From the Editor’s Desk is an occasional series of dispatches from our founder Jessica. This first appeared in our newsletter (which you can subscribe to here).
I’m back in the U.S. again and while it feels great to be home, I admit that I miss my “other” home. Visiting South Africa is always a mixture of nostalgia and excitement, an odd feeling of visiting an old love and meeting a new love all at the same time.
I had a whirlwind six weeks there. I don’t get to meet Catalyst’s authors very often since most of them live a continent away. Highlights included meeting Barbara Boswell for the first time, whose novel Unmaking Grace is coming out in just a couple of months, as well as a future author for Catalyst, Joanne Hichens. I have been familiar with Joanne’s crime novels since 2013 and I’m excited she’s joining #TeamCatalyst. I was also able to meet with authors Bridget Krone (Small Mercies), Luke Molver (King Shaka), Peter Church (Dark VIdeo), Helen Brain (The Thousand Steps), Karen Vermeulen (our cover designer but also a future Catalyst author), Yewande Omotoso (Bom Boy), Niki Daly (the Lolo series), and Henry Trotter (Cape Town: A Place Between). Along with authors, I spent some time with Colleen Higgs, publisher of Modjaji Books. We’ve published several of Modjaji’s books into North America. Colleen is somebody I admire greatly—a champion of women writers in Africa. I hope to be more like her when I grow up! I also was able to briefly see Robert Inglis, director of Jive Media Africa and co-publisher of Story Press Africa, and I spent two amazing days with Aoife Lennon-Ritchie, a literary agent who sold us the rights to several books we’re publishing and who hosted me for a brief stint in Cape Town for Open Book Festival. I also got to see Izak de Vries (who, by the way, has amazing translation abilities and live-translated 6 hours of Afrikaans for me during a sales conference) along with the whole amazing team at LAPA Uitgewers, our wonderful distributor in South Africa.
Going to South Africa isn’t all about publishing of course. I hung out a lot with my family. I got to see my newest niece, born two months ago on my birthday. This, according to African custom, makes her my “twin.” Her father, my brother Mtho, got married while we were there. This involved negotiations for lobola, roughly but not completely accurately translated to “brideprice.” (This definition is inaccurate because nobody is “buying” a bride; rather, there is an exchange of goods and money from the groom’s family to the bride’s family as a good faith promise that the bride will be treated well. This exchange also allows the children of the union to belong to the groom’s lineage and clan, rather than the bride’s. It gets more complicated than that and I’m sure my historian friends reading this would love for me to present a nuanced definition but nobody has time to read a 60 page “from the editor’s desk” newsletter on the subject of lobola.) Lobola included the slaughtering of two sheep, one which was extremely cute and my son had named “Tommy,” so it’s possible the two of us will never eat lamb again. Anyway, I was really happy for my brother to get married and I’m absolutely in love with the newest member of the family.
Last, but not least, I got to spend some extended time with the newest person working for Catalyst, SarahBelle Selig. SarahBelle was brave enough to fly from Cape Town to join me and my 13-year-old niece, my 9-year-old son, and my parents for three days in Johannesburg. She’d only met me briefly in New York for coffee and she’d never been to Joburg. SarahBelle, who had to camp out with the five of us in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage on a sheep farm, amazingly survived this ordeal-by-fire of intense, personal, and up-close time with the Powers clan. More amazing still, she continues to work for Catalyst. This, after hearing an extended 15-minute verbal review of some teen vampire anime comic from my niece, who never once took a breath during it and also spoke at a speed of what felt like about 100 words per second. Neither one of us will ever hear such an impassioned review again. I will be pleased if any of the books I publish ever get that kind of treatment from an excited teen. Go, enthusiastic teen readers!
