In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Melissa Febos about being honest with yourself, dropping out of high school to become a writer, and her next essay collection Girlhood. Melissa Febos is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017. Her third book, Girlhood, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ucross Foundation, and Ragdale. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and an associate professor and graduate director at Monmouth University, her work has recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times.

the sparrows
they let their wings down
& I let the dishes gather
I was not as I wanted

National Book Award winner Lily Tuck is very familiar with tackling the plights of women characters across time and place in her writing. Her latest work, Heathcliff Redux and Other Stories, picks up on these themes while also playing with form. Comprised of a novella and four short stories, the collection looks at human situations with control and complexity as Tuck takes readers through a number of case studies where characters hope (mostly to little avail) to be an exception to the cruel rules of reality.

At the Columbia Journal, we believe in creating space for and celebrating traditionally underrepresented voices. We seek out and support marginalized writers year-round, but this March marks our first ever Womxn’s History Month special issue. Our website will feature writing and creative expressions from artists reflecting the diversity of non-men, non-binary folx, women, and all those of marginalized genders. We are particularly interested in work related to the intersectionality of gender and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration, age, sex, sexual and/or romantic orientation, class, and more.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our badass and wonderful judges include Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction.

All those local to New York City and nearby: join Columbia Journal staff, faculty advisors, and alums for an evening of spelling fun! Talented writers from the community will go head to head in a battle of wits. As Taylor Swift so famously sings: “Spelling is fun.”

As if sprinkling stars onto the sky
or hiding gold nuggets under the earth
I will take this lingering love and

Your memories of the museum are from your college years: visits and winter work terms when you come from Vermont and stay with the Siegels, your parents’ best friends. You feel valued, part of a family again, especially as a young woman among their three sons, always one of them in the midst of some sixties rebellion. The museum is a favorite destination. You head first to the top floor rotunda around the dome where most of the Monets are hung. There you can stand close to the paintings, examining the brush strokes, the mix of colors. But you can’t step back to see how they compose an object; you’d be in midair, three stories up. Somehow this delights you.

Ode to a Wreck
Praise to my ovaries, those broken
little bee hives busy with trying. I’m sorry

We’d been dating for only a short month and already cohabitating on Seneca Street in Tucson, when Leslie, my future wife, invited me to her family’s home, 120 miles north in Tempe, to meet her parents and to subject me to a Lutheran Christmas Eve dinner in the desert. On the approach to her house, while popping a breath mint, I noticed a sort of Arizona nativity scene on the neighbor’s roof: an inflated Santa in flowered shorts and sunglasses falling-down drunk into a fake chimney. It was very anti-Norman Rockwell-esque.

It’s a fruitful and useful thing to learn how to read like other people and those who are not like you. As each writer has a writing style, as each musician a method, a critic too, has a way of reading. Criticism done well, according to James Wood in the introduction of Serious Noticing, is bearing witness, “writing through a text,” a balance between the writerly, journalistic and scholarly.

In this interview, Claire Foster spoke to writer and translator Katie Shireen Assef about her recent translation of Black Forest (Deep Vellum), a slim, quiet book of ghosts and grief by French writer, filmmaker and visual artist Valérie Mréjen.

A skeleton sat in front of a café drinking coffee while he read a magazine. The magazine was called Deadly Sins Quarterly. The skeleton daydreamed about publishing his photography in the magazine. He took photos of the various realms of hell, mostly. He took a photo of Lucifer playing an acoustic guitar. He took photos of rivers of fire and clouds of smoke. He took photos of red dragons and old wizards. His photography was showcased in New York City, Paris, Mexico City, and, of course, Hell. The skeleton finished his coffee, tipped his waiter generously, and returned to the cemetery to practice yoga.

The last time it snowed in Phoenix I was nine and we all still lived together in the big house. In my mind snow was grouped with landscapes like forests and the ocean and with phenomena like the Northern Lights. In Phoenix snow was used as a decoration for Christmas—I remembered cutting tissue paper into snowflakes in second grade, and watching Dad hanging light-up icicles from the eaves of our house like earrings. I think we were both surprised when it snowed—me and my city.

In Crossing, Finnish-Kosovar novelist Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a queer narrator starts over in every city—sometimes presenting as a man, sometimes as a woman. In each new location 22-year-old Bujar claims a new heritage and a new history. The book opens after Bujar’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in Rome, travelling from place to place, restlessly pulling on and discarding identity after identity—in Germany claiming to be a woman from Bosnia, in New York claiming to be an actor who has acted in small-scale productions all across Europe, in Helsinki claiming to be an immigrant from Italy. He constantly seeks a city in which he can be comfortable, where he can be himself, though what he considers himself to be is sometimes in flux and ambiguous. The one identity he declines to claim is his own: the name Bujar, the life of starvation, deprivation and tragedy in Albania he led and fled ten years ago with his close friend and sometime lover, Agim.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Winners of the Spring Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. Up to three finalists will also be selected and announced in each genre and published on our website, though there is no cash prize. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is February 23rd, 2020. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here.

Tell me about last night
I drank when I hadn’t been drinking so everything felt like a movie
about being sixteen: all those big emotions. The swirl of ice in the glass.

In an alleyway between the Uptown Theater and the Mister Maharashi Indian Restaurant, a cocaine dealer is waiting for a client. Warily, shiftily, he glances up and down the street. Occasionally he looks behind him into the alleyway, which connects to a second alleyway, which in turn connects to a third and a fourth, giving the dealer multiple paths of escape—lines of flight—if police come down the street to catch him. Like a woodchuck, he has left himself many exits from his burrow.

“I never imagined I’d write about boys,” Orenstein writes in her new book Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. Her previous work, Girls & Sex, focused on modern sex and relationships for high school and college-aged young women. Despite this, three years after that book—now against a background of #MeToo, President Donald Trump, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Orenstein has shed light on the other side of the story. Through a combination of extensive interviews with young men and sociological research, the book seeks to move beyond the space of think pieces written by men and actually include them in the conversation. It gives readers a digestible overview of the problem.

we’re quiet for a moment
don’t sing out loud in pubs
don’t make love in public places