Dear Chanel,

You write that your memoir Know My Name is “an attempt to transform the hurt inside myself, to confront a past, and find a way to live with and incorporate these memories.” This attempt reveals a myriad of fractures in the American judicial system. It also illuminates the reality of rape culture and chronicles your convalescence following a sexual assault by Stanford student Brock Turner that made headlines. I see this book as a reclamation of what the judge and the defense attempted to shut down: your voice. You offer guidance, critique, and analysis but through it all, you weave stunning descriptions, such as those of your home where you “watch the sun spill its yolk over the hills” and “smell the sun baking fallen shards of eucalyptus bark.”

As Ada Calhoun enters her forties, she suddenly finds herself staring at her son’s pet turtle, wondering if it wants something more from life. It sounds silly, but she realizes almost all of her female peers can relate. In Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Calhoun investigates why middle class Generation X American women (defined as those born between 1965 and 1980) are on the verge of “blowing it all up” in a different way from previous generations, haunted by what they did wrong and the versions of themselves that could have been. She writes, “How could women who wanted the challenging job and the financial independence, plus the full home life, still relate to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique?” or in other words, with all they have now, what is still missing?

What do you want people to say at your funeral?
From the comfort of the casket, would you prefer a weeping violin or a cheerful trumpet? And what about the reception—still or champagne? Waterworks or fireworks?

The winter my father’s mother moved out of our home was nothing short of fanged, for where we lived on the Gulf. The roads froze. My father drove us to visit the seniors’ facility after school twice a week, a 10-minute drive away. Her private suite had a little TV deep as it was wide; I could just barely wrap my arms all the way around. While she puttered around her stoveless, ovenless kitchen to fix us styrofoam plates of no-bake cheesecake she’d set in the fridge the night before, we would sit on her sofa and wait for the early-afternoon soap opera programming block to end and the late-afternoon game show programming block to begin.

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.

We’ve decided to extend the deadline for the 2019 Winter Contest to December 30. We hope this will allow some of you a little extra time to submit. Check out these new interviews with Ottessa Moshfegh, our fiction judge, and Ada Calhoun, our nonfiction judge!

An interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest fiction judge. Conducted by Elliot Alpern, print fiction editor.

An interview with Ada Calhoun, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest nonfiction judge. Conducted by Rachel Keranen, print nonfiction editor.

Recently my colleagues in the English Department made a collective push to compel my getting a cat since, in their generous estimations, cats have shown a remarkable affinity for me and vice versa. It is true cats do appear to gravitate towards my presence in ways my colleagues do not when I visit their homes. I have no rationale for it since I’ve never owned a cat. I also haven’t thought much about acquiring any sort of pet as of late, either, in the midst of finishing my tenure review portfolio this term. In addition, I frequently make any number of the usual excuses for not getting a cat: the expense, the investment of time, the shredding of precious material items, what will happen if the match goes wrong, et cetera. But I don’t admit to them I’m the kind of soft-hearted libertine who enjoys other people’s cats because of my complete lack of responsibility for them, knowing they will return to their owners to commit the rank misdeeds I won’t have to encounter myself. Cuddle benefits, then, with none of the fuss and dander at my place. A solid deal for me, I’d concluded. This self-satisfied mentality of mine likely irritates my colleagues to no end about my resistance more than anything else, among my other notable shortcomings.

Towards the end of her new book Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante reflects on the importance of storytelling: “An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.” This statement could be applied to the work as a whole, a collection of weekly columns the author wrote for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019 in response to questions provided by the newspaper’s editors.

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities?

In the beginning, there were only two. My brother and I, the only children our father would ever have, a man whose face we never saw. We are War and Discord, here long before such titles existed. Long before their wise carpenter gave them a new God to follow. They came and they went, and we outlived them all.

Water-bearer:
constellation of your birth,
Not a womb, but a jar,

Anonymous is the unknown author of the fifty four stanzas of the Fatrasies d’Arras. Along with the eleven stanzas written by Philippe de Rémi, these comprise the total corpus of the poetic form known as the “fatrasie,” written sometime between the years 1250 and 1300. Philippe de Rémi, a knight at the court of the Countess Mahaut, in Arras, is believed to have invented the form alone. But the form immediately lent itself to the kinds of collaborative writing practices— collaborative poems, game poems, competition poems—that were a sensation in Arras of the period. The consensus today is that the Fatrasies d’Arras were written by an unidentified coterie of virtuosic poets, who interpreted Rémi’s invention as a generative structure, one which could permit an infinite number of combinations from a finite set of rules. The exact mechanics of the writing procedure are not known. One poet may have provided some aspect of the finished poem—the rhyme words, for example, or the first six lines, or the pattern of paradoxes—and a second poet may have filled in the rest. Or perhaps they were written by circles of 11 poets, with one poet responsible for each line, in a procedure not-too-distantly analogous to the Surrealists’ cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).

It is perhaps a few days—three, to be exact—after her brother had called. They’d found her mother’s body. She’d been dead since Sunday.

“No!” she’d yelled. It really made no sense. No sense at all, she’d seen her mother days ago; she’d watched her mother’s disapproval of those expensive Parmesan crisps she’d bought melt into pleasure as they munched them with their coffee. Her mother was really a different woman.

We sit in the sauna talking, my baby brother and me. He’s twelve years younger, a serious just-turned-ten.

“More water on the rocks?” I ask. I peek up through yellowed light to the temperature gauge. It’s 75 Celsius, not as hot as we usually keep it. Even at 100 our grandparents won’t get out to cool off. We are Finnish, this is what our people do, have always done.

Around three years ago, I felt a general sense of unease invade my being. It seemed that everyone around me, including strangers on the internet, possessed a core set of beliefs and values and I did not. I grew up in India and then moved to the United States for college and graduate school. The individualistic culture of the American college environment presented a stark contrast to my upbringing. It took me a while to realize that something different was expected of me in the U.S. I could no longer rely on straightforward adherence to the values of the collective. I instead had to develop my own unique system of values, my own beliefs about what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust. What a drag, I thought.

Dressing, not stuffing. That’s a distinction she clings to even after all these years up north. Her worn hands crumble cornbread and white bread together over a mixing bowl, skin papery, veins dark. Martha has been fascinated lately with her veins. Dark, protruding, obvious—they seem so very exposed. She pokes one, and watches it roll around on her wrist like a pitiful snake. Dave had loved her dressing.

Yi held his keys in his hand, ready to leave, but Crystal was blocking his way.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “I’m on my way to meet Alberto. We can talk when I get back.”

“I called the office yesterday. Alberto said you hadn’t been in all day.”

Jenny Slate is overwhelmed, and very sweet. Her book Little Weirds came out this month shortly after her Netflix special, “Stage Fright,” and an engagement announcement. Little Weirds is made up of micro-essays, sketches and fairy-sized windows into Slate’s mind. The collection hovers around a time in Slate’s life when being alive became joyless, painful and lonely in the worst way. At times, the book flits about too much, jumping into the surreal without warning. It’s disorienting. But when Slate hits a truth, which she does again and again, her perspective asserts itself with a gentle, earnest: Here I am!