Launched This Week: December 12th-16th

A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.

Rebekah Frumkin’s essay on the election, queerness, and digging for coke bottles at the edge of a swamp was one of the best things I read this week.

“So many people have told me to cut her out of my life, but how can I do that to my own mother?”

Catapult columnist Adrian Shirk with a wonderfully rich history of the Rockland Palace, a place where the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and the Great Depression intersected.

Harmony Hazard wrote a lovely, lyrical essay about a cancer diagnosis, a haircut, and mourning the stranger who “once touched my hair with fingers fluent in love.”

José Vadi on the prog rock band The Mars Volta:

The explosion—the danger of playing so loud the amps break or the cherry at the tip of every joint in the crowd—goes out in an extinguished awe of the moments before us, the solos where every note is hit perfectly on pitch, a guitar that never goes out of tune no matter how many times it’s slung abusively around a sweating body, the conga and drum mics keeping the round sound of fire-tuned skins covered in flags and sweat: No stage can handle that possibility, that magic some of those initial Volta shows brought, without some form of combustion.

Writer and editor Jess Zimmerman, who really is on my personal list of Editors Who Have Never Edited My Work and Sometimes This Fact Keeps Me Awake At Night, kindly took the time for some editorial shop talk with me. (You can pitch Jess at The Establishment or Atlas Obscura!)

“I want to be the bridge between my grandfather’s memory and habits and my grandmother’s presence and love for cooking . . . If I can meet them in between, if I can cook up the perfect hybrid of wellness and wonder, maybe I can capture their love and his life in one perfect bite.”

From the EcoTone archives, Jill Sisson Quinn’s gorgeous meditation on ichneumon wasps, natural selection, family, and the afterlife:

Can people live without the comfort of a creator? I think so. But relinquishing God—the Christian God, at least—does not leave everything else intact. A lack of the divine probably means that when you die what you consider your essence will cease to exist. You will no longer be able to commune with the people you love. Choosing to live without the assurance of an afterlife, therefore, feels like a kind of suicide, or murder.

In which Heather O’Neill wonders: Wherefore all the single mothers in horror movies?

“Billy Joel is the clown prince of my middle age. He is driving, for better or worse, the brown borrowed van to Baltimore that is my adult life, and riding the brakes all the way.”

Last but certainly not least, Julie Buntin shares some exciting news about our writing programs and classes as we celebrate our wonderful students and look ahead to 2017:

I’m thrilled to announce that in partnership with Electric Literature, we’re offering a limited number of full scholarships to workshops and master classes. This fall we also held our first online classes, and expect that branch of our program to grow exponentially in the coming months. Finally, we’ve joined forces with Literary Hub to host a new writer’s conference this summer. The conference, called Catapult NYC, will be a three-day deep dive into the craft and commerce of literary writing, held the weekend of June 23rd at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. The legendary Paul Auster (!!!) is our keynote speaker. Email Colin Drohan (colin.drohan@catapult.co) to get on the info list.

Thank you to all that have generously shared their words and inspired us since our first workshop. We’re looking forward to expanding our community in the months and years to come, and to reading your work and celebrating your successes.