THE COLUMBIA JOURNAL · ISSUE 64
LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
Dear readers,
I’ll admit, I was intimidated to write this letter. Since the Columbia Journal’s inception in 1977, our one hundred percent student-run literary magazine has housed artwork by Jenny Holzer and Kara Walker; poems by John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Fanny Howe and Carl Phillips; and prose by Joan Didion, Phillip Lopate, and Joyce Carol Oates. On my trip through the archives, I discovered that an earlier draft of Raymond Carver’s infamous story “A Small Good Thing” was first published in the sixth issue of the Journal as “The Bath.”
While these names easily bring a theme to mind—artistic reverence—we weren’t aiming for reverence when we first met as a team. Instead, our editorial board wanted to curate something that felt playful and fresh, while still paying homage to the storied history of our magazine.
Binaries are exciting because they can evoke a surprising equilibrium just as much as they can generate conflict. In this vein, Issue 64 contains “short” stories that span lifetimes; essays that thread memory’s natural subjectivity alongside neuroscience’s cold and clinical precision; visual art that conveys the startling beauty of ecological collapse; and poems where nature’s expanse emboldens the body … or swallows it.
The moment you picked up this journal and began reading this letter, you too, reader, enhanced it with your fingerprint of experience. I hope that living in these elemental binaries propels you to create and play. Play is, after all, its own kind of reverence.
Yours,
Aimee Clemens
Editor-in-Chief