Happy Birthday to Us

Since Catapult began a year ago, we have (true to our name) launched quite a few things of various kinds  into the world: books about a duchess, a rock star, a Floridian translator, an illiterate Irishwoman, and a ghost; collections about surveillance and the South; essay series about brains and adoption, faith and fandom; columns about bodies and buildings and friendship. Over four hundred students have taken our classes. Our instructors have learned to make sourdough bread and served coffee to Karl Ove Knausgaard. We’ve received accolades,  learned some facts, and judged your pets. Oh, and we’ve joined forces with a legendary indie press. 

For our birthday, we wanted to reflect on the originating mission and vision that have guided us thus far. Here’s a letter from our co-founder and CEO, Elizabeth Koch. 

We’re also unveiling brand-new features that are propelling our multifaceted  writing/publishing machine into its second year:

Our new online classes platform brings our intimate, focused workshops and creative writing intensives to emerging writers worldwide. The platform includes a built-in story editor, high-quality embedded video lectures, clickable PDFs, a live chat “salon,” and in-line commenting. You can give and receive feedback on workshop submissions without ever leaving the online classroom environment.

We’re looking forward to expanding our curriculum by adding classes in subjects like personal branding and TV writing.

We’ve upgraded our Community with a new layout and a more extensive Catapult Extra section, and brought on a Community editor to continue its development into an online home for writers and readers—where anyone can publish pieces in-progress or completed, receive feedback from Catapult editors, find empathetic readers for their work, and benefit from frank insider conversations about storytelling, pitching, and publishing. 

Coming soon: in-line commenting for pieces posted to Community, sections curated by theme and topic, and more resources  like editor roundtables and story prompts.

Do you have suggestions, comments, questions? We love hearing from you. Say hello on Twitter or Facebook, try posting something to Community, or email us anytime. 

And thank you for reading the magazine and buying our books, for taking our classes and sharing your stories. We call ourselves Catapult, but in fact, of course, you are the catapult. 

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