Nicole Chung - A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

Contents

CONTENTS

Praise for A Map Is Only One Story

This collection is a vital corrective to discussions of global migration that fail to acknowledge the humanity of migrants themselves.

Publishers Weekly

Fierce and diverse, these essays tell personal stories that humanize immigration in unique, necessary ways. A provocatively intelligent collection.

Kirkus Reviews

A vast, astute collection exploring questions of identity and belonging. A Map Is Only One Story is about margins, ideas of home, migration, and the violence of borders, but its also so capacious that its impossible to summarize. Candid and devastating.

R. O. KWON, author of The Incendiaries

A Map Is Only One Story has a kaleidoscopic effect, breaking our image of the world with fixed borders and identities to create something new again and again. In this anthology, finding home is more than just a search for a place, but for a way to exist. Funny, poignant, and thought-provoking.

AKIL KUMARASAMY, author of Half Gods

Moving and intimate. These disparate voices come into their power when they reach beyond the broken self toward something greaterlove, kindness, familyeven as homes are lost, pride shattered, identities remade.

DINA NAYERI, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

Praise for Catapult Magazine

Its tricky to pinpoint, exactly, what Catapult means for me. A publisher is only ever defined by the people who run it, and working with some of the industrys kindest folks, and its most thoughtful folks, who are nonetheless among its most incisive, can do a funny thing to a writer: it shows you some of the many ways to be. As a storyteller, sure. But also as a person. Mainly as a person. And maybe thats what sets Catapult apart, and what will continue to set them apart: they champion people, in their messy, glorious, unending multitudes.

BRYAN WASHINGTON, author of Lot: Stories

Writing for Catapult changed the way I saw my craft, and how I saw myself as a writer. Id never written for a publication that I would call literary, and as a queer person of color, I considered the notion of ever inhabiting that word to be a lofty goal. But thats the magic of Catapult: in the process of being edited and published there, I saw my narratives in a new light, as worthwhile gems waiting to be polished. My first longform essay for Catapult, about La Llorona and my Chicano familys history, remains one of the pieces Im proudest of in my career. It wouldnt have been possible without Catapults dedication to publishing challenging, bold works that defy easy categorization, opting for complexity and rogue prose over standard fare. In the stories it chooses to uplift, Catapult is changing the game, both for its writers and for the literary world we inhabit. Im as eager to contribute again as I am to read what they put out next.

JOHN PAUL BRAMMER, author of Hola Papi!

As writers, our careers are dependent on gatekeepers who decide what and whose writing is published and read. As writers, also, we ultimately decide to whom we submit our writing and where we will find the best support and audience for our work. Which places make us feel seen? Which publishers are highlighting unique voices? Which publishers are moving the needle on changing the landscape of writing? Which publishers are finding and supporting uninhibited, high-quality, riveting writing that screams of tenderness and heart? For me, that place is Catapult. Im both an avid reader of Catapult, as well as a published author via Catapult. The editors there get it and apply their skills with meticulous craft and unfettered heart. And it shows in the writing I read in the magazine and in their books; I walk away learning something I never expected to learn but realized I needed to learn each and every time. Catapult: what a sanctuary for writers and readers.

CHRISTINE HYUNG-OAK LEE, author of Tell Me Everything You Dont Remember

CATAPULT

New York

Copyright 2020 by Catapult

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ISBN: 978-1-948226-78-3

Cover design by Nicole Caputo

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

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Since its launch five years ago, Catapult magazine has published a wide array of personal narratives from writers all over the world, in hopes of realizing a central tenet of the magazines mission and Catapults overall company vision: through writing that seeks to bridge rather than widen the rifts between people, literature can provide a pathway to greater empathy and understanding.

First led by founding editor in chief Yuka Igarashi, along with this anthologys co-editor Mensah Demary, Catapult magazine publishes standout literary fiction and nonfiction that honors the intimate bond between writer and reader, while also engaging with the broader culture in the way only a daily publication can. It can perhaps be best understood as a clear, ongoing expression of Catapults values, as well as our commitment to writers at all stages of their careers. Key to the magazines editorial identity is the challenge we issue to each of our writers, encouraging them to identify opportunities to ask themselves hard questions even as they interrogate and investigate the world.

In A Map Is Only One Story, the first published anthology of writing from Catapult magazine, writers reveal and explore the human side of immigration: Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Jurez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the heroines of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and what they taught her about her bicultural identity. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim details her grandfathers crossing of the IndiaPakistan border sixty years after Partition. Krystal A. Sital writes of how ones undocumented status in the United States can impact love and relationships. Porochista Khakpour describes the challenges in writing (and rewriting) Iranian America.

Migration is an experience that crosses borders and generations, and the writers in A Map Is Only One Story share an array of perspectives as immigrants, children of immigrants and refugees, people directly affected by immigration policy and how this country treats those who come here. While their stories are different, a truth they share is that immigration is not, ultimately, the story of laws or borders, but of peopleof individuals, families, and communities. As one of our contributors, Jamila Osman, winner of the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, writes in her essay: A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.