Launched This Week: October 17th-21st

A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.

We kicked off this week with MariNaomi’s delightful (and illustrated!) account of how one of her oldest, most complicated female friendships inspired her new comics memoir, I Thought YOU Hated ME.

“The paradox of weightlifting is that you have to fail in order to make gains . . . You ask your body to do something hard, and if it doesn’t cooperate, you fail and then ask once more.”

JD Ho on what it was like to work in a Founding Father’s garden, for  Catapult’s At Work series:

It was a place that could have existed without me, but I would not be who I am without it. It gave me a lifelong love of unusual vegetables and the belief that I should grow everything I eat. It was a place ruled by seasons, ruled by history, created by hardship and exploitation, maintained by biophilia. It’s a place that wouldn’t exist if not for slaves.

Chloe Caldwell is tired of being asked what her family thinks of her writing.

Larissa Pham on the process of writing and rewriting her novella, Fantasian, and how she learned to break a few rules and listen to herself.

In which the author discovers that one of her ancestors owned nineteen slaves:

I want to start the long walk down this road, carrying with me the deeds of my ancestors. I want to ask the questions that lead to more questions, I want to open all of the doors, and all of the doors behind them. I want to stop swimming through the dark water and sink, all the way down, until I know what’s been hidden there. 

But this is not about what I want. This is not about what I need.

“It is at this moment that I realize, more thoroughly than at any other moment, that I have always lived in a dictatorship.”

Finally, check out instructor Justin Taylor’s Q&A on teaching, Catapult’s new online course platform, and what a good fiction workshop offers students. (You can find a full list of Catapult’s on-site and online classes here!)