Deez Interviews: Meet the Catapult managing editor with a very pro tip on how NOT to address your pitches

Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with the literary mag Catapult’s Matt Ortile, who talked to us about growing BuzzFeed Philippines from the ground up, writing (and titling) his essay collection, and making the most out of a ~WFH Friday~. Enjoy!

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The interviewee: Matt Ortile (follow him @ortile!)

The gig: Managing editor @ Catapult

The day-to-day:

I split my time between straight-up editorial work, reading and acquiring writers' essays and fiction projects for editing and publishing on the site; and operational tasks for the magazine, like art direction, social media, budgets, contracts, invoices, all that good stuff that makes a publication run behind the scenes.

I work with everyone, from our editor-in-chief, our art director, our associate and assistant editors, and our interns. My job is to make sure that everything goes according to plan—that all the balls are not dropped, so to speak. If a ball is dropped, that means I was the one to drop the ball! All in all, it's a pretty flexible schedule — I like to work from home on Fridays so that I can use the two hours I spend commuting each day to actually do some heads-down editing and return drafts to their writers. We work with a long lead time, so nothing can ever be set in stone.

You spend a lot of your time evaluating pitches — what's one thing about pitching etiquette that you wish all writers knew?

Show me that you've done research, not just on your topic — what's been written about it before, how you'll move the conversation forward — but also on our magazine. Catapult's essays, for example, all have a personal storytelling bent to them, so it's rare that we'll actually run something that's entirely third-person reportage, where the author as their self does little to animate or enhance the story.

I understand that the hustle is real and that you want as many editor-eyes on your work. But it's effort wasted — on both the editor's and your parts — when a pitch is ill-matched to an outlet.

A huge tell when writers do this: opening a pitch email with "Dear editor." Woof, nah, man. Do the work! The writer-editor collaboration is one between teammates; "Dear editor" tells me this will be a group project shouldered entirely by the dear editor.

Before Catapult, you were the global publishing lead at BuzzFeed, where you were also the editor for BuzzFeed Philippines. Can you talk to us about what it was like to launch and grow that edition by yourself?

It was fucking cool, tbh. I had some oversight from Scott (BuzzFeed's VP of International), but mostly I was given the keys to a car and he said, "Don't crash it."

It was a great testing ground for my role at Catapult, actually. I was able to scope out an editorial vision and sensibility, to test and decide which lanes we'd be driving in, to continue the metaphor. It wasn't until later on though that I got to commission more longform pieces for BFPH, the kinds that I now run all the time at Catapult.

Turns out running an international edition on top of another full-time job at a growing media company was tough! BFPH had a great run until I quietly parked it back in the garage in the summer of 2018 when I left BuzzFeed. It would not have been the amazing thing it was without the help of everyone who contributed (Isabelle Laureta, in particular, who was the first freelance writer for the edition all the way back when in 2015!).

You've published your own work in many outlets, including Self, Out, and BuzzFeed (make sure you all read his latest essay, “I Make More Than My Immigrant Mom Ever Has. But I Can Never Repay Her”). Do you consider yourself an editor or a writer at heart?

Ugh, great question. I think my writers at Catapult are probably annoyed at all the notes I give them where I'll say, "Maybe add something like, 'blah blah blah,' to better emphasize the point about XYZ... but in your own words!" At the same time, my editors have also told me to turn off that editor side of my brain when I'm drafting for them, whether it's for an essay assignment or my book, because I shouldn't cut sentences before I've even written them; it just makes for a very halting and staccato writing process.

So I have to cop-out and say I'm both — but what if I say, "You can't be one without the other!" In both roles, your job is to tell a story, to communicate an idea, a thesis. Writing and editing are just two different stages or processes of the same practice. How's that for a zen koan. (You like how I ended that question-y sentence with a period? It's great, pilfered it from Dreyer's English. Highly rec.)

Finally, what can you tell us about your upcoming book?!!

All I can say for sure is that it's happening (It's all happening!!), and it's out from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette. It's an essay collection about sex, power, and the model minority myth — so the idea is to get the reader excited about going out to Pieces in the West Village on a Saturday night, but also going out to march against white supremacy on Sunday afternoon.

And the title of the book is The Groom Will Keep His Name. I keep name-checking it because I'm terrified someone will publish something with it before my book comes out and I'll have to say, "No, I did come up with it myself!" The only other time I hope the phrase comes out in print, apart from mentions of the book itself, would be in my own wedding announcement in the Times.

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Don’t forget to follow Matt on Twitter @ortile, and have a transformative weekend!