A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
“No one ever found out what became of El Hugé.”
Make sure you read Myles Johnson’s beautiful essay on microaggressions, intersectionality, and survival as a queer black artist:
These thoughts, plummeting toward me in moments of peace, comprise of a lifetime’s worth of microaggressions. You are only allowed as much complexity as a misguided person or an essay or a piece of media created by someone observing you offers, and not an inch more. And these are the moments that remind you: Technically, you might be the mad one.
Today we published a wonderful new short story by Olivia Clare, excerpted from her collection Disasters in the First World (forthcoming from Grove):
Because I was happy, I looked for what might ruin me. I asked questions—wanting vision, prophecy—of someone or something not there. I called it Baby. Baby, tell me what it is, I’d say. What takes this away? I meant not just happiness, but my life.
“My father remained forever silent, leaving us to discover the story only after he was gone, folded along with his tube socks”: Neil Serven digs into the most amazing fish story his late father never told him.
How do you inherit anxiety? How do you make it your own? Laura Turner grapples with these questions and her own family history and complex traits in her latest column for Catapult.
Devin Kelly recalls the two summers he spent working at Arlington National Cemetery:
My time at Arlington made me question what it means to be a part of a country that pretties up its history, making it easier, more beautiful to swallow. Consider the fact that many monuments are constructed from marble, and how marble, at its purest―a limestone that contains little clay or iron―is a gleaming white. If marble is even remotely “impure,” it can be crushed and “whitened.” I don’t need to explain the latent metaphor, or relate it to the whiteness of history.
“Every Wednesday night for six months, I have visited a medium-security prison in Iowa to teach creative writing to locked-up men.”
Sarah Mirk, contributing editor at Bitch Magazine and The Nib, is our featured TinyLetter writer for April. Her newsletter, Mirk Work, is one I always open and read immediately—I love the mix of writing, comics, and photos. Go check out one of Sarah’s recent issues, “From Silence to Pride,” republished on our Community site, and let us know what other TinyLetters we should be reading!
Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know, a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the forthcoming memoir A Living Remedy. Find her on Twitter: @nicolesjchung
