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.

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.

In this interview, Editor-in-Chief spoke with writer Sarah Ramey about her debut memoir, The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday), a book that examines the author’s years-long battle with an illness that doctors found themselves unable to diagnose and the overall treatment of women’s pain in the U.S. healthcare system. Here, she discusses the role structure plays in the work, the process of healing through research, and why she does not mind calling herself a “hope monger.”

In this interview, Sarah Gheyas spoke to Peter Frankopan about his latest book, The New Silk Roads, which looks at the shifting geopolitics and the rising global influence of industrial powerhouses of Central Asia. Peter Frankopan authored the highly acclaimed international bestseller, The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World (Bloomsbury 2018) and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury 2015), both of which have been translated into more than thirty languages. Other notable books include a revised translation of The Alexiad (Penguin Classics 2009) and The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Harvard University Press, 2012). He’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The London Evening Standard. Prospect Magazine named him One of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019. He currently chairs the Ondaatje Prize at the Royal Society of Literature, the Cundill History Prize and the Runciman Book Prize. He is professor of Global History at Oxford University, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is also the founder of the hotel franchise, A Curious Group of Hotels.

Ascendent Mexican author Fernanda Melchor makes her English-language translation debut with “Hurricane Season,” a whirling novel that rages ahead from the first page, when a group of boys discovers the town’s Witch floating dead in a drainage ditch. In chapter-long chunks of text, Melchor illustrates a troubled town’s response to this socially fraught incident of foul play. Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes, the book’s profanity-laden pages sustain its sense of dismal fury.

I had forgotten what wet felt like. Perspiration pooling from my pink water jug on the side table next to my hospice bed—how it grew. Clanking of ice cubes in my mother’s glass settling on top of the side table—how they created waves. Pellets of rain that leaked through the window sill—how they jumped from the ledge and awaited the floor. Even their mud, my fresh blood—how they created sludge on the cloudy floor. How they knew I was thirsty.

Nina St. Pierre speaks with author Paul Lisicky in this interview about his sixth book, the memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World. Set in the early ’90s, Later is a prismatic rendering of life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the height of the HIV and AIDs epidemic. In Later, Lisicky renders it a one-word mythology: “Town”—a location both in and out of time, where the synthesis between death, sex, and community, is nuanced, contradictory, and ultimately, life-affirming.

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.

A.
Draw a circle around yourself
and pray seventy years
for rain that it might come

In this interview, Columbia Journal online arts editor Jai Hamid Bashir talks to poet Jane Hirshfield about her ninth poetry collection ​Ledger​ ​(Knopf, March 10, 2020), a deeply observant and stunning text about our species relationship with this Earth, beauty, and ourselves.

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.