We’ve enjoyed the thoughtful, relatable personal narratives and writing resources that the folks at Catapult have published and offered over the years, and are sad to hear the online magazine and writing program are coming to an end. Here’s a reading list of our favorite Catapult essays from our editors’ picks archive.
Catapult editors’ picks
When Food Is the Only Narrative We Consume
“Chinese culture can’t be made bite-sized for mass consumption.”
Walking Off Grief on the Appalachian Trail
“Every hiker is called to the trail for a different reason, but we all share a common goal: We all want to finish.”
An Ode to Kraft Dinner, Food of Troubled Times
“While the world has continued to change, Kraft’s product has remained the same, somehow evading inflation at one or two dollars per box.”
Living With Wolves
“Working at a wolf sanctuary became part of my identity. Leaving the pack was harder than I expected.”
On Mother Trees: What Old-Growth Trees Taught Me About Parenting
“I was helpful, but unlike the giving tree, I was not entirely happy.”
Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi
“Didion depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.”
To All the Brooklyn Brownstones I’ve Loved Before
“The brownstone stood for everything I wanted: solidity and urbanity, possibility and permanence. I could see it, stand inside it, even sleep there. But it wasn’t mine.”
Learning to Live with Durians Again
“It is a strange sort of alienation, when you make the life-changing decision to return home, only to suspect that you no longer belong.”
What It’s Like to Travel When You Have a ‘Bad’ Passport
“I am always an immigrant, never an expatriate. As an immigrant, to even visit a country, you must prove not just your legality, but your worth.”
A Black Physicist Is Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past
“I am forced to live in a parallel world to the one I wanted to live in, where I could have been a physicist without also constantly being asked to speak on or attempt to compensate for the persistent racism of institutions.”
All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered
On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.
Meeting My Third Family
“Briefly, I was part of that mysterious organism, a biological family; no one cared about my virtues or my bad behavior.”
What Is Common, What Is Rare: Why Extraordinary Events Cannot Eclipse Everyday Racism
“We’d denounce the marches and torches and chants. When that moment passed, we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy.”
Why We Cross the Border in El Paso
“I felt my mom’s grip tighten around my hand as dozens surged across the Rio Grande, the water waist-high. Adults held children in their arms or carried them in rebozos across their backs.”
Children of ‘The Cloud’ and Major Tom: Growing Up in the ’80s Under the German Sky
“In the sky you could watch history happen as though on the world’s most massive TV, and history’s wreckage could rain down on you at the park with your friends.”
My Editor Was Black
“Debut author Naima Coster on working with Morgan Parker, the whiteness of publishing, and literary self-determination.”
Why My Family Takes a Thanksgiving Vow of Silence
“The silent retreat gives us all time away from the bewilderment we tend to experience around American holidays.”
What Miyazaki’s Heroines Taught Me About My Mixed-Race Identity
On the wonder and strangeness of occupying a perpetually in-between space.
Talking to My Daughter About Charlottesville
“Once your children know that even one person detests their bones and breath, they know.”
Decades After Foster Care, I Found My Long-Lost Brother
“If I’d stayed, I could have protected him. That’s what I believed. Maybe he believed that, too.”
The Oil Cross: On Being Raised to Wage Spiritual Warfare
“They were fallen angels, Satan’s henchmen, and they were everywhere.”
Explaining My Multiracial Identity (So Others Don’t Do It For Me)
Jaya Saxena’s personal essay on the complications of owning her three racial identities–white, Indian and multi-racial–and dealing with the many ways people see her, and feel entitled to define her.
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