Spring has sprung and with it comes a new batch of publications from the writers at Women Who Submit. Congratulations to all!
From “What Is the Value of Chloe Kim’s Gold Medal” by Julayne Lee at Cultural Weekly:
2018 marks the 30th anniversary of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics at which time South Korea’s baby export business was exposed to the world. After the 1988 Olympics, Korea greatly reduced the number of children being sent abroad. How far has Korea advanced since 1988, in particular from a social welfare perspective? Isn’t this what the Olympics are all about? “Putting human beings first. To build a better world through sport.” While the number of children being sent abroad is now less than 5% what it was during the Seoul Summer Olympics, it seems in contradiction with the Olympic charter and spirit to allow a country that exports and sells its people to host the Olympics.
Congratulations to Julayne whose book, Not My White Savior, was published in April!
From Sara Finnerty‘s “The Consuming Power of Hunger and Desire” at Catapult:
As a young woman, I was rarely in control of my body or my mind. I had hungers like snakes wildly contorting from my head. I hunger for food, for sex, first for my stomach to be full of a baby, then for my baby to be merged back into my body; I hunger for alcohol and pot, for obliteration; I hunger for my family: I want to hold them close and breathe them in but they are like holding a grenade. I hunger to change my story…
Also from Sara, “Dear Baby Witch,” at r.k.v.r.y:
We, the women in our family, have a problem with love, little girl. Love inside of us is a hard black hole, baseless, bottomless, always threatening to suck the rest of our bodies through its borders and to consume us until we no longer exist. Love is something too heavy to hold. Love isn’t something we think we deserve. We have been taught love means to clutch, to drag down into the dirt. Love is something to bear. But that is not what love is.
From “Rose McGowan Is You, Too” by Marnie Goodfriend at LA Weekly:
Brave. Unapologetic. Determined. Artist and actor Rose McGowan is a force in the fight against the pervasive sexism, harassment and assaults against women in Hollywood. She is angry, and rightly so.
Also from Marnie, “The First Girl: On the Loss of Friendship” at ravishly:
The first girl I fell in love with had broken toenails and hazel eyes the size of silver dollars. Ivy was a ballerina who grew up on a street named after a flower. We met as freshmen in college; our firefly bellies lit up with freedom and a sense of belonging to the world and each other. I’d wait for her outside of Bobst library where she had a work study binding the spines of ancient books too fragile to sit on a shelf without restitching their covers back together, even on the rainy days when wind swept my umbrella into a black crown above my head.
Congratulations to Marnie who won a scholarship for a retreat at the Vermont College of Fine Arts!
From Tina Rubin‘s “How a Woman Who Lived in a Windmill Taught Me that I Mattered” at The Coachella Review:
“Come,” she said, extending an arm, and walked me briskly around her “yard,” a grassy spit of land next to the canal. “Holland is below sea level,” she said in lilting English, “so we have the windmills! They pump water from the canals. Without them, the North Sea”—she pointed northwest—“would submerge us.” I looked in the direction of her finger, but all I could see were repeating rows of canals and windmills stretching across the landscape like an infinity mirror.
From Rachael Rifkin‘s “Here’s What Works Better than Forcing Your Kid to Say Sorry” at Today’s Parent:
“Say you’re sorry,” we say to our kids when they grab someone’s toy, hit their sibling, or do the many other undesirable things they do as they’re learning to respect other people’s possessions and bodies.
And that’s often where the conversation ends, with little if any discussion of what happened, why it was hurtful to the person they’re apologizing to, how they can address the hurt they caused, and what they can do to change their behaviour.
Check out Rachael‘s piece, “Forgotten Letters” featured on the podcast, Reservation Row.
From Noriko Nakada‘s “Education in Resistance” at Entropy:
I sat, my ass baking on the hot asphalt, staring up at the skyscraper that housed the bureaucracy I protested. Shadows of faces pressed up against the glass, faces attached to bodies who claimed to work for students, but went weeks, months, before seeing students or setting foot on a school site. I wondered what they did in that building all day.
From Arielle Silver‘s “5 Reasons Why a Writer Should Move to Tampa” at LitHub:
We writers need long moments when we can look away from the black and white of our stories and let our minds wander. Florida’s wild and strange beauty feels like another world, and Tampa’s unique flora and fauna can reunite a heady mind of words with sensual experiences.
From “Reverberations” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
A tony high school for teenaged girls is the setting for a predator in inspirational English teacher clothing. Victoria Namkung’s These Violent Delights mines a subject that is tragically, outrageously, maddeningly evergreen.
From Romaine Washington‘s “at the end of the devil’s breath” at voicemail poems:
…july.
wilted cereal in a bowl / we
drown in brown boiling milk.
the haze of sparklers and fire-
works add to the deafening heat
that drips into
august.
Congratulations to Eileen Cronin who was a quarterfinalist for the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship for her script Autobiography of a Secret.
Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong whose poems “Look Back,” “Mother Tongue,” and “The War Still Inside” were published in Dryland.
Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Lady Liberty Lit, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Linden Avenue.