Some Words About Catapult Magazine

A little tribute to the publication that changed my life.

Photograph by Osman Rana on Unsplash

As many of you have heard by now, Catapult Magazine has published its last. The news broke on Valentine’s Day, kicking off one of the most surreal and exhausting weeks of my life. Shuttering a magazine is, it turns out, even harder than running one. I don’t think I’ve ever sent more emails in a single week than I did during that one, and I’ve been doing open pitch calls for years. I was on a trip to the California desert when it happened, which gave the whole thing a slightly unreal cast; almost as though, if I just concentrated hard enough, I could jump the track and be back in the original timeline, the one where I signed off my emails with “let me know how this sounds and I’ll send along the paperwork” rather than “I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”

It was a tiny heartbreak every time I had to respond to a pitch from a writer who hadn’t seen the news. Some people even wrote me saying they had seen the news but would I maybe look at their draft and give them some feedback on it anyway, or tell them where else they should send it. It was viscerally clear that a huge hole had been ripped in the literary ecosystem and various players, both fairly and not, were turning to me to ask how they should fill it.

The outpouring of social-media support in the wake of the announcement deserves its own paragraph. “Heartening” and “grounding” were terms I used to describe the posts in conversations with other people, words I used mostly to try and make them feel better, because I hadn’t had time to start distilling my own feelings into something fit for sharing. What I didn’t say was that the posts also felt deeply uncanny. Because we’ve been here so many times before, right? Even in the last ten months alone. We saw it with Bitch. Then we saw it with Astra. Then we saw it with Bookforum. Literally the last issue of this newsletter from three weeks ago was me being unable to process the Gawker closure. I knew the beats of the discourse, the rhythm of this cycle. I’d lived it before and I was living it again, just with higher stakes and more Twitter replies than I could keep up with.

All of this meant that I didn’t have time to reflect on Catapult Magazine as, well, a magazine. Dealing with what the publication had meant to so many other people—a beacon, a byline, a resource, a paycheck—was so logistically and emotionally consuming, I had no time to think about what it meant to me. My original goal for this newsletter was not to talk about work at all. To make only brief references to my day job to the extent that it had a bearing on some craft or career point. But I have a long history with the magazine. I’m still processing its loss, and will be for some time, but this feels like the right place to start reflecting on what it’s meant to me as a writer and editor and offer my own tribute to it.

*

I’d been working full-time for the magazine for almost two years at the time of its closure, and running it as editor-in-chief for a year and a half, but my relationship to Catapult actually began back in 2018. Then-EIC Nicole Chung published an essay of mine about “piano women” like Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Alicia Keys, intertwined with a personal narrative about racialization and genre in the music industry. (I’d originally pitched it as a column but the editorial team felt it would work better as a standalone essay. The number of times in the coming years that I would give this exact note to writers is very funny to me now.) I’ve hyperlinked it above, but please know that it causes me actual pain to do so, because—while I stand behind the essay—five years ago is an eternity and I am a verrrrrry different writer.

Nicole had reached out to me on Twitter after I published an essay in Electric Literature. I admit that I hadn’t heard of Catapult Magazine but was immediately taken by the work they published and the principles they stood for. My primary thought was we don’t have anything like that in Canada, which was how I felt about most magazines I wanted to write for. The day the piano-women essay published, Nicole sent me a note saying she was bringing on some new contributing editors and asked if I was maybe interested in becoming one of them.

It’s hard to overstate the generosity of this invitation. I had little editorial cred to speak of and very few bylines to my name. I had made various attempts at charging toward what I thought of as The Literary World (caps in original, i.e., my brain) but had concluded that I was dealing with what was essentially an electric fence—I’d only sneak in if somebody forgot to turn it on. Nicole’s email was like somebody popping up to say that actually it wasn’t a fence but a decorative and porous bit of landscaping. Like a hedge, but specifically the kind of hedge you see in cartoons, the ones that look puffy and cloud-like and capable of enveloping your whole body, as in the Homer Simpson gif. What’s more, I was even welcome inside. This, I would come to learn, is very much the ethos that guided the magazine—a tone set and maintained by Nicole’s leadership—and the type of scarce, life-changing inroad I mourn in the wake of its closure.

There isn’t a lot of formal training available for people who are interested in being editors, and even less of that training actually offers a viable route into the industry. But the first several months of my contributing editorship for Catapult were an invaluable and rigorous education in pitch assessment. I would solicit work from writers I admired or cull some options from an open pitch call and send them to Nicole, who would send me back clear and incredibly perceptive notes that began to build my sense of what makes a strong pitch, what made a good Catapult piece, what makes a great essay online. I sent many, many pitches that did not work. There was always a reason why it didn’t, and that reason was always made clear to me. Every rejection contributed to the foundation of my editorial discernment. I have probably sent more pitches to senior editors advocating for someone else’s work than I have pitches trying to place my own pieces. I haven’t articulated that ratio to myself until just now. I am incredibly proud of it. What a gift. It has given me a view of the playing field more panoramic and multidimensional than it would have been otherwise. This is why I’ve always been drawn to editorial work—because I’m an egomaniac who craves omniscience (kidding. Sort of).

Eventually, I sharpened my sense of which pitches to advocate for. When I brought them forward to the editorial team, my hit rate increased. It’s so easy to romanticize an earlier age of something—and I want to resist doing that too much here, because I truly believe the magazine only got stronger over time—but wait till I tell you who some of the earliest writers were, who I went to bat for and published in Catapult when I was just a goddamn freelancer: Bestselling novelist Katie Gutierrez. Essayist Rax King (yes, of the Guy Fieri essay). Polygon senior culture editor Nicole Clark. These people have gone on to have incredible careers, and publishing their work was invaluable to my own professional trajectory. I had more pull when I became EIC and had the weight of the institution behind me; I could, on a good day, devise a project or assignment that crackled with enough potential that I’d get a big-name writer excited enough to jump onboard, even at the rate we were able to pay. But just as gratifying—if not more so—was getting in on the ground floor and being able to collaborate with someone whose talent hadn’t yet had many venues for formal recognition.

This is what I’ll miss the most about the magazine: The opportunity to do work like that. To say, “Hey, you think this might be a book?” to someone who hadn’t yet landed on that idea and might not have done until somebody said it to them first. To curate a series that published a big name alongside somebody else’s first byline. To publish that work in an outlet that championed values of literary citizenship that aligned with my own. I am so lucky that my DNA as an editor was formed somewhere like Catapult. Even as I took on other editorial jobs, I kept acquiring pieces for them on a freelance basis, because I could tell that the Catapult magazine ethos was the one that I wanted to form the core of my editorial practice: The way we put writers first (we gave them input on story display, for goodness’ sake). The way we encouraged them to experiment with different forms. The way we saw ourselves as integral to building the foundations of their careers, a community, a culture.

I’ve edited for other places, seen how easily my instincts could have been corrupted by other principles: an obsessive tendency to over-edit, or chase traffic at the expense of ethics, or chase quantity at the expense of quality, or write toward that toxic phantom of the the Broadest Possible Audience. I would come home from my day job as an editor and go through Catapult pitches after hours. (I wrote for them occasionally, too, like this piece on The Sims and the housing market, handled by contributing editor Nicole Clark.) I would have kept it up as a side thing—that’s how much I loved it and how rare an opportunity I knew it was. When I saw the job posting for a full-time editor after three years of acquiring for the magazine, my first thought was no waaaaay and my second was but what if—.

*

I like to think of myself as someone who generally does a good job of not making my work my identity. But in the wake of the magazine’s closure, I realized with a sinking feeling that I’d let that conflation happen, to some degree. I let my publisher put my former job title on my book. I annexed it to my name basically every time I introduced myself to someone in a professional situation. On the basis of that position, I’ve been asked to do lots of really cool things, one of them to deliver a lecture next month on digital publishing (lol). The anxious little voice in my head tells me that that job title was the only thing that made me interesting in the big pond of New York and now I’m just a stranger in a strange land. I am trying not to listen to that voice. But it’s hard.

There was nothing like Catapult and I don’t know that there will be again. Even as I’ve seen so many people step up and anoint themselves its successor in various capacities; even as I’ve mentally snarled—ungenerously, I know—let the corpse cool off a little in response to some posts. I am lucky to have been affiliated with the magazine for as long as I was. But there was so much I still had planned for it, so much I thought I still had time to do. I wanted, finally, to write a column. I wanted to shepherd more of my writers through the column-to-book pipeline. I wanted to keep growing Don’t Write Alone, our brilliant and vital vertical of writing resources. I wanted to try out more new, zany series and special projects. I wanted, so very badly, to teach a class.

And it was going so well, you know. We were on track to have our biggest, best year yet—the rare coexistence of both those things at once. I know web traffic is (literally) pennies on the dollar, but those final months, hoo boy. We had a viral hit almost every week by the end. When a story took off, we celebrated one another; we celebrated our writers; we celebrated all that it meant for their future and ours.