A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
Everyone here at Catapult is stoked to welcome Erin Kottke, our amazing new director of publicity! Learn more about Erin, and why we are so dang lucky to have her with us, in this Q&A she did with Natalie Degraffinried.
Get ready for Halloween with Alyssa Martino’s essay about how her dad celebrates his favorite holiday and Liz Rosema’s comic tribute to “becoming the thing that scares you.”
And speaking of comics, Amy Kurzweil, MariNaomi, and Liana Finck shared their thoughts on the form in a fantastic roundtable. Mari: “My favorite thing . . . is that it’s one of the few art forms that has barely been explored. So much has never been done with comics that it’s not difficult to forge new paths as a creator, to be The First to try something.”
Find out why one writer has played 101 online Scrabble games with her mother since 2011.
“As I look at a photograph of Vanderbilt University’s medical school class of 1949, I think about inheritance and time travel. There is only one smiling face in the photo: It’s Granny Jane. Hers is also the only female face.”
The inimitable Helena Fitzgerald has a new column on the history of the subway and her own life in New York:
New York is an accidental city: A harbor with a muddy strip of streets offering a place to climb off a ship and stay for a night transforms nonsensically into a city whose function makes no sense with its geography, whose size and straining ambition make no sense with the amount of real estate—thirteen miles up and down and two miles across—that they inhabit. But people kept returning, kept coming back again and again . . . Love is an accident followed by an insistence on repeating the accident, talking oneself into staying against the odds and the logic. The subway was one more plan to make this geographically untenable place permanent, to carve more space out of a plot of land that its residents have always refused to admit is finite.
In which the Magpie tells Hillary Clinton: You can go home again.
Heather Skyler wrote about being groped by a boy in seventh grade and fighting him off with her flute case.
“I aspired to weightlessness. It wasn’t that I wanted to be thinner; I didn’t want a body at all.”
Please don’t miss this powerful essay by Rachel Klein about illness, motherhood, Crime and Punishment, and the things we endure:
I assumed that my health issues were just the kind of thing you had to put up with as a parent. I truly believed that I was no worse off than many other mothers of young children, and that if I soldiered through, I’d eventually come out okay on the other side . . . Women’s bodies, I was taught from a young age, must be a special kind of strong. Women’s bodies must quietly endure; must bear scrutiny, judgment, damage, even violence without too much fuss.
I assumed that my health issues were just the kind of thing you had to put up with as a parent. I truly believed that I was no worse off than many other mothers of young children, and that if I soldiered through, I’d eventually come out okay on the other side . . .
Women’s bodies, I was taught from a young age, must be a special kind of strong. Women’s bodies must quietly endure; must bear scrutiny, judgment, damage, even violence without too much fuss.
There’s still time to sign up for Courtney Maum’s online humor writing workshop! Hear Courtney describe the course, which launches November 7th, in her own words—and then read about her comic writing crushes, favorite pieces, and advice for aspiring humorists.
That’s it for this week—hope you have a splendid weekend, whatever you’re up to, and soon find yourself well supplied with fun-size chocolate bars if that’s your thing (it is extremely my thing). As always, thank you so much for reading with us.
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
