“War is what happens when words fail.”
-Margaret Atwood
At Columbia Journal, we believe that the stories and voices of our service members should be celebrated within our creative communities and circulated among the people for whom they served. This November, we hope to bring to civilians a better understanding of military culture, from every veteran who has a story to tell. For the first themed feature of the 2017 academic year, in honor of Veterans Day and all those who have served, our website will feature writing and creative expressions inspired by or concerning the military experience. Please submit to us, until October 31st, 2017, your poetry, essays, nonfiction, fiction, translated works, art, music, and film.
Guest Editor Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. He is the bestselling author of All the Ways We Kill and Die and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named a New York Times Editor’s Pick and an Amazon Best Book. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, Boston Globe Magazine, VICE, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Buzzfeed, The Daily Beast, and on National Public Radio. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, a collection of short stories featuring veteran writers, and has twice received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, and to paddle the 1200 mile Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 2016. His newest book, Disappointment River, will be published by Doubleday in the spring of 2018.
