A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
A Girls’ Guide to Personal Hygiene
Westworld
For our At Work series, Jim Cole recalls his time working on a “burn crew” at a state park in Florida: “It’s one thing to explain why something works, and another thing to be the one setting fire to the parched reeds.”
I learn everything and nothing. The world blooms into a series of stories that leave me gasping, angry. A man in my office decided to advocate for me. A surgeon once cut into my breast without saying hello. A colleague confused common everyday sexism with sexual harassment and I became the star of an investigation. So many young men were never taught the nuances of consent.
Our occasional pseudonymous columnist, the Magpie, considers power, memory, the films of Mike Nichols, and the collages of Hannah Höch.
“I kept running toward fashion blindly, erasing the desires I couldn’t see within me. Restlessness for muscular boys with fair skin, for sophisticated parties where I twirled and drowned myself, for the beauty of a world far from provincialism—I needed all this when I left my parents’ home. José Esteban Muñoz writes of queers as ‘migrant souls,’ but it’s Ranjha’s words that echo in my heart today: ‘They are happy who do not quit their homes.’”
When Rachel Klein, a lifelong performer, suffered damage to her vocal chords, she learned to give voice to different kinds of stories:
My humor pieces, I saw, had been an extension of the narrative of my performing self—the comedian, skilled with a turn of phrase, a well-placed reference, a perfectly timed punchline. But in the quiet forced upon me, I started to hear the voices of other selves, voices that spoke the kinds of stories one didn’t tell to get a laugh or fill a room—stories told in order to make sense of things, to create meaning. These stories were more personal. They were about me, my family, my life. They weren’t funny, and that was okay. And when I wrote them down, I could tell they often weren’t as good as I wanted them to be, which was okay, too. For the first time in a long time, I felt the humility and pleasure that can accompany a deep desire to grow.
Finally, this week we were delighted to present the first comic in “Passing for Human,” a brilliantly weird new series by Liana Finck.
Nicole Chung is the author of A Living Remedy, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen outlets. Her debut memoir, All You Can Ever Know, was a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @nicolesjchung.
“Although my main characters find themselves in difficult circumstances, they are not passive. They resist, confront, and sometimes arrive at moments of transcendence.”
I don’t really want to die; I just want to be dying—in the Romantic, Victorian sense. I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel this way. Most people know the story of Sleeping Beauty. Surely I’m not the only little girl to grow up thinking that the dreaming princess had it made.
Shaking, Ali knew she was never going to be the same. For the first time in her entire life, she did not know what to do. Her academic life was always perfect: she graduated with an honors degree from a top university and she had a tenacious desire to become a lawyer. She had spent hours preparing her application, sleepless nights of planning her path, and put all her hopes and expectations in this law school application.
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