Nearly three decades after her mother’s death, Pulitzer prize winner and twice-appointed Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey accepted a faculty position in the city where her mother had been killed. Her return to Atlanta, Georgia set in motion the striking, nonlinear journey of this book—the past and future of the day her mother had been shot by her ex-husband, Trethewey’s step-dad—in her own apartment on Memorial Drive.

Kate Sullivan, Social Media Manager for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Lynn Steger Strong to discuss her second novel Want, a book that explores the complexities of motherhood, lost friendship, and the ways in which we live in, and in spite of, broken systems. The protagonist grapples with precarity amidst an aggregation of desires, while Steger Strong’s prose reminds us of language’s limits and the many voids it creates.

What women do with their body is something that should rarely, if ever, be in the hands of anyone besides the woman in question. And yet, it continues to be a political debate in today’s supposedly modern world. In Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Blue Ticket, she takes the reader through a dystopian society in which women have “freedom,” except when it comes to one thing: the ability to have children. Through seven parts, reading like concise poetic vignettes, Mackintosh examines the nature of rebellion, the innate strength of motherhood, and the paradox of choice.

My partner thinks I put my desk below the towel rack in my bathroom to hide from my loving parents, but that’s not the whole story. Writing fiction, to my attorney parents, financially literate sisters, and medical student partner, is a bizarre effort. They wonder what facts I work off of. Am I reading into everything they do, how they do it, and why? What does “telling the truth” mean, if mine’s the only voice on the page? My family nervously eyes my laptop and notepad. I imagine they are curious, and insecure. We’ve all been living together for three months, quarantined beneath the same butter-lettuce green rafters. Who, but them, could I be harvesting for material?

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote that while people make history, they do so under conditions not of their choosing. In the United States, I doubt anyone hoping for change would choose today’s conditions if given the option. To name a few: an economic crisis that has left millions unemployed and unable to pay rent, a militarized police force willing to brutalize even the most peaceful protestor, and armed white supremacist vigilantes emboldened by a president whose recommended cure for a global pandemic is to inject Lysol.

Madeline Garfinkle, Columns Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Hilary Leichter to discuss her new book, Temporary, a debut novel that addresses the paradox of work-life balance and what we sacrifice of ourselves for a career. The unnamed narrator, who is a designated Temp, sifts through a series of jobs which include working on a pirate ship, filling in for an endangered species, serving alongside a murderer, and acting as a boy’s mother, just to name a few. The novel brings forth essential questions about the value of work, time, and how life can slip through our fingers.

I cannot even fathom the fear my black friends in the United State face in their day-to-day lives, while buying groceries, selling loosies, jogging, or even making a phone call in their own backyard. The murder of George Floyd in police custody is not an anomaly. His murder is reflective of global systemic abuse against dark skin, and his death speaks to the intergenerational and ongoing legacy of racism that prevents equal access to justice and the chance to live a life free of prejudice. I’ve only encountered glimpses of everyday racism across the world, and the encounters make up my nightmares. It frightens me to imagine living like this across generations for four hundred years.

The genre of literary fiction in the Indian subcontinent has always been hard to come by. I think fondly of fiction by Ruskin Bond, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh. Then I think a little more because I want to think of women. I think of Arundhati Roy. I stay in that little bubble, re-reading The God of Small Things, over and over.

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the violent confrontations between gay rights activists and police after a raid on The Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned gay bar. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march to honor the riots and subsequent uprising. In years since, Pride celebrations have morphed into slick displays of corporate-backed consumption and rainbow capitalism; radical origins are glossed over in favor of thirty-day calendar acts replete with free rainbow pens and Jell-O shots, large displays of police surveillance, and police marching along parade routes that feature flashy narratives that skew white, cisgender, male.

Hay caballos en su pubis, hay caballos en su vientre, en
su pelvis hay una gaita algebraica, hay unos engranajes
de volteo, hay galápagos, en su vientre. Hay galápagos y
golpes: galopes.

On what grounds do we allow ourselves to be policed? The presumed relationship between police and civilians is one of safety. In general, we do not allow people to hold us against our will or to assault us, and we make an exception for the police on the condition that their right to violence will lead to a safer community. We understand it as a controlled violence to prevent uncontrollable violence. Political scientists refer to the legal use of violence by government agents as the “state monopoly on violence.” It is a term that, whether intentional or not, reflects a capitalist worldview. What, then, happens when police violence itself becomes uncontrollable? What happens when the monopoly on violence, much like any other monopoly, becomes an unfettered source of public harm? What happens when it becomes clear to the public that you cannot regulate a monopoly?

I always took pride in never writing in bed. My rule was that I could only write once I was dressed, out of the apartment, and sipping coffee somewhere (preferably by a window), next to a stranger whose presence held me accountable for putting words on the page.

Columbia Journal hosted a virtual panel of industry experts to discuss the intricacies of writing, editing and publishing. The two-hour conversation sought to provide answers to the big question of the day: how do editors choose what to publish?

Over the weekend, I was combing through articles, pushing beyond my boundaries for social media consumption, and frantically scribbling notes, scrambling to find a way to channel my grief, anger, and frustration. I wanted to construct the perfect essay with a perfect argument, supported by so much irrefutable evidence that anyone who read it could, and would not be distracted by anything else. They would have to face the fact that there is racism in this country, often excused and overlooked, that comes in deadly forms. Then I asked myself, “why?” Why must I use rhetoric and go above and beyond in order to convince someone of my humanity; to prove that black people should be treated as equals and not be discriminated against due to the color of our skin? My life is not a research paper. My life is not an intellectual exercise and when I navigate the world I cannot treat it as such.

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English Literature and Asian Studies. For her MFA in Creative Writing she attended Columbia University, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship. She worked as the assistant managing editor of Samsung Economic Research Institute’s business journal in Seoul and as a travel and culture editor for CNN International in Seoul and Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, V Magazine, WWD and The Believer among other publications. Most recently, her short story “As Long As I Live” was published in the Korean-language anthology New York Story (Artizan Books, Korea). She has taught Media Studies at Ewha Womens University, Creative Writing at Columbia University and Yonsei University, and lectured at Seoul National University. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters and spends summer in Seoul, South Korea.

Shalvi Shah is the Online Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal for the 2019-2020 year. She is pursuing a joint MFA in Fiction and Translation at Columbia University, where she is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Here she speaks with Cha about her debut novel If I Had Your Face, and about art, men and women, Korean culture, and the wheels of writing.

Perumal Murugan grew up in a family of farmers in Tamil Nadu. He is one of India’s most well-known literary writers, having produced ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. Several of his novels have been translated into English, including Seasons of Palm and Current Show. His best-known novel in the west, One Part Woman, was longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation. It won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.

The Columbia Journal launches its new podcast as co-hosts Emma Ginader (Online Poetry Editor) and Shalvi Shah (Online Fiction Editor) explore the writing processes of Fall Online competition judges Monica Sok (Poetry) and Akil Kumarasamy (Fiction). Podcast transcript available below.

In this interview, Alanna Duncan spoke to writer Cyrus Grace Dunham about queer bodies, naming, memory, and his new book, A Year Without A Name. The book, Dunham’s first – a memoir – is out from publishing company Little, Brown this month. A member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, he lives in Los Angeles.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.

At multiple points in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project — contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers — is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.” “Mark” (she gives the rapist a pseudonym) speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do. His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape, 14 years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life. At the very least, he’s thoughtful about it. The text, however, does not actually function as the banality-of-evil accounting that her statement of intent promises. Instead, it’s an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness.