Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow House reads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

Our resident Print Translation Editor Megan Sungyoon chats with Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019) about family, Korean history, and language as a form of resistance and exploration.

“These [essays] are the prisms through which I have come to know myself. In this book, I tried to undo their acts of refraction. I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.”

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Emily Bernard about her new book of essays Black is the Body and why she can’t resist the emotional cost of showing her scars. Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Unfold, my potato
A bateau ivre full buttermouth for a bottomless breakfast
Brittany crepes and browned fats,

The first-ever 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. More guidelines can be found here. You can read about our judges below.

Even the teensiest of curtsies
will make your shadow go away.
If you envision tucking your chin

The bed at the foot of the mountain, I wished it was brighter.
The train, delayed by summons and escarpments.
The fool feasting in the dining car, a child.

Poor drunk and deeply wounded humans
who believe that love cures everything.
And now they usually see that

This is your teacher-creature speaking.
Hello blue jays, twits, and squirrels.
Hello black cat, orange, tabby.

To who,
to you and myself
some identity who tells me I’m doing it wrong

Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-part film installation, Manifesto, is situated at the approximate midpoint of the Hirshhorn’s Manifesto: Art x Agency exhibition which comprises the entire outer ring of the museum’s second floor, serving to bridge early twentieth-century manifesto-catalyzed art—futurism, surrealism, constructivism, and lyrical abstraction—with political art that speaks more specifically to contemporary concerns. It thus acts as a synecdoche of the attempt by the exhibition—and by manifestos in general—to taxonomize the breadth of history and the diversity of individual expression. The ways in which the installation subverts these tendencies make the two-hour journey one of the most compelling artistic confrontations in my recent experience, both on intellectual and sensory levels.

Michele Filgate is the kind of person who you can meet for the first time at a co-working space in SoHo, bond over both being indecisive Libras, and feel, because of her kindness and warmth, like you have always known her. Her writing leaves space for a vulnerability that can make you feel like you have always known her, too. In her essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” which inspired Filgate’s anthology of the same name, she writes about her relationship with her mother and abusive stepfather with graceful, precise sentences describing the ways in which trauma looks, feels, and sounds: “Here’s what silence sounds like after he loses his temper. After I, in a moment of bravery, scream back at him: You’re NOT my father. It sounds like an egg cracked once against a porcelain bowl. It sounds like the skin of an orange, peeled away from the fruit. It sounds like a muffled sneeze in church.”

Hello and welcome to the new 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.

The mountains loom
Large like questions
About poverty. Wages

“All the boys knew about that rotten spot,” describes the narrator of The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s searing novel set in Jim Crow-era Florida. The boys, students of Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory, are just that—boys, kids, those who were “tied up in a potato sack and dumped.”

In April, I attended Memoir Night at Franklin Park, an indoor/outdoor bar in Crown Heights that hosts a reading series on the second Monday of each month. I made the hour-long journey from Harlem to listen to Kiese Laymon and Mitchell Jackson read from their memoirs Heavy and Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. Also on the bill was Mira Jacob, a writer I did not know. Her book Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was published a few days before the event, and I didn’t know what to expect when she took her stand at the microphone while the Franklin Park crew cued up a projector.

Sylvie, the titular character of Jean Kwok’s third novel, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, a girl who learns her manners from etiquette books and studies designer brands as intently as her statistics textbooks. During her childhood, she lives with relatives in the Netherlands for nine years because her parents cannot afford to take care of her at home in Queens. Now in her thirties, Sylvie is married to an old-money husband and works as a management consultant. Her younger sister, Amy, envies her—for her elegant hips, her degrees from Princeton and MIT and Harvard, her even-keeled mind—and views herself as an “afterthought,” far from the spectacular path of assimilation even as she dreams of being a teacher. Awkward, bookish, and prone to falling in love with strangers, Amy is easily the novel’s most likable character.

Colm Tóibín has spent much of his career unearthing and troubling familial relations in works such as The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, and New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. This scholarly and writerly interview probes relationships presented by Tóibín between art and living, psychology and fiction, form and national identities, fiction and politics, art and sexuality, biography and narrative, the writing of a novel and our reading of it. Tóibín was invited as a visiting author to Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, where I was an instructor at the time. I was privileged to have dinner with him after his reading in March of 2010. Later at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Seattle, Washington during February of 2014, I attended a panel discussion session with Colm Tóibín and American novelist Rachel Kushner. Tóibín discussed a range of topics, including visual art, the historical novel, and the assertion of the writer within public discourse. In June of 2016, Tóibín responded to the following questions about relationships that permeate his writing, extending to the reader an invitation to rethink those relationships as he does in his fiction.

Translator’s Note: The last protest Luis Montenegro attended in Nicaragua was on Mother’s Day in 2018. Pro-government groups fired on demonstrators that Wednesday, killing 15 and injuring more than 200. Luis stood next to a few. Not as part of any student group—a symbolic backbone of the protests—but rather as a citizen of the country and as a practicing doctor. He decided then that he couldn’t continue risking his life; he would contribute to the still-beating movement in other ways.