Rachel Rueckert, nonfiction MFA candidate, spoke to travel writer Pam Mandel about her career path and recently released book, The Same River Twice: A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel, a coming-of-age story about an unconventional, emotionally fraught gap year at home and abroad. With no guidance or concrete plan, Mandel embarks on a tangled journey across three continents, from a cold water London flat to rural Pakistan, from the Nile River Delta to the snowy peaks of Ladakh and finally, back home to California, determined to shape a life that is truly hers.

You shouldn’t be here, but inside your head you’ve already escaped, that’s what you tell the other inmates, but they just snicker like they’ve heard that before, so you tell the concrete wall that the cops arrested the wrong girl and you just happened to be at the same party, a little fucked up but basically in control, dancing to Common in the living room while your two best friends made out with the Brezinsky twins from Saginaw who love no one, not even themselves, but you’re no gangbanger, you don’t even know how to shoot a gun, you don’t trust them because guns make efficient divorces, they kidnapped your papa and made a Christian lunatic out of your mama, in fact, if the police did their fucking research, they’d know you abhor guns and the idiots who use them to feel in control against the criminal world inside their own heads

Richard died New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 63. From this widow’s point of view, one confounding thing about death is its persistence through time. Day in, day out, year after year, the dead remain dead, even if they return momentarily in dreams or conversation or correspondence. You’re still dead? I find myself asking Richard, even though I’ve been happily remarried for 15 of the 22 years since he died. (Once, I dreamt that Richard returned. I am happy to see you, I said. But I am married. To someone else. That’s all right, he said, slipping into bed next to me and my husband).

That’s what happens if you dive in murky water;

everything disappears from sight, you start looking

at that lot of nothingness closing in around you.

Everything looks as you wish it did not.

When you lift your head, your eyes shut quickly.

“Friction,” by Marieken Cochius, is a selection for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Uprising in the art category.

Editor’s Note: “Civics Unit: Naturalization Test” by Mariya Zilberman, was chosen by Ruth Madievsky as the poetry winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.

“I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man twice my age.”

Editor’s Note: “Chimera,” by Kathleen McNamara, was chosen by Ada Calhoun as the nonfiction winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.

Speak to lightning, a memento of my beloved

—plunging into still dark—

if he remembers how he thundered me:

I was laying on my couch, fishing pot stickers out of a Chinese to-go box, and watching a movie on my ex’s Disney+ account when my phone started chirping to life, and the record should note that I was done with the day.

The moment you hit send you know you’re fucked. Still, there’s a chance that if you move fast enough you can rip the cable from the back of your computer and prevent the email from blasting out to the group distribution list. Processing that thought takes less than one second and is accompanied by what feels like a full quart of adrenaline hitting your bloodstream with the force of a speedball. And so down you go, oblivious to the perilous state of your heart, which is already jackhammering an exit from your chest, into a briar patch of dust bunnies and dog-eared copies of The Economist and paper bag sarcophagi of rancid half-eaten lunches. Another second. You find the wire and yank so hard that your elbow smacks the underside of your desk and launches a Starbucks cup filled with two days of tobacco spit onto the carpet next to Alvarez’s foot. He recoils and fires off automatic rounds of trilled and profane vernacular but you barely hear it because you’re back on your feet in a modified three-point stance, your chair capsized next to you, your hand on the desk for support, your face six inches from the screen, searching for the parenthetical that will save your life: Outbox (1).

“Adversity,” by Neesa Ahmed, is a selection for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Uprising in the art category.

Shalvi J Shah, an MFA candidate in Fiction and Literary Translation and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, talks to author Jenny Bhatt about craft, cultural stereotypes, her debut short story collection Each of Us Killers, and how far artists go to create.

I mean, come on coach, you know what it’s like, when you’re on the ice and you’re all hopped up and ready to go. You used to play too. And my dad played football and hockey for a bit when he was growing up. You should hear some of the things they’d say to each other then. He’s told me. Like some messed up shit. Like when we drive home after games, he says things to me, too. About how I need to move my feet more and keep my head up, and about how you’ve gotta dominate the enemy. Fuck ‘em. Get in their heads, ya know? That’s just part of the game. Chirping. Talking. Blowing kisses. Like, I get it, I understand what was so bad. But, I mean, come on coach, I’m sure it’s not the first time he’s heard that word. We listen to rap in the locker room, don’t we?

Columbia Journal is excited to introduce our podcast with poet Joe Pan, publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press and the smallest press to ever win the National Book Awards. Hear the episode, which details a conversation between Columbia Journal’s Issue 58 editors Shalvi Shah and Emma Ginader. Find out what it means to be a good literary citizen, how longing and anguish can create space for civic or literary engagement, and the perils and joys of small press publishing in this riveting interview with one of the literary world’s visionaries.

To be butchered between the banks
of North & South Bend & Black Lives
Matter asked her to suspend

How do you heal from the pain of growing up? This question, refracted through a feminist lens, lies at the heart of Melissa Febos’s essay collection, Girlhood. With psychological clarity and emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the future.

Abhigna Mooraka, Columns Editor for Columbia Journal Issue 59, spoke to author Avni Doshi about her Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar, her writing process, and her art history background among other things. Burnt Sugar releases in the United States in January 2021 through The Overlook Press.

On the first day of lockdown, I play a movie for the kids so I can move bedroom furniture: eight-drawer dresser, queen bed, desk, file cabinet, nightstand, lamps. My husband works upstairs, in the apartment of neighbors who have fled upstate.

I am a part
of whatever I create,
my contradictions and my compunctions