The Columbia Journal Online Editors are delighted to officially announce that the Columbia Journal Fall Contest is now open for submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and, for the first time, art. Our judges will be Akil Kumarasamy (fiction), Monica Sok (poetry), Emily Bernard (nonfiction), and Helena Anrather (art). The four winners of the Fall Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. At least three finalists will be selected and announced in each of the four genres in the fall. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is August 9th. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. You can read the full contest guidelines below.

The ways in which you are able to house stories within stories throughout White Dancing Elephants is mesmerizing. Several stories have aspects of nesting dolls, especially with the merging of myth and realism. How did the two influence each other?

Hello and welcome to the new (and possibly improved?) Blurbed. Each month, columns editor Adin Dobkin gives recommendations from his reading list, as well as listening to Columbia Journal editors’ thoughts on reading, writing, or whatever happens to be on their minds.

“Here’s proof that the algorithm is, in fact, fallible,” begins one panel of Melanie Kruvelis’s New York City grief pamphlet, part travel brochure, part how-to guide for the bereaved: “Spotify compiles no playlists for mourning complicated father-daughter relationships. Maybe grief is just too messy for recommendations curated by capitalism. Besides, what would they call that playlist?…‘Estrangement + Chill’?”

tarah douglas describes her work as “conceptually motivated,” which is a way of saying she’s not tied to one medium. Though other projects like studies of jahyne and pillowsforsadboiysz have married photography and textiles, her most recent work, called daysmissingu, is a series of watercolors created over the duration of a period of grief. Often so watery that the pigments bleed together, these paintings are very intentional indices of an ongoing emotional experience, a way, douglas says, to represent her “internal-emotional landscape.” On a recent Saturday morning, we spoke on the phone about her work and about making space: safe spaces, space for grief, and space for responding to the world.

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Alex Dimitrov discusses capitalism, social media, and his upcoming book, Love and Other Poems. After reading this interview, we hope you will read his new poem, “Having a Diet Coke with You” published here.

is even better than a regular Coke
because in New York the streets are so skinny
I’m always worried about my hair

This poem, Joke 3, has been taken from “And here’s the song” by Hélène Sanguinetti, and has been translated from the French by Ann Cefola.

My friend, she was telling me
How everything she owns can fit in five suitcases,
and how liberating that is.

The following short story “La coda” (“The Tail”) comes from Luigi Malerba’s posthumous collection Sull’orlo del cratere (2018, On The Edge of the Crater). It has been translated from the Italian by Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike.

This couple, then, entered, without their knowing it, an unendurable zone, years in the making. Most nights they came back to their apartment in Greenpoint from their office jobs, though he returned thirty minutes before her. Then they ate, often take-out, and watched TV, often the latest cutting-edge series. It’s not that they didn’t speak, but they weren’t exactly thrilled to hear each other. They created a stagey type of interplay, with a lessening of surprises, so that everything was gists and gestures—the pretense often indicating the expected. Seven years they’d logged, five together, and they moved to Greenpoint just when the cool people left it, bemoaning the fact that their few important friends, who all lived in Brooklyn, rarely made the ponderous trip via the homunculus of the subway, the G.

Days we thought we’d lived before:
routines of conversation and television
shows that we already knew the endings of.

On September 22nd, 2010, a student from Rutgers University logged onto Facebook and wrote what would later become the most widely read suicide note of all time:

After a while, we stopped counting the dead
and let the body of the wind push us into departure.
Nothing civil about war, everything numb with distance.

In this interview, Columbia MFA candidate Jared Jackson speaks with Joshua Furst about his second novel, Revolutionaries, and sheds light on critical choices he made while crafting the book, which transports the reader to the 1960s—a period of love and violence, and a touchstone of cultural significance for those with visions of radical change and societal disillusionment. Filtered through the sharp voice of Fred, a grown-up child of the counterculture, Revolutionaries takes off the nostalgic, free-loving, psychedelic sunglasses of the period, and glares at the cost that idealism— genuine or otherwise—has on the relationships of those involved.

“Our mothers are our first homes,” writes Michele Filgate in the title essay of a new collection she edited, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence. The mother’s body is also the site of the first tragedy, the instant when we are torn from the nurturing safety of the womb and sent into the loneliness that we will never escape. It is no wonder that the image of the mother resonates throughout history with both pleasure and pain, with love and longing. It is no wonder that this collection of essays about mother-child relationships, written by contemporary authors who are diverse in age and race, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status and writing style, can touch every reader.

This short story by Jung Young Su won the New Writers Award in Fiction from Changbi Quarterly in 2014, and has been translated from Korean by Anton Hur.

When the shadow of the earth fell on the moon it was red like the cherry you left on my neck— which is another way of saying it seemed to turned purple with the night and brought with it tears from blinking against the wind—which is another way of saying it was cold like the tiles we laid down on in the Carl Andre exhibit—which is another way of saying we joined the dark spot of a fluorescent world waiting for the white walls to fall—which is another way of saying we were surprised when security laughed and said yeah, they do that too—which is another way of saying our violation was unoriginal and could be called customary—which is another way of saying the 144 magnesium square tiles had a similar energy to the wrestling mat at your high school—which is another way of saying we are still on our backs looking up and waiting for God or a referee to call the match—which is another way of saying it was a draw and we left the museum in something of a daze—which is another way of saying we felt suspended like astronauts—which is another way of saying our blood wasn’t where it should to be.

There are many Frida Kahlos inside the Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. There is a diminutive Asian girl with a crown of braids, dressed in a long red skirt and embroidered blouse. There is a tall blond man with fine penciled unibrow, a headband with enormous flowers, red kitten heels. Kahlo stretches across T-shirts of little girls on tiptoes, across bags, phone cases, the red painted lips of gallery-goers and the flowers in their hair.

Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.