Behind The Editor’s Desk: Megha Majumdar

At Women Who Submit, we encourage our members to submit their writing to journals that value their writers, journals that publish excellent writing from new and established authors, and who have a clear mission statement. Many of our members have submitted prose to Catapult, a relatively new but widely respected online magazine and press that publishes dynamic fiction and nonfiction. Catapult also offers classes for writers looking to hone skills such as writing personal essays, humor writing, and finding an agent.

I work on both books and the magazine, so a typical day might involve phone conversations with my authors and their agents, meetings with my colleagues, responding to emailed pitches from writers, preparing jacket copy for a forthcoming book, sending out early copies of a book to authors for a blurb, and many other tasks. The evening is devoted to reading manuscripts and working on edits in solitude!

A ferocious sense of purpose, a clear intellectual aim, and surprising language.

I loved Tari Ngangura’s How This Woman Celebrates Black History and Food in Salvador, Brazil; Angela Chen’s How I Learned to Tell Signal from Noise and Appreciate Calm, part of her Data column; Rida Bilgrami’s 15 Minutes with Abdul Sattar, the Man Who Serves the Karachi Press; and M. Leona Godin’s

We’re selective, but it’s hard to provide a number—sometimes an essay isn’t the best fit but we’re taken by what the writer is trying to do, so we stay in touch and a different piece works out, months later. Rather than seeing them as discrete pitches, in my mind I tend to think of them as part of one long, patient, ultimately fruitful conversation.