My niece said, “Grandpa! Did you get to meet Aunt Lucy’s girlfriend? Do they kiss a lot?”—Lucy Weems, Inmate #922870C

Poet, essayist, and translator Ulalume González de León believed that “Everything has already been said,” and, thus, that each act of creation is a rewriting, reshuffling, and reconstructing of one great work. For this reason, she chose the title Plagios (Plagiarisms) for her book of collected poems. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz called Ulalume González de León “the best Mexicana poet since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” recognizing the visionary quality of her work.

Recently, a political candidate was put on the spot in an interview with a question. It’s a question that has plagued us—as Clare Beams demonstrates in her debut novel The Illness Lesson—for a long time, one that hinges on the inherent believability of women’s stories. The interviewer asked, rather dismissively, about a woman who alleged she’d been discriminated against while pregnant. With telltale condescension, he wondered why we should believe this woman’s story.

“Maybe we should run away.”
I stop cutting carrots into tiny squares. I scan my husband, trying to spot any signs of crazy or burnout, as he is normally abnormally logical. I see that his tie is off; it lies quietly a top the back of his chair and his shirt buttons are undone at the top but not haphazardly so. His shoes are on the right feet. I ask him what he means in a way that does not give away my concern. In reply he jabs his phone into the air between us and gives me two words, presented as though they were gifts. I take his phone, the screen of which is alive with letters. I read while the carrots dry out on the bench. “It’s mad.” I say when I am done, and he agrees but we keep quoting the article to each other until we get into bed. Then it is quiet save for the clicking of the pipes and the two of us thinking together.

He threw the pen aside and collapsed onto the lumpy chair, resting his aching body. Dazed, he silently stared into the distance. Last Monday, a strange ethereal shadow had appeared out of nowhere, settled over his head, and loomed over him ever since. He was able to bat it away, sometimes, but it still peeked out at him from time to time, and he felt as though it might engulf him, all of him, at any moment. Strangely enough, he could not discern what it was or fathom its nature; he didn’t know why this specter had invaded his body and soul. He winced at its presence, his face contorting with both misery and dread. Every time the shadow overtook him, he felt overwhelmed by deep confusion and dejection.

In her latest collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You., Samantha Irby details life now that she’s forty, married, and living in the Midwest with her wife. Though (spoiler alert) depression has followed her from Chicago, Irby’s collection shows a little more vulnerability and a little less deflection than her previous books. She has a way of making you feel close to her. Despite proclaiming that much of her work (including her previous books Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life) has been primarily “about butts,” Irby delivers essays in Wow, No Thank You that are pithy, laugh-until-you-bend-over-funny and insightful.

“Silence is so accurate.”—Mark Rothko
That winter when winter was thick as a knot, Rothko sat
sluggish in long-johns and warm black

By Winniebell Xinyu Zong

My mother knows how
to choose the best: the ones
with smooth pale skin.

In Bird Summons, by Leila Aboulela, three Muslim women in three fragile marriages take a vacation to a remote loch in Scotland, with the intention of visiting a Scottish convert’s grave site. Each of the women wants to change her life, but they are all afraid of the costs of releasing themselves from the responsibilities and burdens to which they are tied. Moni devotes her life to her disabled son, at the expense of her marriage and her own work. Salma idly considers cheating on David, her husband of more than twenty years, with an old flame. And Iman, the youngest, finds herself freshly divorced for the third time and craves independence from men.

The Washerwomen’s strike is assuming vast proportions and despite the apparent independence of the white people, is causing quite an inconvenience among our citizens….There are some families in Atlanta who have been unable to have any washing done for more than two weeks.

—Atlanta Constitution, 26 July 1881

Two days after I watched Pan’s Labyrinth and practiced self-awareness with Meshkov, my spiritual guru, I was walking down Marshal Zhukov Street and sniffing my hand—every finger, my palm, and even nails—but for nothing. There was no smell. That didn’t stop me. I treaded towards the crowd gathered around an office building. Some of them were smoking. As soon as I passed them and the air was clear again, I sniffed my shoulder and the upper part of my arm. Nothing.

The woods were a kaleidoscope of women. Tall, rangy women with muscled arms in cut offs. Women with mohawks in their best butch leather get-ups. Women cutting onions and serving veggie burritos, women hanging off the back of beat-up pick-up trucks as they made recycling rounds, and women preparing to perform nightly under the moon and stars. Women sprinkled everywhere on the lush Michigan land that lay empty eleven months of the year. It’s hard to imagine anywhere else with a greater concentration of pheromones wafting through the air than here, in these ferns and forest. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was the perfect place for romance – and sex.

I entered the world a textbook case. My earliest thoughts were, I am a boy. I behaved traditionally male in every way, eschewing girl’s toys, books, games, clothing, monikers. At four, I asked my parents for “sex change surgery.”

Based on her 2015 Vice article, “London, Ontario was a Racist Asshole to Me,” Eternity Martis wrote a memoir of her time in college, They Said This Would be Fun, which comes out this March 31. The book follows Martis’ time at Western University and the racism and sexism she experienced there. This is not a book about one time or place, though. The systemic issues and lack of formal policy to bring stories like hers to light are widespread. Martis writes about the body in stressful and harmful times, boyfriends gone so wrong they dip into Greek tragedy, and separates the chapters with pithy interstitials named “The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students.” Her memoir dives into friendship, family connection and growing up as a woman. It is her first of a two-book deal with McClelland & Stewart. In this interview, Columbia Journal’s Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp caught up with her over the phone. Eternity Martis is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and editor whose work has been featured in The Huffington Post, VICE, Chatelaine, Canadaland, Salon, CBC, Hazlitt, The Walrus, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, J-Source, Xtra, The Fader, Complex and many more.

I tend to think of memoir as a somewhat serious genre, lending itself toward the charting of a life via chronology, with moments of intimacy and confession along the way. There are exceptions to this gravitas, of course, such as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, but it is rare that I set down a memoir and remark on its vitality. Comedian Cameron Esposito’s new book Save Yourself has landed on my shortlist of memoirs that blend interiority and laugh-out-loud wit. Her writing is insightful and generously open, and her voice leaps from the page.

true stories

ANTS

An hour had not yet passed, since Tanaka slept with his neighbor’s wife, when ants squirted out of his manhood. Each time the teenage boy felt the urge to piss, one by one little black ants crawled out from his shaft instead of droplets of urine. They did not come quietly, these ants. They bit into his flesh, tickled his veins with their antennae, and danced their way out of him with each of their six little legs.

The man’s first wish: a job where he could earn promotions without kissing up to his manager or navigating office politics. A job where he needed only hard work, perseverance, and a respectable amount of smarts to achieve society’s definition of success—a bonus, stock refresher, leadership role in cross-functional efforts where he got to stand in front of other men wearing suits and fancy watches. The genie, a jaded young woman who enjoyed watching old Disney films while eating hard-boiled eggs dipped in chili spice powder—whites first, then yolk—and scrolling through Instagram, granted his wish. The man found a job at an up-and-coming smart car company where he simulated driving environments to test the car’s artificial intelligence—an algorithm quality check without the overhead of a sensor-bolted car and traffic light-disobeying pedestrians skirting the edge of mortal peril.

Harry Dodge is well known as a visual artist whose works are in the permanent collection of museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. My Meteorite or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing is his first book, and it is as experimental in form and subject as his other creations. Like all works of art, it is an attempt to create patterns, to impose some order on our experience of the world. While the book has many virtues, it sometimes fails in that task, leaving us with a postmodern sense of randomness to which the book’s subtitle bows.

One overcast Saturday morning, eight months after my father’s suicide, my seventh-grade baseball team spent an hour practicing drag bunts. Unlike most bunts, which are designed to move existing baserunners while sacrificing the batter, the purpose of a drag bunt is to earn a base hit. When drag bunting, batters should remain in their normal upright stance as long as possible, pretend they want to swing hard until the pitcher is about to release the ball. Good drag bunters are con artists. They convince infielders to position themselves for line drives, far from the plate and the danger of hard hits. After they have fooled the fielders, drag bunters try to make soft contact with the ball so that it bounces slowly toward the first or third base foul line.