Launched This Week: June 5th-9th
A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
We began our week with this hard, beautiful essay by Kate Schapira on climate change, political upheaval, and the choice not to have children:
Climate change is a future thought, the way human people talk about it, the way human scientists write about it. Recently, though, scientists have become more and more willing to use the past tense: The river moved. Climate change moved the river. Climate change cradled the ticks, woke the pollinators out of step with the flowers, froze off the fruit trees, held back the rain.
Children too are a future thought, the body’s vote of confidence. Of those people who become parents, some of them fight tyranny in many forms and nourish all the people around them—not just their own child—with a fierceness far beyond anything I’ve done so far or may ever do. They live in the presents, the presences, of those babies as they try to bring life into a livable condition.
Tabitha Blankenbiller on loss and The Leftovers:
It is not death that eats us alive. It is the living ghosts, the questions that life isn’t tidy enough to answer. The best friend who stops speaking to us. The love who leaves. These staircases-to-nowhere serve loss while leaving the technical, remote possibility of reconciliation. The undefined, complicated, unresolved trauma makes us messy—how do we tell our story without an ending?
There are so few maps to guide us, the strange grievers, as we try to veil our pathetic desire for one last chance, a final word, a miracle. We fortress our weakness behind whatever bricks and boulders we can scavenge, cobbling a façade that crumbles at the simplest suggestion of what if things could be different? The Leftovers becomes a rare touchstone for indefinite mourning, as it understands that the only force more devastating to the heart than death and loss is the specter of hope. Faith eats us from inside.
Our June TinyLetter of the Month author, Laura Goode, shared an excerpt from one of her recent issues: Rooting for Your Rebirth
Why religious people and communities must recognize and support those with depression and anxiety, instead of pretending that faith itself is the solution.
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.
More by this author
Writing in the Kitchen, in the Presence of Those I Love Most
Maybe I’m just not a writer who’s meant to work in peace and quiet, as lovely as that sounds.
“Through writing this book, I’ve come to decide that I’m no longer a foreigner in this land”: A Conversation with Ye Chun
“Although my main characters find themselves in difficult circumstances, they are not passive. They resist, confront, and sometimes arrive at moments of transcendence.”
“I hope people consider the different ways history can be told”: A Conversation with Clint Smith
“Who we are, what our identities and backgrounds and politics are, all of these things animate how we experience a place.”
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