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Bel Canto to Bulgaria: The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell’s first novella, Mitko, won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Greenwell discusses “gay identity,” loneliness abroad, and art songs with Shara Lessley.His poems have...
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Round Trip
My boyfriend and I were on Knez Alexandar, the main shopping drag in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, waiting for the tattooed palachinki vendor to finish his Rick James imitation and give me my crepe. He was a smug...
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We Who Leave
My grandmother died this past January, and I did not attend her funeral.I live in Boston now and she lived in Hisarya, Bulgaria, and I could not afford the plane ticket. This is the equation every...
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True Romantic #10: A Small Black Velvet Box
A number of surprises awaited me when we arrived in Sofia in May 2002.First, I learned that Marius’s visa situation was much more complicated than we had originally believed. It turned out that his J-1...
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True Romantic #11: To Find a Rainbow
It was at the twelve-week prenatal exam that we learned we would be having a baby boy.If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said the usual mantra pregnant mothers chant: As long as it’s...
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True Romantic #12: A Strange Feeling
In the beginning months of our time in Bulgaria, we lived in Marius’s house, a big place that Yana and Ivan had given him as a wedding present for his first marriage. The house wasn’t in Sofia itself,...
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True Romantic #13: God or Fate or Whatever
The contractions started too soon. I was walking up the stairs of the apartment in Izgrev, Adam’s hand in mine, and the wall of muscles in my abdomen locked up, hard and tight, as if a belt were...
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True Romantic #14: On Hold
Marius came back from Izgrev with a container of curry and rice, some chocolate, and a case of bottled water. He’d filled a suitcase with extra clothes, some books and a blanket. He handed me his...
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True Romantic #15: Division of Labor
Emma was born in the middle of a cold January night in Maichin Dom. She came into the world with one sharp cry, a beautiful and pitch-perfect sound that sliced through the silent delivery room. Marius...
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True Romantic #17: Ripping Free
By Christmas 2003, Adam hadn’t seen his father for over a year. Sam and I agreed that it was time for a visit, and so I bought tickets back to the Midwest for the holidays. In the past year, Sam had...
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True Romantic #19: A Heavy Weight
We set about applying for MFA programs. I showed him the online applications for some of the best creative writing programs: Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, Brown, Cornell. The applications were on the...
View ArticleCapturing the Movement of Consciousness
For Electric Literature, Laura Preston interviews Garth Greenwell about his recent debut novel What Belongs to You. The two discuss what led Greenwell to transition from writing poetry to fiction, his...
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
The week I conducted this interview with Garth Greenwell, author of the breathtaking novel What Belongs to You, my five-year-old son first learned the term “potential energy.” My son and I spent that...
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Bel Canto to Bulgaria: The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell’s first novella, Mitko, won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Greenwell discusses “gay identity,” loneliness abroad, and art songs with Shara Lessley.His poems have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Round Trip
My boyfriend and I were on Knez Alexandar, the main shopping drag in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, waiting for the tattooed palachinki vendor to finish his Rick James imitation and give me my crepe. He was a smug...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We Who Leave
My grandmother died this past January, and I did not attend her funeral.I live in Boston now and she lived in Hisarya, Bulgaria, and I could not afford the plane ticket. This is the equation every...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov’s debut novel Stork Mountain is a multi-layered, multi-faceted story about family secrets, young love, superstition, politics and religion set in a remote mountain region dripping with...
View ArticleRecollections of Home
The woman looked at me when she finished reading, smiling, expecting me to compliment her English. But I couldn’t speak, moved beyond words by a sense of homecoming in this place so far from home.Over...
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The Rumpus Interview With Danielle Trussoni
Not long after the success of her first novel, Danielle Trussoni’s life became a fairy tale, when she and her writer husband Nikolai moved their family to a magical 13th century fortress in the...
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The Evolution of Present-Day Greece: Talking with Nanos Valaoritis
Ioannos (Nanos) Valaoritis has been widely published as a poet, novelist, and playwright. The grandson of Aristotle Valaoritis, a famous nineteenth-century poet, Valaoritis escaped German-occupied...
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