Inborn Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact
You wear the red vest Mom got you for my reception with pleasure, the bolo tie that matches Dad’s tucked under your chin. You put your arm around my shoulders, and I laugh. Behind us, the lake...
View ArticleWhat Is Found There: Talking with Barbara Crooker and Marjorie Maddox
As poet William Carlos Williams famously mused, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” What better way to examine...
View ArticleA Hard-Won Love: NOS by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman
Every family suggests a geometrical figure, a more or less plottable set of shifting relations. Think of the Bundrens in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Anse explains, by way of geometry, his inclination to...
View ArticleExploration and Connection: A Conversation with Oliver de la Paz
Parents, especially of younger children, are probably familiar with autism screening questionnaires, one of the pile of forms thrust into our hands during regular checkups at the pediatrician’s office,...
View ArticleOn Anger, Autism, and Blackness
Whenever I sleep in the same house as my sister, I have these dreams about her. In the better dreams, I start awake to find Remi standing over me, wearing a white sheet like a crude ghost costume with...
View ArticleFields of Light
My cousin Paul is a genius. He graduated from a special high school for geniuses when he was sixteen years old. Today, one of Paul’s projects is working for Google on the company’s virtual reality...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #219: Zak Ferguson
Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in the best possible sense of the word. His work is unsettling. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches...
View ArticleBeauty in a Cold Season: Katherine May’s Wintering
For most of us, a state of crisis is not one we regularly seek. We do not venture past the tip of the iceberg. We prevent catastrophe with safety nets, dodge apocalyptic fears with the humdrum of...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Amy Mackelden and Dr. Dylan Jaggard
There has never been a greater need to hear directly from chronically ill and disabled people. Even before COVID-19 changed the reality we live in for the short term, we were fighting off the...
View ArticleOutside(r)
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child Ignoring the adults calling,...
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