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Small Breeds
I. At first I don’t realize it’s dog shit on my back door. I see the three streaks of jaundiced puce defiling the cheerful white paint. But my brain, unaccustomed to encountering dog shit on surfaces...
View ArticleFor the Love of Dogs: Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Good Boy
How do you make sense of a childhood haunted by a voice that whispers, “You are not you?” How do you process an adolescence at times so uncomfortable that you spend night after night at home, eating...
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It’s a Beautiful (Toxic) Life
I’m obsessed with a lump on my dog’s penis. Maybe obsessed isn’t the right word. Maybe I’m simply paying appropriate daily attention to the marble-sized growth that’s technically on Barney’s prepuce,...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Biswell and Hope Get a Dog, A Story in Three Epiphanies
I. “That woman was calling her dog in the middle of the night,” Hope says. “She just kept calling Coco! Coco! Coco!” They’re still in bed. It’s Saturday, mid-morning. The room is dark because of the...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #222: Kathryn Scanlan
I first met Kathryn Scanlan at a reading last year for Karen Olsson’s new book—the two writers share an editor in common. In chatting briefly with Scanlan, it came up that I was writing an essay on...
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Acclimation
I first understood the dog thing in eighth grade Honors English, thanks to a man whose name I’ve lost to the years. It was at the end of a short string of Veteran’s Day events, the kind of experiential...
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Survival Soup
It’s hard to pick an origin point to the story you are living, so I’ll officially clock it at when the stay-at-home order began. The governor of Oregon declared a state of emergency six days ago. Of...
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True Detective and a Greyhound: On Imagination and Survival
During the thirty days when I am sickest, meditating makes me wonder why thinking is ever on the agenda. I’m trying to imagine the effort it would take to cultivate a truly thoughtless existence, when...
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Cooped
Just before it all begins, the dog gets out of the house and kills one of our chickens. He shakes her until she goes soft and limp and then he drops her body on the ground. My husband gets rid of the...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Randa Jarrar
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Randa Jarrar about her new memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country (Catapult, February 2021), writing the “anti-road trip road trip memoir,” the power that comes with speaking the...
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