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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When my mother was a baby her father threw her into the ocean so she would be forced to learn to swim. It didn’t work.

The good old days. That’s what everyone calls them. I remember them as being old. Dry, dead, endless heat. Days hiding from the sun. Nights with only stars for witnesses. Hours of nothingness, waiting outside a village, tracking movements. And minutes filled with whizzing bullets. Paah-paah when they left the gun. Chook-chook when they hit the sand just in front of me. Or whoosh-whoosh as they zoom into the trees and bushes behind me, stripping them of foliage—it’s easy to remember the sound of bullets when they don’t hit you.

“I can’t get my characters down the stairs,” says Lily King’s protagonist in Writers & Lovers, trying to convey her writer’s block. It is hard to believe the author herself has this problem, what with this being her fifth novel among award-winning successes (though like her character, Casey, it also seems she has been working on it for six years), but King certainly understands how the living of lives and the making of art can be in conflict with one another. It is a problem at the core of her latest work, one that is unafraid to be simultaneously humorous, intimate and insightful.

The first time I tried to quit I couldn’t sleep for three days, cried whenever I heard a familiar song on the radio, and set my favorite sweater on fire. We were watching TV and there was a cantaloupe-scented candle on the endtable, and my arm must’ve gotten too close to it, because the next thing I knew Robert had jumped up shouting. It’d been a few days since I halved my dose, so I figured that was the worst of it. But by the second week I could barely stand. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be this bad,” Robert said, sweeping up shards of a plate I’d dropped, and I guess I agreed.

Silences come in all sizes—big, small, comfortable, painfully uncomfortable, short gaps in conversation, small sighs between breaths, and entire eras worth of quiet. Sayed Kashua’s Track Changes explores these silences, these unsaid words across two countries, two continents, two national identities, and two personal identities. The backdrop of the story changes, the geography of the narration changes—but the silence remains.

The tip of the boat noses into the air. She leans into it as it rises, gripping the edge of her plastic orange seat, quietly daring the motion to throw her overboard, or at least out of herself. But the seat is bolted to the boat’s base and her grip survives—when the hull slaps down she sits, hard, but is exhilarated; she breathes in the salty spray as it baptizes her. Airways that reach all the way to her core begin to clear.

While reading Carolyn Chute’s new novel, The Recipe for Revolution, you will spend a good deal of time trying to figure out where she’s coming from. That’s because this book, which is the third in a sprawling, four-novel epic about the downfall of a survivalist-style cult called the “Settlement,” is an explicitly political text from top to bottom. In often-jarring style, with a polyphony of voices employed throughout, each scene is written from the perspective of a different character. But Chute, who has often referred to herself as “no-wing,” resists strict categorization at every turn.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2019 Winter Contest, which was judged by Ruth Madievsky, Ada Calhoun, and Ottessa Moshfegh. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

There was another time and another place, and from that place, Jana’s mother pulls forth stories of swamps and leeches, broken bones, neighborhood dogs turned rabid, cars without air conditioning, snakes in yards. Her mother calls this place Childhood.