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November 2024 Publication Roundup

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. 

Huge congratulations to Love TaShia Asanti whose fiction novels The Seer: Legacy of Stone & Spirit and Any Heart Open have been published and are now available for purchase!

Kudos to Marya Summers for her poem entitled “On This Post-Election Shore, 2024” being featured in Dissident Voice.

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.

Congratulations to Lauren Salerno for their article “How Princess Leia teaches us not to lose hope as we head into another Trump presidency” being featured in The Mary Sue.

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 Oldster Magazine. 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.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

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October 2024 Publication Roundup

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.

Kudos to Michelle Otero for her publication of creative nonfiction piece “She Wants to Be a River” in the anthology collection Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth published by Torrey House Press. She published another creative nonfiction piece “In Search of Mexicans in Hollywood” in the anthology entitled Spark: Celebrities and our Decisive Moments with Chimera Projects.

Please join me in congratulating Laura Sturza for her latest publication of “90-Something Women Share the Secrets for a Long, Happy Life” in The Ethel.

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.

Big shoutout to Amanee Izhaq for her poem “The Stillness in September” appearing in The Markaz Review.

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.

Big kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzacoatl whose poems “Brown” and “To the Daughter I Never Birthed” were chosen as a feature by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the Latino Heritage Month 2024 Calendar and Cultural Guide (see excerpt of the former poem below). Her book Conversaciones con los Difuntos / Conversations with the Dead has also been published with Desierto Mayor Editores!

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 Poets Magazine.

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.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

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September 2024 Publication Roundup

🌰 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!

Huge congratulations to Laura Sturza for her humor/opinion piece “Cats Are Ready to Cast Their Votes for Kamala Harris” published in Medium and her story “Pedal Power” published in Unfolding: A Market Street Writers Anthology. See excerpt of the former below:

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.

Big shoutout to Désirée Zamorano for her latest novel Dispossessed and a blog post for the novel entitled “Peeling Away Decades of Whitewashing Our History: On the Writing of the Novel, Dispossessed” in La Bloga (see below for an excerpt). What a huge accomplishment!

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.

Please join me in congratulating Rachael Rifkin for the publication of her article “Non-Nuclear Families — Out of Necessity — Are Sought After, and on the Rise” in Good Housekeeping.

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—

Kudos to Diana Radovan for publishing her creative nonfiction piece “Oh, My Friend, How Is Your Blue?” in Humans of the World.

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! 🎃

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

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August 2024 Publication Roundup

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. 

Lastly, we have Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “as you light up” was featured in Scooter Literary Magazine ‘s 18th issue entitled “Nightlife.”

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.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

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SUBMIT 1: WWS Submission Drive & Fundraiser

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. 

DONATE HERE!

Your support also allows WWS to continue to provide the following free services: 

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. 

Eight women with laptops sit on either side of a long table, smiling at the camera
1st Annual Submission Drive – September, 2014

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July 2024 Publication Roundup

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.

Huge congratulations to Tisha Reichle-Aguilera whose fiction piece “Mi Culpa” appeared in Angel City Review’s thirteenth 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. 

And lastly, please give a shoutout to Elizabeth Galoozis whose poem “My Wife Asks Me Why I Keep Touching Her Leg in Bed” was featured in Rogue Agent Journal.

in the night, I press
my foot to your hot bare calf.
surreptitiously

so I don’t wake you
into kicking me away.
how can I explain.

my body needs to
know your body is alive.
that my body is.

Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher

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A Review of Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl: A Memoir

Sarita Sidhu

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  

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Even a Time Traveler Can’t Escape the Patriarchy: Elizabeth Dement’s No Place Like Gandersheim

Drama Script Review

By Aronne Guy

The play is available through the New Play Exchange

The name Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but should be familiar to women artists. An abbess who lived in the 12th century, she was a prolific writer who courageously reworked the plays of Terence to bring them into line with Christian values. She defended the peculiarity of her profession—a woman writer—by reframing her ambition as a service to God. The Almighty wanted her to be a writer, and thus was willing to work with the humble clay of womanhood. Raised in the Pentecostal church, I am only too familiar with this argument, since I often heard it used by women preachers and church leaders in the 1980s. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

The never-ending struggle to transcend ancient patriarchal values is a key theme of the play No Place Like Gandersheim by Elizabeth Dement, which had its world premiere at the Skylight Theater in Los Feliz in June 2023. Dement tells a fanciful story which takes as its launching point the life of Hrotsvitha, known here by the snappy nickname Roz. (This is a review of the play as a written work, not as a performance.) After her play is rejected by the Emperor Otto, Roz drifts through the ages—still writing, still waiting for a moment when women will be able to express themselves artistically without all the bullshit. In early 21st century Los Angeles, perhaps she will finally have her opportunity.

It is hard not to think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as it becomes clear in the second act that Roz is about a thousand years old. Roz does not switch genders, but she does make a transition that Orlando never attempts. While Virginia Woolf’s character is defined by a certain intractable Englishness, Roz throws off her German identity and becomes fully American—a divorced lesbian writer/producer with an emotionally neglected 15-year-old daughter and a hit show about nuns.

Bringing a character like Hrotsvitha to life—eternal life, even—is a fine enterprise that I can get behind. In spite of her well-deserved place setting in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, she still needs all the press she can get. We stand on the shoulders of giants—or perhaps, as suggested by Chicago’s work, we eat off their shapely plates. She didn’t make the cut for Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, but No Place Like Gandersheim gives Hrotsvitha another chance to shine.

The first act is the closest to telling her actual story, as it takes place in a German abbey in the 12th century. While providing a useful quasi-historical framework for Dement’s fictional take, the dialogue in this section is hard to accept—there’s a flippancy that creates an uncomfortable feeling of tacked-on hipness. It’s jarring to read. As spoken on a stage, though, the contemporary-sounding dialogue is probably really funny, cool, and relatable to an audience. It’s not really history. I get it.

The second act, taking place in the present day, leaves the historical issues behind and suddenly the dialogue works on the page. Otto still exists, but instead of the emperor he is the head executive at an unnamed network. Throughout the play, men are an invisible force, always offstage, yet always in control. Like offstage violence in a Shakespeare play, the men’s invisibility enhances the perception of their power. The author is clearly at ease in the second act. The machinations of the network executives provide high intrigue and support the theme.  

The third act is also quite clever and has a twist that works seamlessly within the plot. The bittersweet ending is perhaps the most accurate way to sum up the life of Roz, as reimagined in a current faux-liberated milieu and a future techno-dystopia. A message comes through that without human liberation, there is no female liberation; furthermore, writing is an inherently selfish act that does not have much impact on the struggle for either. It’s a bit hopeless after all, but not inaccurate. 

No Place Like Gandersheim makes a valuable contribution to theater in its clear-eyed vision of the sacrifices necessary to live as a creative woman, regardless of era, while bringing attention to an under-recognized early female playwright. Here’s hoping we see another production soon.

Aronne Guy is a freelance writer, teacher, and musician, performing as Aron Blue. Her writing was recently featured in The Common’s Dispatches section in collaboration with her father. Currently in Las Vegas, she is co-writing the scandalous memoirs of a professional gambler, occasionally releasing music, and teaching part-time at UNLV.    

aronblue.net

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June 2024 Publication Roundup

The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during June 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.

This is my last post as publication roundup editor. I started as editor in July of 2020, when the pandemic was still in its infancy. Women Who Submit became a lifeline for me with our weekly Zoom check-ins and Writing Alone Together sessions. I’m so grateful to be part of this organization and will miss editing the roundup. I look forward, however, to continuing to read updates about our members’ publishing accomplishments under the editorship of Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo.

Please join me in celebrating our members who published in June of 2024!

Continue reading “June 2024 Publication Roundup”