Issue 10

Maddie Schumacher is the reason you’re all here. The editor-in-chief of Cold Worm Column, she’s the voice notating every piece you read, the spirit inhibiting every word on the page. She’s behind it all, gleefully passing her excellent tastes in art, people, and words onto all of you with a grin. Hell, she’s the watermark itself – she’s the worm in the apple, digging her way into your brain with a stellar turn of phrase and a fresh blowout to boot. Meeting someone with whom y

When I saw that Cold Worm was approaching its 10th issue, I knew I wanted to sit down with one of my favorite creatives: Charlotte Geissler. So, as soon as she wrapped The Werewolf Problem, her latest short film, we met for coffee at The Bourgeois Pig in Chicago to talk about who she is as a filmmaker, where her work comes from, and the experiences that have helped shape who she is. Charlotte Geissler is an award-winning German-American filmmaker working between Berlin, Atlan

“He went around with his heart unfurled, The one and only Playboy of the Western World. You could fall in love with everyone you meet, When you'd walk with him down the street.” — Connie Converse, “Playboy of the Western World,” How Sad, How Lovely (2009) We want endings that explain things—some neat emotional thesis that justifies all the time spent thinking about someone. We want the wondering itself to mean something. But some people simply remain unsolved: crushes, the

Ambient Dangers and Desires, Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, and Holding Each Other I’d never held my friend’s face before. As his head tilted back in his theater seat, eyes going wide and pleading for recognition, and as he choked and convulsed and frothed around the edges of his lips, I thought about how beautiful they are — how beautiful they’d always been and how I’d always thought that. I wondered if I’d ever felt scared by that feeling and if that ever held me back in our fr

This was a while ago. I’m serving a family of four at work. The mom orders a glass of red wine, and I pour her a taste, as we always do. She takes the sip, puts the glass down, and says, “No.” Her adult children, mortified, scold her in hushed tones. Their mother is being difficult in a restaurant, and what’s more humiliating than that? But I respect the rejection, which I hear so rarely. Her kids think I’m annoyed at having to do more work, but I actually want her to find a