Catapult

Extraordinary storytelling. From the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing. Follow us on Twitter & like us on Facebook.

[catapultbooks]

My husband Shannon—I want to say this—is a kind person. No other way to describe him but calm and kind, I couldn’t understand. During sex I’d say to myself, Baby, let her be happy. While Shannon went down on me, I’d say it.

Catapult | Olivia | Olivia Clare

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There is something in the soul of mediocrity that seeks to stomp down anyone or anything that stands out. There is something in us small-town kids that makes us lobsters, pulling each other back into a bucket so that no one gets out.

Catapult | El Hugé | Meg Elison

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I was four when I first noticed feeling worried all the time. Nine when I had my first panic attack. Nine when my family moved across the country and a kind of bleakness made itself known at the edges of my vision. Twelve when I realized how hard Verna’s anxiety was on my mother and so, slowly, taught myself to hide my own anxiety because I didn’t want what they had.

Catapult | Catapult | How Do You Inherit Anxiety? | Laura Turner

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After my father died in 2009, my mother opened his safe deposit box. Among the mementos she found inside was a painting of my father, wearing a bomber jacket and visor hat, done on silk. It was the first image of him of any kind that we had seen from that era. Why hadn’t he shown it to us before? Privately, my wife and I arrived at a conjecture: that it had been painted by a girlfriend. Something my father knew would have upset my mother.

Catapult | My Father, the High Line: A Fish Story | Neil Serven

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The past is fixed, but memory is not. How we choose to remember defines how we live.

Catapult | Catapult | Monuments and Memory: Working at Arlington National Cemetery | Devin Kelly

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In prison the body is stripped of privacy. You no longer possess yourself: not your diet, not your clothing. Not even your underwear, as I find out one day when I pass a bin full of clean white briefs in the hallway, worn and stretched to the shape of bodies that belong to no one and everyone at once.

Catapult | Writing Behind Walls | Amy Bernhard

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The trees, or mountains, are already foam. What if there weren’t any other people in here besides the guard? To find oneself one of two carbon-based life forms, the other one being a guard, in a gray and white synthetic world seems closer to solitary confinement, or perhaps a space station where all the other astronauts have died, than the wild freedom of a desert.

Catapult | In Which the Magpie Enters the Silence | The Magpie

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As I have found out, doing ethnography is not only about trying to perpetuate one’s own liminality against all odds, but, also, about learning to be a body.

Catapult | The Uncanny of Sleeping Bags: What I Learned on Tour With a Georgian Folk Ensemble | Marina Kaganova

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I’m thinking now of two eardrumless girls, not in Kenya but India, sisters, street children, the last people my wife and I remember before the blast wind blew us, two travelers, off our feet, unconscious, to somewhere else, ultimately to here. They too have surely lost their eardrums yet likely they live and will live, unlike us, without them now.

Catapult | Let’s Feel the Pain Together | David Naimon

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The idea of a peacefully united continent that acknowledges identity and enables exchange must prevail. The more barriers we put in the way, the more difficult we make it for us and our children to exchange and explore other places and cultures. The more fear we create of the unknown, the more difficult we make it for us to have a nuanced view of the world.

Catapult | Borders of the Past: On Europe and the Berlin Wall | Marcel Krueger

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My family’s demon-battling had stripped me of every friendship, every outside connection I’d ever had. Instead of feeling like one of the blessed few who knew the truth, safe thanks to my parents’ diligence, now I could see how much my parents’ fears had taken from me.

Catapult | Catapult | The Oil Cross: On Being Raised to Wage Spiritual Warfare | Kelsey L. Munger

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I have a new baseline for success: I might fail at any number of things, but as long as my kid is alive and happy, the most important part of my life is doing just fine.

Catapult | The Productive Artist-Mother | Catherine LaSota

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I imagine my mom, or my Auntie Hui-chin, selecting what to bring with them on a trip halfway across the world. Clothes for all kinds of weather; a few family photographs; a ring or a necklace given to them by their mothers; two or three books; their best shoes; an address book with contact information for all their relatives in Taiwan, plus a few friends-of-friends to look up in the Tri-State area; a handheld mirror; a purse. There wasn’t room for anything frivolous.

Catapult | Catapult | Feathers from Home, and Other Family Heirlooms | Grace Prasad

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I schedule writing time on my calendar. This is a good practice. The problem was that for many years I had no respect for those appointments. A friend or colleague would ask a favor or invite me to lunch (Lunches: They ruin perfectly good days of writing), and I would stand up my work without hesitation. If I bailed on any friend as often as I bailed on my own work, I probably would no longer have that friend.

Catapult | Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?

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When I was twenty-five, I thought the most dishonest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people change. At twenty-five, I was positive that nobody ever changed. When I was twenty-six, I learned the most honest thing about Hollywood movies is that they tell you people only change if absolutely forced to by circumstances; that nobody ever wants to change, and they’ll do whatever they can to stay the same, until there is no choice. At twenty-six, I understood that you never choose to change. You are changed.

Catapult | The First Time I Got Paid to Write | Elan Mastai

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To my little sister I said, you’ll get over it. But I know, and she knows, that you never get over something like this. We’re all at the age where we’re losing our fathers, I said. But I know that was harsh; it is unjust and we are crushed.

Catapult | You Will Be With Me in Paradise | Wan Phing Lim

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No one ever told me to be ashamed. Especially not before the first time, not when I was so very young. But then, no one had to tell me it was wrong to collect butterfly wings either. All they had to do was take them from me, simply make me aware by virtue of their unexplained absence that someone else knew, and I never touched another wing again.

Catapult | Catapult | A Chronology of Touch | Kayla Whaley