“Look up” is what I hear myself telling our seven year old almost every day. They say it could help us avoid text-neck. More importantly, there’s something grounding about witnessing the endlessness above us, how it holds space for both chaos and calm, for both the known and unknowable, and room for possibility. And every seven-year old should experience endlessness every so often.
Welcome to This Makes up the Sky: A Year of Looking Upward.
I’m excited to introduce myself to you as the newest Women Who Submit Blog Managing Editor. In the months prior to submitting my proposal for this series, I spent some time thinking of ways to continue writing while the world continues to erupt. I thought about the sky and how everything it holds is connected by that very thing, that perfect relationship of gravity and orbital motion. And when I came up with the series, I thought about what it means to create a shared space where writers can explore their own relationship with what the sky holds. The sky, in all its iterations, offers us a universal connection point—as simple as it sounds—we’re all under it, all witnessing its changes, all carrying our own interpretations.
Over the coming year, we’ll explore six themes that together tell the story of our shared sky. We’ll begin with Dreams – those just-above-the-surface visions that shape our understanding of what’s possible. From there, we’ll witness the mathematics of flight through Birds, explore the systems that animate unwritten rules in Weather, investigate the always shifting narratives of Clouds, contemplate precipitation in all its forms through Rain, and finally, we’ll discover the architecture of collective movement in Murmurations. For each theme (except Murmurations), we’ll publish four pieces that approach the subject from different angles, different genres, different perspectives – creating a mosaic of how we understand and experience these elements that make up our sky.
As a publisher, I consider myself lucky to have been able to approach anthology curation as a form of collective meaning-making. It’s a practice that might begin in what feels like a selfish place – this desire to reach out, to gather stories, to make sense of the world through perspective. But what comes of it is always so much more, I mean, isn’t this why we write and read and create and…all of it? Research has consistently shown that engaging with art and creative expression provides tangible, memorable real-life benefits for our emotional and psychological wellbeing. When we write about our experiences, when we share our perspectives, we’re not just creating sentences and paragraphs—we’re participating in one or more forms of collective healing. Studies show that we’re activating multiple brain regions and circuits, fostering neural connections that support regulation and cognitive resilience. In times when the world shows its horrendousness, a slight turn toward reflection and creative expression becomes essential.
I truly hope you enjoy reading each piece throughout the year, and the collective sum. And for those interested in submitting work, please read through the submission guidelines. I look forward to reading your work—your poems, your flash fiction, your essays, your hybrid forms. Each submission is a way of mapping the world around and above us, of making sense of both the physical and metaphysical. Through your words, we’ll build a constellation of perspectives, a year-long exploration of how we understand, imagine, and inhabit the space above us.
Looking Forward, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell
Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, Blog Managing Editor (she/they), is a writer, content strategist, publisher, and advocate whose work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals and three chapbooks: Gent/Re De Place Ing (2016), End of the Road (2017), and Facilitating Spaces 101: A Manual for equitable Arts Programming (2018), and has produced a ton of literary events throughout LA. She lives with her husband, seven-year-old, and their gato in Los Angeles, where she runs a small press and where she is ever-attempting to work on Happiest Place on Earth, her poetry contribution to conversations around memory, place, and belonging, inspired by a trip to Disneyland while in the foster system. www.jessicaceballos.com
The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during January of 2025, and four of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member. We appreciate everyone’s commitment to sharing and celebrating their work, especially during these difficult times for our beloved Los Angeles. Thank you and happy submitting!
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our members who had their work published this month.
First up, let’s give a congratulations to Michelle Smith whose poem “Morning Decks & Decorum” was published with Four Feathers Press through their Saturday Afternoon Poetry Blogspot series (excerpt available below). She also published a poem entitled “Brightness” in Southern California Shadows with Four Feathers Press.
Fresh cut blades
of green grass stacked
on yards like neighborhood
houses. Awakens my olfactory
senses. Feeling
squishiness of the piled
high hill dancing in spring
coolness between my toes.
Big kudos to Ronna Magy for her publication of poems “Snow Globe” with Silver Birch Press (see excerpt below) and “Free Love” in Dionne’s Story, Volume IV Anthology with Carlow University Press.
between grandmother’s knobby fingers brown coin-purse frayed zipper thread-bare days. post second war she counts bus quarters. rations tickets for coffee sugar butter whole milk
we’re riding Detroit’s Woodward trolley. downtown electricity crackling Christmas lines yellow car clanging squeals to a stop.
Please give a shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “Elegy” was given a Pushcart Prize nomination by journal Rust and Moth, where it initially appeared in their Spring 2024 issue.
You will not appear in obituaries: cells and the universe colliding, contracting into an embryo, a whole half with me since before I was born. But they said this body could not keep you safe, so I carved your name into my bones, swallowed a pill that made a grave of my womb.
Congratulations to Yvette Siegert who translated five poems by Amanda Libertad and fiction piece “The Devil Knows My Name” by Jacinta Escudos from their original Spanish, which both appeared in Fence (the latter of which is shown below).
The Devil tells me everything
He comes to see me every day. He talks a lot. He tells me stories from every country in the world. About how human beings struggle and how they fear Evil, about how they spend their lives making up excuses so that they can give in to temptation and so be on good terms with both God and the Devil.
He tells me that he was once a charming prince, a man of flesh and bone like everyone else. Elegant and intelligent. Handsome. Wonderful. To such an extent that God chose him to become his favorite angel.
“But,” he says, “the problem is that I can’t stand taking orders from anyone.”
Please give a congratulations to Marya Summers for publishing her poem “The Congregation” with Pensive Journal in their ninth issue.
Kudos to Ruby Hansen Murray for their poem “White Hair Memorial” which appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. She also published another poem “Devotion” in Elysium Review (see excerpt below).
For years, in the women’s rest room at Dismal Nitch, a bouquet of wild flowers, white honeyed verbena, stalks of grass.
How small things stitch the fabric of our lives, river gray toward shore, the ridge beyond.
At schools, churches, art centers, auto shops, health centers, and in neighborhoods, artist Elliott Pinkney painted bold swaths of color and every shade of brown reflected in the community. The murals he designed across Compton in the summers of 1977 and 1978 mirrored the creative energy and consciousness of the city. His art extended into Watts, South Central, Long Beach, Carson, Lynwood, and Berlin, Germany, in over 90* murals across 50 different sites, many of which involved a total of over 200 local youth (*multiple murals painted at one site were counted as individual murals; in a career that spanned over 50 years, this total was likely higher).
Lastly, please give a kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl who published a poem entitled “Mojada” with FLUP and Venas Abiertas Editor Popular.
Happy New Year! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during December of 2024, and four of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member.
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our dedicated members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
The Republican Party campaigned for power by threatening to rip the lives of 20 million people from the fabric of this country. As horrifying a premise as it is, this act of political depravity has happened before.
Beginning in the 1930s, an estimated 1 million people —Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals— were expelled from this country. Following the Great Depression, Mexicans were targeted and scapegoated for taking jobs from “real” Americans and exploiting social welfare resources. The Hoover administration, scrambling to stay in power, gave cities and states authority as to how they would rid themselves of these “undesirables.” The smears used against this demographic have embedded themselves into the historic and now daily discourse of immigration.
Big shoutout to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo whose poem “God Was Not” was featured in Poetry Magazine’s December 2024 issue (excerpt below). Her poems “When I Wince” & “Making an Amends to Myself for Letting Men Use Me” were also published in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.
in your kiss or fingertips, or how you liked to say goodbye, arms squeezing through my middle to lift my body from the ground
till bones cracked up my back. Like a child’s xylophone, you played me into laughter, but not in the good way giggles
Please join me in congratulating Deirdre Hennings for publishing her poem “Midnight, Wisconsin” in Humana Obscura‘s eleventh issue.
We’d lost the moon.
As if in the bottom of a well or some vast pit of sea we floated, nothing tethered but our soles. Each gravel-y step a search in blackness so deep we were nothing but beating hearts
Shoutout to Erin Jourdan whose fiction piece “Chimeras” appeared in Epiphany Issue 33.
Please give kudos to Jesenia Chávez whose creative nonfiction piece “A Meditation on Shopping Carts” was featured in Air/Light Magazine (see excerpt below). She also published a personal essay entitled “Abuelita Josefina Presente!” and a poem “Now I am crying” in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.
Shopping cart as found art
A shopping cart sits at the foot of the trail, perhaps because of the last “clean-up.” This is what they call it when they kick everyone out who has made a home in the hidden hills of Debs Park. Once I went off trail and into a camp and ran back the other way because I was scared.
Shopping carts are upside down on the riverbed, on the sidewalk right side up. Someone managed to push these shopping carts off a grocery store parking lot. This has given the carts new life.
Congratulations to Lorinda Toledo whose memoir piece “Chile Season” was selected as the second place winner of Exposition’s Review‘s Flash 405 “Otherworldly” Contest.
Kudos to Jasmine Vallejo-Love for their creative nonfiction piece “Breaking the Comb Ceiling” being picked up by Lunch Ticket.
There were four hard knocks on the door; the kind only the police made. We froze, every muscle still, breath slowing down. My eyes focused firmly on the hardwood floor, tears slow-danced down my cheeks, snot bubbles in my eight-year-old nose, little fists clenched. The loud squeaking of the front door, in desperate need of WD-40, signaled Mom had opened it.
Shoutout to Bonnie S. Kaplan whose poem “Wildlife Crossings” was featured in The Nature of Our Times.
A camel crossing in Kuwait, an elk overpass in Banff,
these culverts and corridors stitch together land
severed by highway, invaded by interstates,
our open road — their dissipating gene pool.
We make necessary reparations for wildlife,
dig a desert underpass for the tortoise,
reroute the deer in the headlights.
We all need to travel
safely home.
Huge congratulations to Ryane Nicole Granados for her novella The Aves being published with Leapfrog Press.
Kudos to M. Anne Kala’i whose fiction piece “The Visitation” appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs.
In June, Sadie and Lee filed into our home with news and the peach pie it had inspired: Sadie was pregnant. My sister was smiling but wouldn’t look at me. If our parents saw how scared she was, they didn’t let on. She hadn’t been married a month. The couple had said their vows in the same place she and I were born, the same place our mother was born: up the road, at Gran’s.
Over dinner, Mother asked how their new place was suiting them, though it wasn’t new. Sadie had moved into Lee’s efficiency apartment next to the filling station he owned. Maybe, Dad said, they ought to consider moving in with Gran before the baby arrived. I liked the idea, for the place was visible from my bedroom window.
The Aves, by Ryane Nicole Granados is a masterful coming-of-age story that introduces the world to ten-year-old Zora and her 1980s Los Ángeles neighborhood, affectionately called, The Aves. This Los Ángeles neighborhood is filled with an eclectic mix of residents, friends, and friends-turn-family who Zora learns to love and appreciate as she enters her teenage years. Zora narrates her stories and although the neighborhood is what we would now label marginalized, we soon learn that the residents of the Aves are made up of more than their economic status.
Congratulations to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl whose poem “Her Favorite Little Word, ¡Ya Basta!” was featured in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.
In addition to celebrating your wonderful literary accomplishments, I hope you are resting up and spending this time of year with family, friends, and pets (or curled up next to a book). Stay warm and congratulations once again!
Hello everyone and happy November! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during November of 2024 (and five of our members heard about these opportunities either through WWS programming and/or another member, which is a wonderful tribute to this community!).
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our amazing members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
Please give a shoutout to Melissa Chadburn whose creative nonfiction piece “Rarebit” appeared on Terrain.org.
I saw it in my mother’s face sometimes when she shook me by the shoulders. The other face she so often showed to the world, the one she wore in church and at work long gone. This one—the angry one—was it her legit face? Was she always working to suppress it? Maybe so. Maybe she was aswang—a shapeshifting, baby-eating vampire. Secretary by day, soul sucker by night. I could see that. Maybe she was a witch; all these women who live alone, who know longing, they’re called witches.
Today, election results run, a river of grief for another river that never became a wave. Tomorrow, perhaps a collapse we never imagined: a bridge, a body, a body politic, the world.
Still, the tide comes & goes. As I stand in the sand, the under- tow pulls my heels, dragging me insistently deeper. These returns can suck folks in beyond their depth, so I know not to wade further into turbulence, into a world half-eaten, equal parts hoorays & handkerchiefs.
Big shoutout to Monona Wali for her fiction piece “Love Thy Monster” being picked up by Santa Monica Review.
Please join me in congratulating Heather Pegas whose fiction piece “The Mermaid Has Finally Had It” was published with Does It Have Pockets?
It is the mermaid’s birthday, and she’s feeling her age. Sailors still like the shape of her tail, it gets their attention, but they turn away at the missing breast, the scarred floor of her chest. They see her hair has turned grey-green, call her a merma’am, and laugh.
The mermaid’s daughter and her friends need constant reassurance and talking down from erotic encounters with fickle seamen. They are forever falling in, and painfully out of, “love” but they reject her hard-won wisdom.
Times like these always lead me back to my Patron Saint of Hope, Leia Organa. Being a life-long Star Wars fan, my relationship to Leia is something that evolves as I go through changes in my own life. That relationship took a new turn in 2017 when I attended the Women’s March in Los Angeles. It was an important moment for me in my political life. The streets of Downtown Los Angeles were packed with people who knew that the next 4 years would not be easy.
Big kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzacoatl whose poems “Gigage,” “Tethered Tongues,” and “Diaspora” were chosen as a feature by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the 2024 Native American Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide. See excerpt from “Gigage” below:
Red is the blood that boils within my veins. Red are the murdered and missing. Red is the lipstick he sees as slut. Red are my eyes filled with rage. Red is the war paint tattooed on my skin. Red are the hands of every broken treaty.
Shoutout to Laura Sturza whose creative nonfiction piece “The Super Saleswoman” appeared in OldsterMagazine. She also published “Our own Golden Bachelorette” in The Beacon. See excerpt of the former below:
Mom put those skills to work in future jobs. She became a saleswoman for whom “no” meant revving up for advanced negotiations. After her dad passed away, Mom revealed he’d been a terrible salesman. “He laid it on too thick,” she said. “They saw his desperation. You have to reel customers in with a good story, make them believe they can’t live without what you’re selling.
Please join me in congratulating Valerie Anne Burns whose creative nonfiction piece “Cornflower Blue” was featured in Sad Girl Diaries.
While my mother was still alive, we’d moved to a brand-new home in one of those strangely uniformed suburbs in South Miami. Because blue was her favorite color, the walls inside were mostly shades of blue, and the exterior was painted in a soft shade of sky blue. The builders of the houses in that neighborhood swept away every natural thing in sight as they put up countless blocks of new homes leaving one lonely palm tree to sway in the breeze.
Lastly, kudos to Carla Sameth for the publication of her poem “Thanksgiving” in Mutha Magazine.
Before the crab stuffing and the molten greens, the grieving turkey, crispy leg reserved for my wife, there is this year’s drink— tamarind, tequila, lime, mint, soda, jalapeño, and champagne. I am the eager taster, hiding in the corner from my previously sober son. Fix you a non-alcoholic drink? I ask jerkily while he lurks nearby this tureen of booze. Really, everywhere you look there’s booze, wine and beer and champagne, drinks that look like innocent cans of soda named spicy or fully loaded. Would you name your car, your cat, your girlfriend that? Do what you need to do my son, I murmur.
Hello everyone and happy November! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during October of 2024 (and three of our members heard about these wonderful opportunities either through WWS programming and/or another member, which is so great to see!).
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our amazing members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
Please give a shoutout to Marya Summers for her poem “A Begrudging Nomad” being featured in Rise Up Review.
Every dawn is an invitation to move on, every evening a surrender to the rhythms that call to rest. When I lived in foster homes, other people decided when I moved, who I lived with, whether I liked it or not. The only thing truly fostered: a sense of my own intrusion and impermanence, a knack for packing light and quick.
Huge congratulations to Elizabeth Galoozis for her poem “Worn” being published in Thimble Literary Magazine!
When we buried you, I didn’t know Jews don’t do clothing after death,
or display bodies without breath. You were buried without your glasses.
Without shoes. Those clothes are for the living, to guard us from exposure.
Thelma introduced the film world’s first nonagenarian action hero. The movie’s star, June Squibb, age 94, brought an irrepressible character to life and captured the hearts of viewers of all ages, including this 63-year-old fan.
In the movie, Thelma is intent on reclaiming money she lost to a scam artist and takes her family, her friend and the audience on a low-speed chase through Los Angeles that has the thrills of a Mission Impossible film.
Thelma embodies the things I love most about my 98-year-old mom, Evelyn Sturza. Mom is adventurous, forthright, funny, optimistic, creative and has a never-give-up attitude. Like Thelma, my mom also believes she has no limits.
I remember the stillness in September The whisper of a child on a swing Back and forth Back and forth The North and South are one Their shouts are eternal The burial of a season Ease is a long lost memory
The cemetery and majlis are one Gone is the wind of laughter The afterlife as cold as the dusk What does the dove say to the cage after breaking its bones to escape?
Please join me in applauding Khamil Riley for participating in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project where she published 30 poems over 30 days.
Congratulations to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera for her fiction piece “Tough as Faith” being published in the Cowboy Up anthology with WolfSinger Publications.
Brown is the color of my eyes. Brown is the color of my skin. Brown is the ground which I call home. Brown is the color of my seraphim. As coffee is sweetened with creamer, so too my pupils are sweetened by the sun.
Shoutout to Flint for her publication of her creative nonfiction piece “The Great Chicken God” in Muleskinner Journal.
The baby chick is the only non-chocolate thing in Finn’s Easter basket, and it’s awful what we did, and we knew it, kind of, when we were doing it, but we did it anyway, even though we didn’t mean it to turn out the way it did.
But The Great Chicken God saw. And like any God, The Great Chicken God is a terrible God. A good and terrible God.
Please join me in congratulating Noriko Nakada for her poems “MONSTER MAKERS” and “Tarot Eclipse” being featured in The Rising Phoenix Review. See an excerpt of the former poem below:
we keep putting genocide together as if these words could ever make sense aid posing as trap
flour and blood pour from trucks idling near invisible borders
massacre disguised as justice transforms humanitarian into terrorist shatters peace
Congrats to Hazel Kight Witham whose poem “Father Light” appeared in Issue 47 of Bellevue Literary Review.
Kudos to Carla Sameth whose San Gabriel Valley Poetry Collage assembled from Nextdoor posts by residents of Altadena and Pasadena, CA was featured in the latest issue of American PoetsMagazine.
Lastly, please join me in giving a shoutout to Joy Notoma for her fiction piece “Uncle Jimmy” being published in Ploughshares Fall ’24 Longform Issue.
🌰 As with the beginning of a new season, there are new publications to share! 🍂 The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during September of 2024. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our wonderful members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
Our cats are frustrated that they have previously been denied the right to support a candidate who will advocate for their rights as members of an interspecies family. While Republican candidates have yet to comment on the sanctity of interspecies families like ours, I think their position can be guessed. On the other hand, Harris is an animal rights advocate endorsed by the Humane Society. Walz’s interspecies family includes orange tabby Afton, who is prepared to move to the vice-presidential mansion.
From the 1930s to the 1950s an estimated 2 million people, Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals, were expelled from this country. Few of us know about this essential American history. The famous line, “A single death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic,” informed me that that’s how our history would have to be portrayed, through the life of someone buffeted and impacted by this historical event. I kept waiting for someone to write that novel. I looked around and waited some more. I waited long enough to realize that someone was me.
Amidst changes in the economy, urbanization, immigration, caregiving burnout, rising loneliness and marriage and reproduction rates, however, there’s been a shift away from the self-reliant nuclear family as the center for family life. In fact, there is no one predominant family form anymore. Instead, people are returning to the idea of having a strong support network and living with or near the people we’re closest with, just like we did for most of humanity. In fact, it’s become such a ubiquitous desire that if you’re having a conversation with someone of millennial age or younger, it’s only a matter of time before they wistfully bring up their dream of getting a plot of land with their friends and living in a more communal way.
Kudos to Monica Cure for translating and publishing three poems by Adela Greceanu in Romanian poetry anthology Cigarettes Until Tomorrow and in The Dial. Excerpt from “Goose” below:
Words are also a province when it comes to the lively meanings beneath them, meanings unimaginable there, above. However tartine, quasi-unfamiliar, and to handle a relationship are words spoken with such power that they yanked up from underneath them a meaning that made them synonyms. Though only for me, to be fair.
Please give a shout out to Deirdre Hennings whose poem “Life after Transplant” (among others) was featured in Volume 17:Issue 2 of Ars Medica.
I cringe when the car peels out I’d rather not be here you’re so moody again, so often angry now—
I’m on my way to the Berchtesgaden National Park. It is Friday afternoon and between seasons. The trees still have red, old leaves. Winter catches me on the way. A snow blizzard takes over the roads, slowing all the cars down.
I’m stuck at the top of a mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm, just 10 km before my final destination of the day in Berchtesgaden National Park.
Let’s give a big congratulations to Jesenia Chavez whose poem “Pictures of You” was featured in the Latino Book Review Magazine.
I wonder what my grandfather’s hands were like, Playing clarinete, what did he sound like? Where did he practice? What were his botas and huaraches like?
How did the músicos travel from town to town? On horseback, on foot? How did you request them?
Please join me in giving a shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “a ghazal for Doggerland” was picked up by Ink Sweat & Tears (see excerpt below). She also published her poems “Channel Seascape” and “still lives” in The Passionfruit Review.
we walk through the exhibition hall lost amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost
grave-deep underwater, newly unearthed as North-Sea fishing boats treasure-trawl lost
Congratulations to Heather Pegas who published fiction piece “I Did Not Die” in Weird Lit Magazine.
Since he’s been gone, she has dodged thirty-seven calls from her sister and been forced to answer eighteen. Gloria, her astrologer friend, has called twenty-two times, been spoken to twelve. For twenty-nine meals in a row she’s eaten a lump of cottage cheese with a handful of Goldfish crackers on top. She has gone through thirty cartons of Tillamook ice cream, but only nine liters of vodka. It has been ninety-two days since he’d gone, so she considers this restraint.
On one of those days, she made it to the gym and swam four complete laps before the weight of her body sank her. She’d come home and thumbed through thirteen old copies of The New Yorker. Why were they even still here?
Kudos to Stephanie Yu whose fiction piece “A Knock at the Door” was picked up by Wigleaf.
Larry and Susan are sitting arms folded at opposite ends of the couch when their elderly neighbor knocks at the door. She is holding a measuring cup and asks if they have some flour for an apple cake she is making. Susan takes the cup, sifts the flour, taking care not to leave air pockets. Larry makes terse conversation with their neighbor at the front door, his fingers tightening reflexively against the knob whenever she leans forward to speak. Weeks later, their neighbor slips while getting out of the shower and dies. Susan will discover her when she checks on her three days later, having noticed the smell.
Last and certainly not least, please join me in giving a resounding congrats to Ronna Magy who published her poem “Distance” in The Cost of Our Baggage Anthology from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
At least three of our members published in September heard about these opportunities through Women Who Submit. Thank you for your wonderful community and encouragement! Happy Fall! 🎃
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during August of 2024. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our wonderful members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
Huge kudos to Donna Spruijt-Metz for her poem “Crow Comes Back” being featured in the latest issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review.
Please join me in congratulating Lisa Eve Cheby for her publication of a review of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s second poetry collection Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites at Terrain.org.
Bermejo reminds us each joy, each life celebrated is fragile. She refuses to let us forget that Black and Brown bodies, even in their joy, are always under threat by oppressive colonialist systems—and individuals acting in service to those systems—that seek to erase these people, including women, children, immigrants, and anyone who does not conform to colonialist, patriarchal, racist narratives. More importantly, Bermejo depicts the richness of the lives behind the litany of the names in news reports, names too easily anonymized and dehumanized.
Everyone included in this monthly publication round up found out about these opportunities either through another WWS member or our programming. Thank you all for this extraordinary and sustaining literary community! Stay cool for this last bit of summer.
Saturday, September 14, 2024 Women Who Submit (WWS) hosts our 11th annual SUBMIT 1 Submission Drive & Fundraiser. This marks the one day a year we encourage woman-identifying and nonbinary writers across the globe to send one of their most beloved pieces of writing to tier one journals as one community.
As an act of solidarity, SUBMIT 1 dares to connect marginalized writers to top tier editors and publishers, widening the spectrum of voices reaching audiences and influencing arts and culture across the world. And you can help!
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
1. Before September 14th, study this list of “Top Ranked Journals of 2024” with current open calls to find a good fit for your work. BE SURE TO READ AND FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES.
2. On September 14th, submit one of your most beloved pieces of writing to at least one tier one magazine from wherever you are in the world at any time of day.
3. Join one of the following SUBMIT 1 Meetups to submit as a community:
WWS-Los Angeles Saturday, September 14, 2024, 11am-2pm Highland Park Brewing: 1220 N Spring St, Los Angeles, CA 90012 Bring computers and money for beer and snacks Masks recommended & provided Contact: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (admin@womenwhosubmtilit.org)
WWS-Long Beach Saturday, September 14, 2024 10am-12pm The Hangar at LBX: 4150 McGowen St, Long Beach, CA 90808 Contact: Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley (lucy@lulustuff.com)
WWS-West Los Angeles Saturday, September 14, 2024, 2pm-4pm West Hollywood Library: 625 N. San Vicente Blvd, West Hollywood Contact: Angela Franklin (afrankone@gmail.com)
WWS-Bay Area Saturday, September 14, 2024, 1-3pm Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 Contact: wwsl.bay.area@gmail.com
WWS-Austin, TX Saturday, September 14, 2024 at 9:30am Central market Cafe, Austin, TX Contact: Ramona Reeves (ramona.reeves@gmail.com)
4. Tag @WomenWhoSubmit on Twitter (or X) and Instagram and use the hashtag #SUBMIT1, to share when you’ve submitted, so we can celebrate with you!
5. After submitting, log your submissions with THIS FORM to help WWS track how many submissions were sent out as a community.
HOW TO SUPPORT:
In conjunction with SUBMIT 1, WWS is raising $5,000 to support projects like purchasing new technical equipment to ensure our hybrid workshops and panels are offering the best quality of online programming making professional development accessible to any writer in need and growing writers funds to help more writers offset the costs of starting and maintaining a writing career.
By donating to the SUBMIT 1 Submission Drive & Fundraiser, and by sharing the fundraiser link and flier on social media and with your communities, you help spread the word on WWS’s mission to push the needle in publishing toward equity and inclusion as one.
Remote community circles and online discussion boards
WWS HISTORY:
Inspired by the 2009 VIDA Count from VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, which published quantitative evidence illustrating the dearth of women’s voices in top tier publications, Women Who Submit was founded in 2011 to empower women writers to submit work for publication and help change those numbers. In September 2014, a group of writers gathered at Hermosillo Bar in Highland Park, CA for a day of beers, cheers, and literary submissions. It was the first time we called on our WWS community to submit to tier-one literary journals en masse as a nod to the original VIDA Count. SUBMIT 1 continues today as an annual event and call to action for equity and wider representation in publishing with submission drives hosted at public places across Los Angeles. From 2020-2023, we moved our annual gathering to the @WomenWhoSubmit Instagram, and this year we return to a focus on public meetups with online support.
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during July of 2024. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
I attended Women Who Submit’s conference, Beyond the Writing: Building Community, Advocacy, and a Literary Career, this past Saturday where I sat in on a panel centered around community as bridges and keys to supporting our potential as writers. When I shuffled into the room, exhausted from the heat, someone handed me a flower with a small piece of paper attached to the stem containing a poem. One of the panelists mentioned how we all deserve our flowers, and I hope this rings true for you this month whether or not you’ve been published (or have sent work out to journals).
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in July of 2024! And do take a moment to celebrate the bloom of your flowers.
Big congratulations to Lisa Eve Cheby whose book Contract Tracing has been published by dancing girl press.
Please join me in congratulating Brenda Vaca for publishing her poem “Anointed” in the Latino Book Review Magazine for their 2024 issue.
“Teresita!” Abuela’s cry from the back bedroom wafts out, beckons me to her side.
If Mamá doesn’t hear the first request for my assistance, I can wait for the commercial.
“Te-Re-Si-Ta!” Even though Abuela’s body is weak, her voice is still strong as ever.
Before I can reply, Mamá steps out of the kitchen, my sister on her hip, my brother at her ankle, and a spatula in her free hand. She glares at me.
Amy Raasch‘s two poems “Why I Am Not a Gravedigger” and “Ashes” were also featured in this wonderful issue!
When I turn the card over, the armoire opens to a library of birch tree-sized books. A pinemarten claws a spine tattooed with my sister’s name, gnaws its pressed flowers. The ocean forgets
the secret the lake told.
Big shoutout to Kate Maruyama whose new novel, The Collective, has been published with Writ Large Press.
Kudos to Valerie Anne Burns for publishing “Reconstruction,” an excerpt from her memoir in LIGHT Magazine.
My life, and possession of my body began to feel like it was slowly slipping away. A powerful feminine essence I achieved through decades of spiritual practice, therapy, and relationship experiences began to drain through my toes and tips of my fingers—a power I’d come to inhabit flowed down a long drain to the Santa Barbara ocean. An ending.
Golem Girl is a sweeping, stunning work of visual and literary art. It is the groundbreaking memoir of an artist who has refused to be erased by a society with a rigid, very short set of rules on who deserves to live and who can and cannot be human.
Riva’s birth was a miracle, after her mother, Carole, had experienced the trauma of three miscarriages. But her life hung on a thread, a cord; her spinal cord to be specific. Riva was born with the worst type of spina bifida in which a section of her spinal cord billowed from her back “like a gruesome [red] birthday balloon.” This was 1958, when surgical interventions were reserved for only the ‘strongest’ 10% who made it to the age of two; to operate sooner would be ‘wasting’ medical resources. Ironically, and very fortunately, Carole had worked as a medical researcher for a birth defect specialist who did not subscribe to this conventional wisdom. Riva was operated on by a surgeon trained in cutting-edge techniques to close the lesion in her spine. She says “Spina bifida babies are born open to the world.”.
She has undergone more than forty surgeries during her life, and each one delivered the message that she needed to be fixed. She was also given this message in other ways: “People kept giving me books about little crippled girls…All the books agreed on one point: all you really needed to get better was willpower.” The world also spoke to her directly:
Our bus was painted with CONDON SCHOOL in big block letters, so we were always 100 percent visible … Sometimes six or seven kids stood at the corner where we’d stop at the red light; other days, there would be teenagers or even a single vicious adult. There was no lack of people eager to scream ‘Retard!’ at the top of their lungs.
***
I was browsing the racks [of an upscale boutique] when a woman planted herself at my elbow, checked me up and down, and announced, ‘If I looked like you, I’d kill myself!
The source of Riva’s self-loathing―going so far as to call herself a monster― is no great mystery. She writes: “I began each day with an illusion. My last act before leaving the house was to take off my glasses … and let Chicago disappear in a smear and a blur. I dodged traffic and baby strollers, dogs and delivery men, all to ensure I wouldn’t see myself reflected in the city’s shop windows and plate-glass mirrors. The sight of me literally made me sick.”
Riva’s avoidance of other disabled people enabled her denial of her own disability. But she admits that she selfishly joined the Illinois Spina Bifida Association when she developed novel frightening health issues, and she needed guidance. She realized that pretending she was ‘normal’ might lead to her death. At the organization’s picnic she tells us she “walked into a field populated by my own body. All of us short and barrel-chested, all of us limping, leaning on our braces, crutches, and canes, or wheeling our chairs over the grass.” She continues “A few brief conversations confirmed my worst suspicions. No one had a job, no one was married or even had a sweetheart, and everyone lived at home.” Propelled by her artistic creativity, this was the fate she had fought so resolutely to avoid.
She writes of her time at Condon “I had memorized the times of the day when the art room was empty and I could work in peace. The art room had always been my room…Art was magical, and not just in the making: people would look at my work, then look at me with a changed expression. One far from the usual oh poor you.”
The author alternates with ease between the universal and the deeply personal throughout the book. She “discovered that there were satisfyingly weird people at DAA [the Department of Design, Art, and Architecture at the University of Cincinnati],” but it was in the Chicago Disabled Artists Collective that she found “[her] people.” As Riva takes us through her political awakening within this group, we are simultaneously educated:
Our true obstacle was not how our bodies or minds functioned; it was having to wrangle with physical and social environments that ignored our existence. I’d always accepted that I wasn’t strong enough, tall enough, fast enough … I’d never considered that society derived benefits from ignoring the needs of the Disabled. Self-blame absolved the normate world for its failures of justice.
I had spent years fighting against misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, yet I’d so easily believed that I should be ashamed of my body that I’d never understood that shame was both the product of and tool of injustice. I hadn’t just needed Disabled friends. I’d needed friends who could give my experiences context and analysis.
Many years prior, as a young art student, Riva’s overwhelmingly old white male professors had only valued conformist art which perpetuated their own subjective but long- standing aesthetics; there was zero interest in feminist art, and the same total disregard for Riva’s subject matter. Her TA, Bryan, had explained that her task was to find universal subject matter: ‘“A viewer is never going to recognize himself in these pieces of self-indulgence. Yet it’s hardly feminine work, is it?”’ In typical form, Riva wonders “What (in Holy Penis Hell) is Universal Subject Matter?” Bryan graces her with an expansion of his wisdom:
‘The themes that civilization has always chosen as basis for great art! Conflict! Think of Ruben’s Consequences of War…And beauty! Ingress’s Grande Odalisque.‘
Riva understood that the Universal was only “men at war and women in bed” and that “The fragile human body pertained only to [her].” She describes her surprise though with her own response to this realization: “Instead of sobbing, or quitting, I felt the beginnings of fuck you stirring in my soul.”
Through her immersion in disability portraiture, Riva’s indoctrination with conventional beauty standards is shattered:
For most of my life, I had glanced at impairment and looked away, afraid to see myself. Now I looked slowly and deliberately. I let the sight come to me. And beauty arrived … This was a beauty I couldn’t name. It startled me and didn’t, was familiar and unexpected. I remembered how it felt to love disability back at Condon School. I’d rejected that love ever since. “Normal” beauty is unmarked, smooth, shiny, upright; but my gaze began to slip past normal beauty as if it was coated in baby oil. I wanted crip beauty―variant, iconoclastic, unpredictable. Bodies that were lived in with intentionality and self-knowledge. Crip bodies were fresh.
***
The division of the memoir into its two sections pivots on Carole’s tragic, untimely, and avoidable death, while Riva was still a high school student. Carole suffered with nerve pain that “[made] it hard to exist” following back surgery performed by a negligent doctor. This led to her addiction to painkillers. The family had become burdened with financial debt due to medical bills and also attorney fees, but justice never materialized. Carole died at the moment her dream career was beginning to blossom:
Twenty-two years after she’d been forced to relinquish fashion design, Carole Horwitz Lehrer would work to change how big women dressed. She left a trail of notepads all over the house, full of gowns that swirled with joy and dignity (and, of course, rhinestones).
Along with the seismic loss, Riva had to contend with the guilt and regret she carried from their final heated conversations around her increasing desire for autonomy. She explains “Mom had been my librarian, my architect, my surgeon general, my curator. She had left me half-formed; for all my teenage rebellion, I was unprepared to take over the task of inventing myself.”
Having spent an unimaginable amount of time in hospital, (the first two years of her life, just for starters) it’s unsurprising―yet simultaneously surprising―that Riva’s first sexual encounter was in the courtyard garden at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, with a hospital employee. It occurred while she was battling with her mother over her need for greater independence. She writes about this awakening with the complexity that emerges over time. Riva also addresses the prevalence of sexual assault and abuse of disabled individuals, both at home and elsewhere.
Riva weighs in on the topic of forced sterilization of the vulnerable, in the context of her own sterilization, without her consent. In tandem with this question of who is allowed to reproduce, she questions, with obvious authority, the abortion of disabled fetuses.
The life of any artist is often synonymous with struggle, and the challenges are multiplied by several orders of magnitude for disabled artists. Riva acknowledges the additional, significant obstacles, while also recognizing her own relative privileges as a white woman with a middle-class upbringing.
I was drawn to this memoir because of my long-standing affinity with the underdog, whose life is rarely, if ever, portrayed with the complexity that is warranted. This is precisely why we must write our own stories. As someone who was born in India and raised in working-class England, the oppressive layers of the misogyny rooted in my own culture, the patriarchal constructs in wider society, racism, and classism, felt like a fire blanket on a life that was predetermined to be compacted and subjugated. As a radical feminist, I understand that there is still a long way to go in the creation of an egalitarian world, because change takes time. A really long time. But it starts with a repudiation of the lies we are told about who we are and all we can ever be.
This memoir is full of joy and humor. Each chapter is short and accessible. Each page is set as though it is itself a work of visual art. The reader is forced to consider their own complicity in the perpetuation of an ableist society through our own blind spots. And so this expansive, insightful book is also a call to much-needed action for the inclusion of the disabled community in all considerations of the greater good.
Sarita Sidhu is a writer and activist in Irvine, California. She was born in India, raised in working-class England, and moved to the US in 1999. Her work has appeared in The Sun (Readers Write), 100 Word Story, Emerge Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram @saritaksid
