. Love blossoms amid numerous instances of tragedy and many a nighttime experiment with the household juicer.
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What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I’m reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s memoir of his father and exploration of the horse-human bond, Blood Horses. I know nothing about horses. I have never even been on one. I do know, however, that I love John Jeremiah Sullivan’s writing—I was a huge fan of Pulphead—and so I’ve hitched myself to this particular (horse-drawn) wagon.
Claire: I’m reading Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future,a collection of stories about time travel and nightmares and weirdos looking for ways to survive in Soviet Moscow. I keep hearing people compare Krzhizhanovsky to Kafka, but I am not that fancy, so all I can think about as I read these stories is how similar they feel to the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, all full of politics and sci-fi pulp and slow-moving dread.
Lucy: I am reading To Siberia by Per Petterson, whose writing both becalmed and entranced me in Out Stealing Horses—a terribly lonely, terribly beautiful book unfolding within the memories of an old Norwegian hermit. To Siberia’s setting is the same as Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (that 5th grade treasure), WWII Scandinavia as described by young people. Petterson’s plots sometimes move at the speed of molasses, and the effort it takes to slow to his speed is part of the considerable appeal.
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Awesome news! Megan Stielstra’s Rumpus essay “Channel B” will appear in The Best American Essays 2013, guest edited by our very own Cheryl Strayed (aka Dear Sugar).
Seth Fischer’s “Notes from a Unicorn” will be listed as a notable essay.
Congratulations to Megan and Seth, and thanks for contributing your talents to the Rumpus!
(gif via)
