The summer has not slowed down the members of Women Who Submit who have accumulated yet another impressive list of literary awards and publication acceptances.
Lauren Eggert-Crowe had three poems published in Angels Flight Literary West. From “Never Shop Thirsty:”
My heart is a hole I want
to stuff with bread
so I go to our Trader
Joe’s for the first time
since you left. Rearranged
shelves are enough to bring it on.
by Iris De Anda
On the lower shelf of my bookcase, there is a row full of journals spanning the years of my writing attempts. A self portrait of a young girl at the age of 13, who took pen to paper on the bedroom floor. What began as stream of consciousness turned into wannabe poetry by the age of 15, when I ventured into my first open mic at a coffee shop in Alhambra, CA. Some girl approached me afterwards and said something about my words meaning something to her. I was perplexed and inspired, and I didn’t do another open mic for about 3 years. Always reading, always writing, never sharing was my silent motto.
The first time I saw Aya was during graduate school at Antioch University Los Angeles. I noticed her immediately because she’s taller than most (while I’m shorter than most), and she has beautiful, long dreadlocks. Her intelligence, however (she’s a Harvard graduate), was the attribute that would remind me of who she was once we left campus and communicated from our respective locations for the rest of the semester. (Ours was a “low-residency” program.) During online conferences I’d read her posts and think: Oh yeah, that’s Aya, the really smart woman.
Continue reading “Claps and Cheers: Aya de Leon interviewed by Toni Ann Johnson”
by Siel Ju
This article was first published at sielju.com on June 14, 2016. It is reposted with permission from the author.
It’s gotten a bit better now, but I used to be a really terrible procrastinator. I did everything I didn’t need to do while procrastinating on the one thing I purportedly really, really wanted to do: write. Then I complained about how I had no time to write.
Best way to procrastinate on writing while clinging to your identity as a writer: Do things vaguely related to writing that don’t actually require you to write. (Remember that Ze Frank video? Take on tasks that give you “the illusion that you’re getting closer to the thing you’re trying to avoid.”)
Women Who Submit stands in solidarity with the #blacklivesmatter movement as we work for equality and visibility of not just women writers but all marginalized people. As we each individually and as a collective search for ways to help the movement, we share the following collection of articles, interviews, poems and videos that we have found helpful in this dark time. We hope you find them helpful too. Continue reading “Women Who Submit Stands with #BlackLivesMatter: Resources for Awareness, Unity and Healing”
by Lisa Cheby
After my father died when I was ten, I watched my mother, who had been a stay-at-home mom, struggle with returning to the workforce while avoiding managing her grief. At the time, I only saw the struggle and deduced my job in life was to never depend on anyone else. This somehow translated into a reluctance to ask for anything from anyone. Through college and film school, I embraced autonomy, working summers to pay tuition on my own, coordinating moves within Florida then to New York City and Los Angeles on my own, paying my bills on my own, finding jobs on my own, buying a home on my own, and traveling on my own.
In her book Shakti Woman, Vicki Noble writes how the taboo of menstruation and women’s bodies paired with women’s conditioning to deny the Dark Goddess in themselves leads women to view autonomy as unacceptable and, quoting Sylvia Perera, devours their “sense of willed potency and value” (30). With all this autonomy, with all my effort to create a life where I depended on no one, I wondered why I still felt devoid of “willed potency and value.” Rather than empowered, I was disconnected and inhibited. Continue reading “Finding the Power in Submission”
