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News hit Twitter today, via Publishers Weekly, that Catapult would be immediately suspending (read: ending) its online magazine and writing classes. This immediately caused an uproar in Twitter-land: jobs lost, teaching positions eliminated, students bewildered, and everyone tiptoeing around the facts of just who founded Catapult, and who provides all its money.
Catapult to Shutter Online Magazine, Writing Classes
Catapult was founded in 2015 by Elizabeth Koch, daughter of notorious right-wing billionaire and climate saboteur Charles Koch, the same Charles Koch who, with his family and via his Koch Foundation, funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to groups first denying the existence of climate change, then downplaying the need to take action. He has caused irrepairable damage to the earth we live on. And his daughter Elizabeth declares herself "apolitical", trying to avoid any linkage to the name while at the same time never disavowing her family's work and definitely picking winners and losers with their money.
Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine
In 2016, Catapult merged with Counterpoint Press, including its Soft Skull imprint, and set about the business of making itself a major player in the literary sector. Giants such as Poetry and The New Yorker are just about unassailable at this point, but Catapult worked assiduously to get its name into the same tier of publications.
Literature, Capital, Catapult, and the Kochs: A Dialogue
It worked. Do a search for "Catapult" on Twitter and you'll see a chorus of hundreds of people decrying the loss of the space it created. The physical books, it seem, will live on: maybe there's enough money in that, or maybe the reason is something different, maybe prestige for a forty-something scion of the Koch fortune to point to it and say, see?, look what I've done, obviously I'm not the same. And now, neither are any of you.
As Lucy Biederman writes, in conversation with Hilary Plum in Fence:
But what deeply unsettles me isn’t that Koch money, or Elizabeth Koch herself, is giving these writers a home. It’s that these writers are giving the Koch money a home.
Because let's be clear: Catapult was always, first and foremost, a reputation laundering operation for Elizabeth Koch. Knowing the great harm her family has caused the planet we live on, knowing her last name is anathema to everyone but the strident right, she used the cover of arts and publishing to funnel money into something (creative writing) seen by most people as good and worthwhile. And in doing so, she either bought silence - of those she employed, of those grateful to be published - or planted doubt. _Maybe she's not so bad after all_, people would think; _maybe there are good Kochs and_...
Screencaps of the email, posted to Twitter, show that the firings were abrupt. They were on Valentine's Day, which doesn't really mean anything, but feels like an extra kick in the teeth to anyone who actually has a heart. And just as abrupt, the entire process feels haphazard - Catapult is still tweeting as if nothing is going on, still allowing sign-up for classes. Still taking payments?
Catapult still seemingly taking registration (and payment) for classes
Elizabeth Koch's efforts to clean her reputation and damage us seem to have worked. There are hundreds and hundreds of tweets on the closure of Catapult, and only a few mention who's in charge. Or where the money comes from. So many people bit into the poisoned apple and either didn't see the truth, or knew they'd be compromised by admitting it. And in doing so, capital corrupted, again. A literary space closed. Writers mourning something they saw as good, something that resonated with them. And meanwhile, Elizabeth Koch continued her day. It was nothing personal to her because we collectively are nothing to her. Happy Valentine's Day, losers. You're all fired. You're all fools.
Perhaps this can be an inflection point, one where people realize that the only prestige to any particular publication is that which we as a community give to it. And that any of us can start a literary space: publish an online or paper lit mag/zine; start a reading series; set up a writer's group or classes in our own community. Be someone's close reader. The possibilities are as diverse as all of us.
To be blunt: buy some printer paper and a long-arm stapler. Make a template in Word and do some test prints to perfect it. Or, set up a WordPress instance. Pick a theme and a press/magazine name, and solicit work, starting with friends. If you're Canadian, Library and Archives Canada provides ISBNs/ISSNs for free. If you're not, who cares, you don't need those, anyway. If you can afford it, pay your contributors a little. It doesn't have to be much, even $10/poem is something and can really help legitimize how people see their own work. Active participation in the community requires broadening your efforts beyond just submitting work to magazines. There is an opportunity every day to be in conversation with art, but a conversation is necessarily two-sided. So what will you do? How will you make space and room for others?
We can choose to support good people who do good work, instead of bad people who dangle money that absolutely comes with stipulations, and I think part of this requires being willing to take on some amount of the work ourselves. This is probably hopelessly optimistic; most people won't do this, of course, either explicitly choosing not to, or rationalizing it under not having enough time (as if any of us do). And so grifts like Catapult, or Narrative Magazine and its $23 submission fees, will march on indefinitely. Sure, individual publications or arms of such might fold, but another will spring up in its place. And it becomes up to us to choose, critically, who to support. Who will do good? Who will do right by us and our colleagues? Because capital and its carpet-baggers will try to work their way in again. And it's up to us to send them on their way.