Columbia students launch a literary journal for veterans

Three Columbia MFA students, Sam Granoff, Jacob Thomas Schultz, and Stephanie Wobby, teamed up to found The Line, a journal of creative work by veterans and members of military families. Featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and veteran-to-veteran interviews, The Line explores aspects of the military experience in ways that civilians may not expect, from post-apocalyptic fantasies to family dramas.

Granoff was inspired to start the journal while teaching a writing workshop at Columbia, home to the most veteran students in the Ivy League. His students, all Columbia-affiliated military veterans, had plenty to say about their experiences, particularly about their lives outside of combat. Looking for venues for their writing, Granoff came up short, and resolved to create a place for their work.

Granoff reached out to fellow MFA students Jacob Thomas Schultz and Stephanie Wobby, both veterans, and together they created the journal and reached out to veterans’ organizations across the country to encourage submissions. With the assistance of five of their classmates, they produced the first issue, which contains everything from wryly dark fiction about military food to explorations of trauma through ceramics.

The Line received support from Columbia Artist/Teachers (CA/T), which offers local communities free writing classes taught by MFA candidates and which ran Granoff’s veterans’ workshop. In keeping with CA/T’s mission of community enrichment through the arts, the journal’s staff created discussion materials to accompany each published piece for high school teachers to download. “We want high-school classrooms, not just literary spaces, to incorporate more veteran work,” said Schultz. Learn more.