In an interview with nonfiction MFA candidate Katie Shepherd, Chelsea Hodson speaks to writing from the self, interrogating ideas, and the joys and melancholies of life. Chelsea is the author of the book of essays Tonight I’m Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices and teaches at Catapult and Mors Tua Vita Mea.

As Jane slurped down her third cocktail, she kept eye contact with the anglerfish. It drifted up to the glass and away, its fluorescent light twitching in front of its gruesome face. Maybe Jane was projecting, but the anglerfish seemed like it was unhappy. Or maybe it was just ugly.

Welcome to Blurbed, a new round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed will feature a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Jericho Brown discusses his (lack of) writing desk, the books that inspire him as a writer, and the one thing that makes writers better.

These poems from Sara Shagufta’s book Aankhein and translated from the original Urdu by Arshi Yaseen.

Submissions for the 2018 Winter Contest are now closed. Thank you to all who submitted. Winners will be notified and announced in the Spring of 2019.

How could you know it would be like this:
touching the keys of a piano
and not finding a sound about it

What do fractals and poetry have in common? What can be gained by thinking about randomness as a universal force? Why does something happen, instead of nothing? The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen offers a new vibrant spectrum of potential answers. Considered to be a master of the avant-garde in Denmark, this posthumous translation of a collection of essays allows readers to experience her work at its most constructionally simplified. The collection is a chorus of lyrical memoir and philosophical discourse about poetry making. The discourse is written in a way in which the reader is also positioned as a poet, often articulating ideas in relationship to the reader as a fellow excavator into the chasm. Christensen’s musings articulate her ars poetica contingent on the inseparability between varying discourses, —ranging from mathematical to metaphysical as she relates, “Poetry is just one of human beings’ many ways of recognizing things, and the same schism runs through each of the other ways, be it philosophy, mathematics, or the natural sciences.” This interplay between language as a part of nature is as a way of collapsing the taxonomy that places poetry as esoteric or high-culture. Rather, poetry exists within more reachable and perceivable elevations.

On Monday, October 22, I spoke with artists Katie Giritlian and Esteban Jefferson about their collaboration and here,. The work will be released as the second issue of prompt:, a new publication from Mira Dayal and Nicole Kaack that asks two artists who have never worked together to produce a publication presented as a draft for further research. and here, takes the form of an email thread between Giritlian and Jefferson dating from July 2 to August 23, 2018. It launches today, Friday, October 26, at the CUE Art Foundation in Manhattan.

Another Scratch into a Postmodern Rabbit Hole

One way to talk about Haruki Murakami’s eighteenth work of fiction, Killing Commendatore, is as a bingo square. Many of Murakami’s usual suspects, whimsical tropes, and narrative-style of blurring the fantastic with the mundane in his works are present. Murakami creates a space for a nameless, recently divorced man as a protagonist, a space for supernatural occurrences, another for vivid descriptions about domestic chores. He creates a center space for female characters who are complex, supernatural forces at best, and reduced to coy, sexual objects at worst. The dialogue often consists of repeating what the protagonist has said. Bingo! Murakami’s characters’ lives are often described through a litany of what and how they ate and how they slept. The precise articulation of the mundane makes his more fantastical elements even more complicated and gorgeously weird.

In an interview with MFA candidate Raffi Joe Wartanian, John McPhee reflects on the panic, procrastination, and prolific output behind his celebrated approach to nonfiction. McPhee’s 38th book The Patch is one of seven essay collections for the longtime Princeton University faculty member and alumnus who began writing for The New Yorker in 1963. A recipient of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, McPhee is regarded as one of the major figures in helping shape the form of creative nonfiction.

Before the beds went away
There were bedtimes

Two poems from emerging Mexican poets Isabel Zapata and Martha Mega, which have been translated from Spanish by Manzanares de la Rosa.

All Aboard

Pittsburgh is a blue city nestled in the red part of a purple state. A political bruise. Take, for example, the pizza place on Cypress Street with the sign high up on the side of it, a four-by-four poster that has a caricature of Hillary Clinton holding a megaphone and yelling all aboard the Trump train. A week after it was put up — by the landlord of the building? The owner of the restaurant? A pizza-maker? — someone had launched something wet and gray and slimy at it, the remnants now a dark smear across the train and Hillary and dribbling down the building. I can only guess as to the contents of the projectile. A leaky bag of garbage, maybe? A torn bag of fresh dog shit? It’s impossible to say. The place also sells halal burgers. It says so, proudly, in the window, though I can’t attest to quality of the pizza or the meat.

In Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah presents us with a dystopia that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem too removed from our reality (schools push drugs on children to make them happy, people go to amusement parks to enact shootings, a white man gets acquitted of murdering five African American children on the basis of self-defense). It’s more like this dysfunctional scenario is a couple of decades into the future. Yet the stories are charming and caustic, memorable because they are full of sharp characters who are aware that their world is upside down. In the presence of the absurd, they question themselves and come up with the answer, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’

Addiction doesn’t disappear, it only changes forms. I was hooked on idleness, but now I’m hooked on work. I was hooked on weed, now I inject Ketamine. I was hooked on Azadeh, now I’m hooked on Jaleh. I was hooked on being free of family ties, but now I’m hooked on my father.

In this interview with emerging and award-winning poet and Columbia MFA alumna Susannah Nevison, Nevison talks about disability, mass incarceration, and her upcoming collection, Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Nevison is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.

A short story by classic Japanese mystery and horror writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from Japanese by Lin King.

Crime novels are often just entry points to examining culture and society. In a tense, concentrated form, mysteries give writers the perfect excuse to look beyond the illusions of an orderly reality and, by following a determined system, can gracefully and entertainingly peel back layers of deception to find real revelations about our lives and ourselves. Mystery novelist Tana French is no exception to this rule, but in The Witch Elm she has provided readers with something that feels quite new.

Friends and Strangers, Katherine Bradford’s current show at Canada, opens with a large yellow diptych depicting a group of six male-coded figures facing the viewer. The painting hangs alone in the gallery’s entryway and at first the standing men strike me as menacing — their postures signal an approach, as if they’re in formation — but the painting’s title, “Waiting Room,” suggests that these figures aren’t necessarily in league. Maybe, instead, they’re some of the “strangers” that the exhibition’s title refers to, aligned here in their shared non-task of waiting but otherwise standing as solitary subjects.