Launched This Week: January 17th-20th

A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.

Today we published “Train Wreck While Fleeing,” a new short story by Sarah Scoles:

As a kid, I’d devoured books about General Relativity, black holes, wormholes, pulsars, exoplanets—anything far away and foreign. I had gone into astronomy because I was interested in objects and places and scales that dwarfed me. But now, I was dwarfed by nothing except the “Assistant” in front of my title. I—we, me and Lisa—had turned into accountants or insurance adjusters, manipulating mere columns of numbers for a living.

I looked into her brown eyes, which I loved for the pattern etched into their color.

“I used to love Mars,” I said. “Now I never think about it.”

Lauren Alwan considers the legacy of her grandparents and the privilege and cost of invisibility:

To my grandmother, I was what she called an American girl—my first language is English, and being born in the States, I have an independence my foremothers never knew. Along with that, I have another privilege: I was born at a time that made me witness to two distinct eras. I was a bridge between the world my grandparents came from and the one they gave to their descendants. I know something of how it was for my grandparents, Muneer and Fausya Alwan, to live a cloistered and intentionally invisible life. For new Muslim and Arab immigrants to the United States, that privilege of invisibility is a thing of the past and may never return.

The wonderful Helena Fitzgerald on Bruce Springsteen, the Ultimate Dad.

“Alternating ecstasy and despair characterize resident life in particular, and medical practice in general.”

For our 15 Minutes interview series, Michelle Wallace profiles artist M. Jenea Sanchez, whose work takes inspiration from and engages with the Mexico-US border and surrounding communities:

The fence itself, she says, “has taught me how to see past the obvious. Yes, the border divides the United States and Mexico, but the culture of this place is of one, not two. The border is not absolute; it’s man-made, imperfect . . . it is part of my daily visual landscape, and I do not forget about it and its implications.”

Sanchez’s work often returns to installations along the border itself. In 2009, she installed the Border Tapestry on the fence, weaving cloth through the slats of fence with her mother in a meditative installation that recalled the familial roots of the border communities, the families that are separated by the fence, and the days when movement across was more fluid and natural rather than militarized. Sanchez notes the sea change happening now: Many people are returning to Mexico. She reflects on how difficult life will be for many migrants under the coming administration.

“When I started here about a year ago, I didn’t think people could get so worked up about cable TV.”

We published another short story from the flawless archives of NOON: “Today’s Story,” by Susan Laier.

Finally, I chatted with writer and Catapult instructor Scott O’Connor about series treatments, screenplays, and fiction:

Writing treatments and writing for television has really helped me to learn that you can tell a story in any number of ways. Adapting your own novel for television means trying to tell it in another way; it’s like taking a new road, a different highway into the city, when you’ve always taken the same road in the past.

I told the story in my novel in a very particular way, and I’m happy with that, but if I want to tell the story for television then I have to tell it differently . . . I’ve had to ask myself the same question I ask when writing any other treatment: How can I best tell this story for television? There is more than one way, hopefully, to tell a good story.