The Columbia Journal launches its new podcast as co-hosts Emma Ginader (Online Poetry Editor) and Shalvi Shah (Online Fiction Editor) explore the writing processes of Fall Online competition judges Monica Sok (Poetry) and Akil Kumarasamy (Fiction). Podcast transcript available below.

When we grow up, where do we go? This is the question running through the heart of ​Find Me, Andre Aciman’s long-awaited sequel to his 2007 novel ​Call Me By Your Name​. Set decades after the ending of the first installment, we again find ourselves with Samuel, an illustrious but bumbling and lonely academic; Elio, Samuel’s son and a talented and dreamily idealistic pianist; and Oliver, the man with whom Elio had an affair, who has since developed his own brand of charismatic academic-cum-family man. What results is a story about time and how we watch it move endlessly forward and forward, while certain things stick with us and many memories don’t.

Storms pelted New York on Tuesday as Andrew Lewis sat down with Lis Harris at Book Culture on 112th to discuss his debut book, The Drowning of Money Island: A Forgotten Community’s Fight Against the Rising Seas Threatening Coastal America. The weather was appropriate given that his book centers on the aftermath of another storm, Hurricane Sandy, and its effects on the South Jersey Coast.

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another — Suzuki Roshi

While it’s been known for over a century that a mother’s cells can travel through her placenta into her unborn child, it wasn’t until 1979 that scientists discovered that the reverse is also true, finding Y-chromosome cells in a pregnant woman’s blood. In 1996 a geneticist found male fetal cells in a woman’s blood 27 years after she gave birth. These “microchimeric cells”—cells of one person that have embedded themselves into the bodies of another—are named after the monstrous fire-breathing she-creature Chimera from Greek mythology, whose sighting was an omen of disaster. The infamous 15th-century anti-witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum cast women as the embodiment of Chimera, describing her as a “monster […] of three forms; its face was that of a radiant and noble lion, it had the filthy belly of a goat, and it was armed with the virulent tail of a viper.” In other words, the treatise explained, those who embody the Chimera are “beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep.”

1. Mise en scène: Sometimes in your bed, but mostly ours is a love in exteriors, in undesirable spaces where we overlay ourselves and make like nest-bodies for one another. Maybe, we would stay out more–if we felt more held.

I

Circa 1960

Alor Star, Malaysia

3pm. Mama’s frying peanuts for the party tonight. Plates of handmade spring rolls line up, waiting for the sizzling peanuts to be done. When Mama’s not looking, I dip my finger into the bright red rose syrup sitting in the pot to cool by the window. Delicious. Heady. Not that anyone’s going to notice the color on my finger in the dark when Papa turns down the lights and the dancing begins. Papa loves to dance.

No one in our leafy suburb had ever seen anything like the yurt. When I was seven and Sachi was ten, Dad built Sachi her “reading yurt” in our backyard. It was fifteen feet tall with a white cone roof. He hung shiny stars and planets from its inner lattice rafters. Mom said she didn’t mind the yurt, but she missed looking out back into the uninterrupted horizon of towering trees.

Alice wondered if Marianne would connect the dots. She did. In about three minutes. “Wait. What’s the name of the ship?”

“The Sea Lyric,” Alice said.

“Wasn’t that the name of the first ship?”

Marianne meant the name of the ship Alice had taken for her first honeymoon, about one year ago.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Same one.”

Question of Lust

Every thought that persists is contradiction.

Marcel Schwob

Jessica puts her fingers all the way inside me like she is reaching up to hold my guts. I’m laying sideways on the bed with my underwear around my ankles, trying to stay cool about this. Her nails are sparkly and manicured to perfect points, like diamonds cut rough at the tip of her fingers.

My mother used to read to me when I was little, mostly at bedtime but sometimes in the afternoons on the couch. My favorite thing was climbing up into her lap with a book. Back then, she was always above me. She’d take the book I’d come with and hold it out in front of us. I remember the way the light came in from the balcony. With her arms around me, it felt as if I was wearing the warmth of her body, as if her beautiful face above me was mine.

In this interview, Alanna Duncan spoke to writer Cyrus Grace Dunham about queer bodies, naming, memory, and his new book, A Year Without A Name. The book, Dunham’s first – a memoir – is out from publishing company Little, Brown this month. A member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, he lives in Los Angeles.

how as the categorical theory of the scansion of our boundless distance
we started as finitesimal and infinitesimal
like divisions of membranes and compacted lovers

My mother was a den mother, but she wasn’t fanatical about it. Unlike Mrs. Kerner—the scoutmaster’s wife and leader of our rival den—she didn’t own an official uniform, nor did she attempt to educate us in the finer points of scouting, stuff like knot-tying, fire-building, and secret hand­ shakes. She considered herself a glorified babysitter and pretty much let us do as we pleased at our meetings, just as long as we amused ourselves and kept out of her hair.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.

At multiple points in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project — contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers — is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.” “Mark” (she gives the rapist a pseudonym) speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do. His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape, 14 years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life. At the very least, he’s thoughtful about it. The text, however, does not actually function as the banality-of-evil accounting that her statement of intent promises. Instead, it’s an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness.

By Mike Guisinger

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Leslie Jamison about her new book of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the slow burn of revision, and how she writes her lyric endings. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other works include Map of the Invisible World, We, the Survivors, and Five Star Billionaire, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. He is the author of a memoir of an immigrant family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was a research fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Rachel Lyon has done something many aspire to do: Made a career for herself as both a successful author and editor. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Boy, met with critical success, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Meanwhile, Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief at literary journal Epiphany. As part of our Ask the Editor series, Lyon spoke with MFA non-fiction candidate Elena Sheppard about her career path, what it really means to be an Editor-in-Chief, and what everyone who aspires to this kind of role really needs in their arsenal.