Reviving The Rumpus

I’ve been mourning the loss of our various outlets for book reviews specifically and critical thinking generally, so I was delighted when The Rumpus came back on the scene under new ownership: married machers Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman. Since 2009, The Rumpus has been an independent (read: neither VC nor Bezos nor Murdoch owned) magazine of art and culture platforming some of the most unique voices online. Roxane and Debbie have refreshed the design and launched new verticals, including a “What Is Freedom?” column with answers from writers and artists like Christina Sharpe, Shirley Manson, and Sarah Schulman — a necessary balm to the America 250 blather.

Below, I talk to Roxane and Debbie about the indefatigable creativity of the online literary community. —Natalie Adler

NATALIE ADLER Roxane, you honed your voice at The Rumpus and Debbie, you’ve said you first fell in love with that voice while reading The Rumpus. This is a full circle moment for you both. What’s changed in writing culture since you were first writing for and reading The Rumpus?

DEBBIE MILLMAN Everything? 

ROXANE GAY In some ways, the cultural interest in literature remains, but we now have a more fractured ecosystem for being able to write and read about culture; you have to work that much harder to get attention. The attention economy has gotten more saturated and that makes it challenging to find ways to reach the right readers. The right readers are simply people who care, people who are curious, people who want to understand the world in different ways. And there’s also just so much more culture to write about. Look at TV alone. Back in the day, yes, there was cable and lots of opportunities, but now it’s cable, the networks, and streaming — you can hardly keep up with the amount of art and film, TV, books, etc. that’s being created. 

DM If you look back to the late aughts, that was the beginning of Bloggerville — everybody was writing. That sort of all died away and now there’s Substack, which seems to be decreasing to some degree as well. I think there always needs to be a place that feels like home to come back to. By reinvigorating The Rumpus now, we give people an opportunity to reconnect with something that was part of the way they understood their place in the world as writers and readers. 

NA We’re in this paradoxical moment where all this book coverage is shutting down, we’re foreclosing all of these places for critical thought, and yet there is also a glut of digital text — a lot of it very much unedited and some of it not written by humans. Thinking about the role of online magazines in today’s media landscape, how are you getting people to read the good stuff, and also the edited stuff, and the stuff that is paid for? 

RG We’re very focused on putting excellent work on the page and we’re also very focused on making sure that when people engage with The Rumpus, they’re looking at something beautiful. Something really intentionally designed. Debbie spearheaded the redesign along with Santiago Carrasquilla and they did a beautiful job making it feel like you’re reading a book, but online. Looks matter, especially in the age of templates, where you can very easily get a nice template for WordPress or whatever content platform you’re using. But we wanted to use something original. I think that the design goes a long way in bringing in readers. We do actually edit, we actually copy edit — we do the whole thing. And yes, it’s an investment, but I do believe it’s a worthy investment and I wish that more publications would remember how important it is to do this kind of work. 

NA Now that so many feminist hubs online have shuttered, what might make The Rumpus a space that your average feminist reader and writer will go to? Roxane, do you want to say anything about how your thinking on feminism has evolved in these 12 years since Bad Feminist was published?

RG Yeah, that was a very unexpected surprise and a very lovely one. It certainly brought the book to a new generation of readers, as well as readers that I would not ordinarily reach with my work.

Everything we do at The Rumpus is intentional and we strive for inclusivity. It’s not just about demographics, but we really care about putting an interesting and diverse range of aesthetics on the site. We always want to make people from any walk of life — other than, of course, bigots — feel like they are welcome here. I believe that some of the key hallmarks of feminism are intention and inclusivity — while understanding that inclusivity does not mean that we all think the same, that we all want the same things, etc. It just creates space for all of that diversity. Hopefully it does so well.

NA I saw that you were interested in running a column for incarcerated writers, which is fantastic.

RG Yes, that’s in the planning stages.I went to a dinner last year honoring the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, who had a new book coming out. He was talking about this initiative he created to put libraries in prisons, because, you know, you need something — you need hope, you need some semblance of normalcy in prison. We don’t often hear from incarcerated people in any way that is non punitive or non-critical. We thought that it would be interesting to feature some writing on a regular basis from either incarcerated or formally incarcerated people, and then also have that column edited by an incarcerated or formally incarcerated person. 

NA I was also really inspired by the America 250 vertical, because I was crashing out seeing so many writers I love writing anodyne pieces about how complicated America is. It was nice to see a space where people really honestly — and in a very diverse way — respond to this question about freedom, if this is the thing that we allegedly associate with America. I was wondering if you wanted to dig in a little bit deeper into the political thinking behind The Rumpus.

DM With the vertical, as you just said, we were really flummoxed by the ways in which people were talking about this historic moment. As if there is freedom for all when, in fact, there’s less freedoms for all than there have been in decades. We wanted to provide a way for people to see a much broader range of what freedom means to working artists today.

RG We see a lot of fear in publishing. We see a lot of fear everywhere, but we certainly see a lot of fear in publishing. That fear is not unfounded, given the current political climate, but we do hope that we always have the courage of our convictions, that we acknowledge the realities of this world with grace and with nuance, and that we are willing to take risks with what and who and how we publish. 

NA I’m thinking about how much media has changed since the early days of The Rumpus; I’m thinking of the first days where I was logging onto these sites to try to find really odd, unique, risky voices. Do you think that we can still have an internet writing community when the internet has gotten so rough?

RG Absolutely. I mean, because we do. The writing community always finds its way to each other. It was there, of course, before the internet; it was there on AOL forums. It was there on message boards. It may show up in different ways and appear in different ways, but the writing community will always be there. 

I also think that right now, the internet is becoming saturated with slop, whether it’s political slop or artificial slop. But people are already weary of it, because there’s nothing there. It’s soulless. I firmly believe that excellence and passion and creativity will always, always find a way. People are never going to stop creating simply because there are obstacles or because it’s harder to find the right audiences. Creativity persists. It has persisted across the history of humanity. Every five years or so, there’s a new sense of agita: is literature gonna die? As if we would be the generation to end literature after millennia. We have to set that hubris aside. It’s gonna be fine.

NA What’s something you’d like to see pitched to The Rumpus that you haven’t seen yet? What are some dream pieces? 

DM I love what Leanne Shapton has done with New York Review of Books, with the art on the covers and the way she’s engaging with artists throughout the magazine. I’m looking to develop more of a visual language through art to use in some inventive way at the top of the site. 

RG I don’t want to be overly prescriptive, but I would love to see more women submitting. About 60-70% of our submissions come from men, which is not new. We publish men all the time. I wish that women were more willing to shoot their shot.