Catapult Elizabeth Koch Into The Sun

I don’t know if Elizabeth Koch would fashion herself a personal essayist, but she has certainly dabbled in the form. In an 11-part essay published in Smith Magazine in 2007, the billionaire’s daughter who describes herself as “apolitical” wrote about a trip she took to Japan with her boyfriend at the time, Todd. The essay opens with her and Todd buying candy-flavored drinks from a vending machine. They buy eight, take a sip from each, and then discard them on top of a mailbox, where Koch includes the following exchange.

“Just line them up on top of the machine,” I say. “Maybe a homeless person will find them.”
We look around. No sign of a homeless person.
“What do you think they do with their homeless people here?”
“They probably hide them wherever they hide the trash,” Todd says. I laugh, and try to take his arm, but he rips it away from me.

It is probably unsurprising that this is what Koch presumes passes for affectionate banter between her and Todd. Much of the essay appears to be a direct transcript between Koch and Todd, in which she quotes him saying “It’s just up here” and “Huh.” The two get into a fight after Koch buys Todd an expensive pair of headphones—a reminder to both of her unfathomable net worth—after which Todd walks away. Koch then wanders the streets and sees two Japanese people with albinism. “Their skin is pinkish and their hair is white and their bodies are lumpy, and I wonder what it would be like to be stripped of tone and color in a city where most everyone looks the same,” Koch writes, before deciding to photograph the people—the photo appears in the body of the essay—so that she and Todd can talk about them later. She laments her privilege and its terrible, burdensome baggage. “I’m angry that those girls on the playground in sixth grade called me a rich bitch when they knew nothing about me except my last name,” Koch writes, patently unaware that she is proving their thesis correct.

I have never believed in the maxim “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” But I have come to believe, at least in the U.S., that those who can’t, buy. Koch has written for a long time. She got an MFA, edited a literary humor magazine, hosted a reading series, and attempted to write a novel. In 2015, Koch founded and funded a publisher called Catapult that would eventually branch out into a magazine and writing classes (Disclaimer: I wrote a column for Catapult in 2018.) In 2023, Catapult shuttered its magazine and classes, leaving only its book publishing arm. This summer, literally as the remaining workers voted to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board, Koch announced the company would be sold. Now the sale has happened, and Catapult will end all operations by the end of this month, according to Publisher’s Weekly.

Even as a fledgling publisher, Catapult got a lot of buzz. Koch paired up with veterans from the industry: the co-founder of Electric Literature and an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Koch’s goal, as she told the Wall Street Journal in 2015, was to give people permission to write. “Don’t quit…We’re here, we’re with you, we support you,” she said. Soon sales were bustling, and the books were good. Some of Catapult’s titles won awards from PEN and the National Books Critics Circle, and the magazine won a National Magazine Award.

Back to me: I graduated from college after the peak of the personal essay boom, a time when the internet teemed with confessional writing, often by women, that either directed or incited outrage. Many of the outlets that published these pieces—Salon, or the infamous xoJane—had shuttered or faded. But there was another, more specific renaissance of personal essays, this time by writers of color, often women, writing about often traumatic experiences. This economy was exploitative, sure, but it was also career-making. “The dominant mode by which a young, hungry writer could enter the conversation was by deciding which of her traumas she could monetize . . . be it anorexia, depression, casual racism, or perhaps a sadness like mine, which blended all three,” wrote Larissa Pham in her essay collection Pop Song, which was published by Catapult.

I was one of these writers. After years going internship-to-internship, I had gotten my first full-time job in media reviewing toasters, travel pillows, and sleep masks. It was a great job but not what I had dreamed of doing, which was, unfortunately, personal essays. When I looked at the writers around me who I admired, many of them were writing for Catapult’s magazine. There was Angela Chen’s column about her asexuality, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s column on life in Wyoming, and Niko Stratis’s column on gender and sexuality in ’90s music. So I pitched a column about sea creatures and identity, and a year later that column had transformed into a book deal. Catapult’s magazine gave a platform to so many emerging writers, many of us on the margins. I am probably not the only writer who feels they owe their career to Catapult.

In 2023, a week after Catapult announced it was shutting down its magazine and writing program, the New York Times ran a fawning profile of Koch and her latest project, a concept she developed called the Perception Box, which describes how a person’s perception of the world is influenced by their beliefs, biases, and narratives. It is unclear to me how this “concept,” which seems to be a general summation of what it is like to be a person in the world, is something that someone could claim to have developed. The closure of the magazine and classes program, which led to layoffs of many of the staff, warranted a single, parenthetical mention in the Times profile, which gave the impression that Koch had grown bored of her old toy and wanted now to focus on a shiny new one. The Catapult website was updated thusly: “Catapult publishes literary fiction and artful narrative nonfiction that engages with our Perception Box…”

Given this recent gutting of the business, and the state of publishing in general, of course Catapult workers wanted to unionize. And then they did, and then Koch sold the company to an undisclosed buyer in what sure looks like some blend of retaliation and boredom. The fate of Catapult—which over the years came to encompass imprints Counterpoint, Soft Skull Press, and Hawthorne Books—remains unknown, except that all 20-something employees will be terminated. Catapult had been reporting new book deals as recently as last month, and the publisher has 16 titles slated to come out this spring. The writer Deborah Reed, whose novel is will be published with Hawthorne Books in the spring, said on Bluesky that no one has contacted her to tell her what will happen to her book.

It is brutal that these days pursuing creative work so often means operating under the whims of a billionaire whose attention, when shifted, can cut the ground from under your feet. Perhaps it is a fitting legacy that the daughter of Charles Koch, a man who intended to and succeeded in destroying much of the world, would go on to destroy other little worlds of her own. Meanwhile, Koch’s first book, The Perception Box, described as a “step-by-step somatic self-inquiry designed to reveal the inner workings of each individual’s box,” will be published in April with Simon & Schuster. At least the inner working of Elizabeth’s box is clear: She simply doesn’t give a shit.