When my father died in 2015, my grandparents were suddenly left without their son. I often wonder what the difference is between grieving a child and mourning a parent. “There’s nothing so horrible as outliving your child,” I overheard my Nana tell a friend. “Losing a parent young is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” my sister explained to one of her friends during another occasion.

Constructs of American Violence consists of nine small paintings, which are details of a Civil War monument and a Civil War era cannon that reside outside the city courthouse in Traverse City, Michigan. A common sight in many towns large and small in the United States, these paintings are an investigation of the scarred and weathered surfaces (physical and cerebral) of these very American constructs to violence.

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English Literature and Asian Studies. For her MFA in Creative Writing she attended Columbia University, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship. She worked as the assistant managing editor of Samsung Economic Research Institute’s business journal in Seoul and as a travel and culture editor for CNN International in Seoul and Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, V Magazine, WWD and The Believer among other publications. Most recently, her short story “As Long As I Live” was published in the Korean-language anthology New York Story (Artizan Books, Korea). She has taught Media Studies at Ewha Womens University, Creative Writing at Columbia University and Yonsei University, and lectured at Seoul National University. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters and spends summer in Seoul, South Korea.

Shalvi Shah is the Online Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal for the 2019-2020 year. She is pursuing a joint MFA in Fiction and Translation at Columbia University, where she is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Here she speaks with Cha about her debut novel If I Had Your Face, and about art, men and women, Korean culture, and the wheels of writing.

In this interview, Jasmine Vojdani speaks with writer Porochista Khakpour about fragmented identity, being Iranian in America, regret, and her new book, The Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. In The Brown Album, Khakpour traces lifelong experiences of alienation and cultural confusion. Her family left revolutionary Iran and relocated to Los Angeles a year after her birth, but this was not the glitzy, gilded L.A. of Tehrangeles so often associated with Iranian America. These essays recount Khakpour’s horror of appearing “other” as a child, her uncanny attempts to alter her appearance and affinities in hopes of belonging, and the ways that 9/11 ultimately upended her understanding of her place as an immigrant in America.

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by Christian iconography, especially the statues of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the saints, and especially with images of the cross. I attended a Catholic school from first grade through my sophomore year in high school, and consequently my classmates and I went to mass in the adjacent church several times a week, on top of going on Sundays with our families. Because I was an altar boy, I sometimes went to church every day of the week, as I was often called upon to serve on Saturdays, at weddings, and at funerals. Occasionally, I served two or three masses in a single day.

Stephen Graham Jones has never been boxed in by genres. The prolific horror writer proudly wears that label on his sleeve, leaning into schlocky tropes of the trade in his new novel, The Only Good Indians. It’s unabashedly a slasher, and blood is plentiful, but a deeper layer runs through the material as Jones, a Blackfeet native, uses the trappings of horror to delve into a dissection of contemporary Native American identity.

Max Asher Miller, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal for 2020-2021, spoke with Stephen Graham Jones about his forthcoming novel, The Only Good Indians, a bloody book with eyes on cycles of violence, basketball, and what it means to navigate Native American identity.

Mary South’s debut story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, presents a delightful opportunity to be as unsettled by your literary fiction as you are by your News Feed. The obsessions in these stories—loneliness, shame, the taboos surrounding the expression of desire and need—emerge as her characters often unsuccessfully attempt to tackle their grief, using technology to abate it in ways that are destined to spectacularly and tragically fail.

The three poems here are from a new manuscript, A Thousand Oars in the Water – 45 Versions from Sappho to Claribel Alegría, and were rendered from other translations cribs, and notes.

Hang us together by our chests // calcium rich and hovering over // fresh pollen // floating // away from the source // gentle atop apples // rotten before they even fall // am I filled with
pollen or dust // who knows but me // in my head are bees swarming inwards // in my body

The thing about telling a story—any story—is that you inevitably find yourself defending it before an audience. This is true of board room discussions, it is true of testimonies. And it is true of writing. If you’re lucky enough to escape the travails of workshops or writer’s rooms unscathed, you’re confronted with well-meaning readers who ask you, in a room full of people, to defend your fiction.

Nigerian writer Ukamaka Olisakwe’s upcoming novel, Ogadinma Or, Everythng Will be All Right does a thorough job of painting the different shades of patriarchy. Expected in June 2020 by the Indigo Press, the book is set in the 1980s Nigeria and chronicles the life of Ogadinma, a 17-year-old girl, whose dream of pursuing a university education gets thwarted by a rich lawyer.

Anne-Flore arrived early one dawn as the inescapable proof of the mercy of God. She was born in October 2019 during the height of what came to be known in Haiti as peyilok, a country-wide lockdown stretching over a period of about three months that was radical and revolutionary, but also violent, disorganized and ultimately trying for all parties involved. The early morning of Anne-Flore’s birth was similar to many others during that period. It followed a long, tension-filled night, the darkness of which was broken by barricade fires, and the light of rubber tires aflame. Whirling smoke suffocated the moon and the stars.

Don’t weed. Look out the windows at the towering weeds.
Hate the weeds. Don’t look out the windows.
Don’t get out of bed. Let the weeds grow taller.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s journey begins among the tumbleweeds of Texas and finishes with a crawl over the Rockies and a descent into the fertile Snake River Valley. Her new book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, is an attempt to reconcile what she calls “the divide” between urbanites like herself and Americans living in the flyover states.

Bill Murray won’t leave the apartment. Get off the couch, I say. Bill Murray gives me his hangdog look. It’s not as attractive in real life as it is in the movies. I don’t feel moved when you look at me that way, I say. That’s what they always say, Bill Murray says. Bill Murray puts a cushion over his head as if that resolves it. I stamp my feet and point to the door. Leave, I say. From under the cushion comes a snore. I know you can hear me, I say. Outside, birds are waking. Inside, Bill Murray is fake sleeping. I’m warning you, I say. But Grace will miss me, Bill Murray says, voice muffled. Grace is asleep in her crib. Grace won’t even notice, I say, but I hesitate as always and Bill Murray stays.

The man lies face down on the pavement. I stare at his back and try to focus on a point to see whether or not it is rising or falling. It is difficult to distinguish a flutter of wind that ripples across the surface of his shirt from genuine breath. At four o’clock, the light is so honeyed and abundant that it catches the glint of mica in the pavement, making this task nearly impossible. I want to be close to a dead body so I can have an experience, like it is some holy relic that has the power to change me. I could tell my husband that I had had a very interesting afternoon. The anecdote might even have a life longer than that—I could feasibly trot it out at dinner parties for the next month or so.

I crouched on the carpeted floor in front of my space heater, my eyes swollen from crying. For days it had been giving off less and less heat, shutting down for a few minutes at a time before willing itself back to life. Now the heater huffed its final hot breaths. When it died completely, I did not think, “I need to grow a garden.”

The End
As the poet David Berman once said: just because everyone has died so far / doesn’t mean that we’re going to.
He killed himself, which goes to show that poems are easy to misunderstand, at least according to my students. I don’t teach anymore.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our annual Spring Contest, which was judged by Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. Winners and runner ups will be posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2020.