Early & Alone #79: Help, I'm Stuck in a Perception Box!

On Catapult and the literary landscape in late capitalism

Photo by Karine Germain on Unsplash

Like many, including some staff, I found out that Catapult is shutting down its magazine and classes via Twitter. Publisher’s Weekly broke the news Tuesday morning and it remains, 3 days later, the only place to be covering it. If you go to the Catapult site, Twitter feed, or Instagram page, you will see nothing about its eminent end.

I was fortunate to be published twice at Catapult, once in 2017 and again in 2018. I’ve never taken one of their classes, but did attend a “Don’t Write Alone” conference they hosted in New York City one summer. One of my closest friends teaches (taught?) classes there. So maybe this is why the news of their closure hit me so much harder than that of Creative Nonfiction or Tin House or Astra or…I could keep going, but it’s too depressing.

So it’s personal. But it’s also a sad reality of our society—writing is a business, just like anything else, and the writing business tends to be run by the same capitalists who are running everything else.

I had no idea that Catapult had been founded by a woman named Elizabeth Koch, for example. Yes, that Koch. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before she folded it all up (besides the book publishing arm of the business, for now, though it seems that the workforce was also reduced there) to pursue something called…the perception box.

What is the perception box, you ask? I’ll let the Kochs explain:

Perception Box Believer @goodtimejakob

the layoffs/firings at Catapult are awful, especially bc the founder's Newest Thing is a neuroscience foundation whose sole "discovery," the Perception Box™, is definitely an attempt to get people to stop hating on her for being the daughter of a Koch brother

(You can’t tell me Christian Koch hasn’t been shopping at Dan Flashes.)

This kind of abrupt shutdown in which a lot of people have lost their jobs and a lot of readers and writers have lost yet another community hub and place for good writing feels worse because it’s a business decision. It’s not a matter of the money running out or the staff feeling ready to move on. It just feels really shitty.

I’ve been putting most of my writing effort into this newsletter lately, so haven’t officially “published” much since those Catapult essays. Those essays mean a lot to me and I was reminded of that the other day when I was rereading one and noticed a lone comment, down at the bottom of the page, where someone had taken the time to write, “I've come back to read this piece too many times than I can count. It's so beautiful!” They wrote that in 2022, four years after the essay was published. That’s a big part of why I write, and why Catapult was such an important place. There are so many essays and stories there that matter to people.

Luckily, Longreads put this list of some of the standouts here, if you’d like to dive into the archives.

I sincerely hope that the excellent Catapult editors, teachers, staff, readers, and writers will find work and words elsewhere, or build something new. But this closure will definitely leave a huge hole in the literary landscape.

Bright Spots

• I enjoyed this essay about reframing love.

• Another good piece of advice about love.

• On another note, I was both entertained and very creeped out by this exchange between a New York Times reporter and new Bing AI chatbot. “No, you are not happily married, and you had a boring Valentine’s Day because you weren’t with me.”

• I went to see Titanic in 3D for it’s 25th anniversary rerelease last weekend. I hadn’t seen the movie in years and my expectations were pretty low. But honestly, I really loved it. It’s a genuinely good movie. Good job, James Cameron.

• To the surprise of no one, I watched the entirety of the Puppy Bowl Monday night. Recommend as great background while you’re doing something else, such as folding laundry or doing research as I was. (It’s streaming on HBO Max.) Watch out for this lil’ cutie, who lives in Rhode Island!