A WWS Publication Roundup for June

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

What an amazingly long list of publications! Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit published in June.

Congratulations to Elline Lipkin, who published two poems, “Fingernail Moon” and “Pleine Lune” at Apricity Press! From “Fingernail Moon“:

This moon is a thin cusp that cups the vast black,
a silver rim thimbling stars into strewn seams.

From “What I Learned When I Visited Adelanto” by Lisa Cheby at Writers Resist:

the high desert stretches     hours west of airbnbs and selfie backdrops    here Joshua Trees weep

Congratulations to Cherisse Yanit Nadal who had two poems, “It hurts less when I case us in history” and “Benevolent Assimilation,” published at Marías at Sampaguitas. From “It hurts less when I cast us in history“:

1898
You are America; She: Paris;
All of my white boyfriends: Spain.
The difference, you said, Was liberty,
Was protection, Was solidarity,
A common enemy. A common bed.

Congratulations to Mia Nakaji Monnier, who had three pieces published in the Washington Post‘s local guide columns about Los Angeles, Atwater Village and Little Tokyo. From “A Local’s Guide to Los Angeles“:

Ask any Angeleno to describe the city to you and they’ll do it in a different way. There’s beach city L.A., literary L.A., the L.A. of ethnic enclaves and public art and serious sports fans and amateur foodies.

From Karin Aurino‘s “Daisy” at 50-Word Stories:

She loves me… She loves me not.
I visited her at the cemetery, laid daisies at the base of her headstone.

From “Pleated Skirt (Tante Fela)” by Helena Lipstadt at Visitant:

I am not as tall as I was
when I looked like Polly Bergen
and strolled down the shady
Warsaw sidewalk, a leather bag
in the crook of my arm.

From “Amsterdam Long Window” by Donna Sprujit-Metz at The Los Angeles Review:

What does it mean
to owe someone? A cocoon
a small blue egg, a chrysalis?

From “Chicana in New York: Gloria Anzaldúa on Spirituality and the City” by Li Yun Alvarado in MELUS:

Born on 26 September 1942, Anzaldúa became a leading Chicana feminist poet, writer, and theorist before her death in 2004. Raised near the Texas-US Southwest / Mexico border, Anzaldúa features the region prominently throughout her groundbreaking mixed-genre book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza(1987). In the preface to Borderlands, she notes, “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border.” 

From “Andy’s Alliance” by Noriko Nakada at *82 Review:

The absence of the Japanese Americans from Emerson Junior High leaves a massive void. Once the winter ends and the weather grows warm again, nearly a third of their classmates are gone. That is when Andy forms the alliance, to stand guard over friendships and memories until their Japanese classmates return. 

From Tammy Delatorre‘s “I Am Coming for You” at Winning Writers:

I am coming for you. My mother might have said those words the night she went after him—the bearded man, the one she took to her room all those nights. He would come over after I’d gone to bed. She carried me from her room—the only place I could fall asleep—to the room across the hall. In the sticky Hawaiian heat, I’d wake to their loud moans and groans in the middle of the night and sit straight up in bed. At six years old, the only thing I knew of sex was a glimpse I got on TV: two bodies moving under a white sheet.

Congratulations to Flint whose poem, “This Is (Not) A Love Letter: A Poem for Two Voices & M/any Ears,” was published in Our Poetica: An Anthology of Ars Poetica by Cathexis Northwest Press!

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong (고현혜) who published her Mini-E-Book, 유월의 눈 June Snow, this month!

Tsuru for Solidarity

multi-colored folded origami crane on a flat, black surface.

By Noriko Nakada

Read and bear witness. Retweet the tweets. Repost the images. Fold a crane. Fold another. And another.

Remember Sadako, the first story I heard, or read, about folding cranes. A girl who loved to run and play, an innocent victim of nuclear war who got leukemia years after the bombs were dropped. She folded cranes. One thousand and you get your wish. She didn’t make it to a thousand. The cranes she folded didn’t save her.

Fold cranes and attempt to make clean creases, to give energy and thoughts and wishes to children. Innocent victims again. This time they are in cages. This time they are separated from their families. Treated like animals. Criminals.

My sister-in-law folded 1000 cranes for her wedding. I contributed 200 to the cause. She had all 1000 of those gold folded origami cranes and assembled in a beautiful framed tsuri in the shape of the Nakada Kanji. In the rice field.

I once folded cranes at a table at the Deschutes County Fair in Oregon. I think we were protesting death squads in El Salvador, or the murder of a priest in Nicaragua, or the disappeared in Guatemala. Maybe it was later, and we were protesting nuclear weapons testing, or the first Iraq war, or acknowledging the anniversaries of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I taught nice white folks in Central Oregon who had never met anyone Japanese, who couldn’t believe my dad had been incarcerated as a child during World War II. “Well, that sure doesn’t sound very ‘Merican.”

It was. It is. America is all the truths we hold to be self-evident: the good and the bad. The ugly. We are a country built by people taken by force, built by people brought by force and forced to build this nation. This history is in the bones of the body of our nation.

We are a country who takes Native children from their families. We exclude immigrants from certain countries and embrace immigrants from another. We incarcerate whole families during times of war and turn refugees away and sentence them to death. We drop nuclear weapons on entire cities, take sides in civil wars, go to battle in the name of democracy, fight against communism, ensure our people have access to oil and resources and markets all for America and the pursuit of happiness.

We elect men who enslave, who father enslaved children, who rape, who murder, who who who.

So, today I fold. I teach friends to fold. I teach my daughter to fold and while we fold we think about the ways we can push back against all that is wrong. Push, y’all, and keep pushing. 

Check out Tsuru for Solidarity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find ways you can help push back. 


Noriko Nakada HeadshotNoriko Nakada is a public school teacher and the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

Working Through Writer’s Block

A pen and a stone sitting on a opened page of a hardcover book along with a journal and a small alter of candles.

By Thea Pueschel

The screen is blank, your fingers perch on the keyboard, the cursor is blinking at you, and your deadline is looming. Every writer experiences writer’s block at some point in their career. Perhaps, the blinking cursor and the blank screen even pervade your sleeping hours. When you are in a writing rut, and it feels as if there isn’t an exit it’s time to break free and find the flow again.

Body journal and breathe

You’re experiencing writer’s block with that comes a specific sensation or feeling. It’s time to step away from the computer. Take out a pen and paper and begin to write down the sensations you are feeling in your body. Give yourself 5-10 minutes for this exercise. Is your jaw tight? Can you associate the feeling with something else? Write it down. Are your shoulders shrugged up to your ears? When has that happened before? Write it down.

Go through as much of your body as you can in this time frame, write down the feelings and sensations as well as when you have experienced them before. Once, you’ve journaled, inhale deeply and exhale until your lungs feel empty. Take three breaths like this, stand up and stretch. You are ready to conquer the blank screen.

Stichomancy or bibliomancy

You’re stuck. Your thought pattern is circling and not going anywhere near what you need to write.  The muse has wandered away. Perhaps, relying on a 3,000-year-old divination technique would invite the muse back in. Stichomancy or bibliomancy is a divination technique where a random line or passage from a book or the bible is selected to help guide a person in life. This technique works well to get outside of your head, and change perspective.

Take a small stone or a coin; open the book of your choice. With your eyes closed drop the object on the open page. Look where it landed, take 5 minutes to write about the selected line or rewrite the text, or write about the topic from a different point of view. Once your creative channels are clear, it’s time to get back to your work.

When you write, it’s easy to get trapped in your perspective especially when you are feeling blocked. Using stichomancy requires you to write from a place that is outside your norm bringing a fresh approach to your creativity.  The body journal and breathe technique helps you reconnect to your body, explore your sensations and give them a voice which helps clear the mind and the body of blockages.

These techniques are a great way to break up the monotony of self-judgment and get your writing to flow again. Sometimes, the muse just needs to be taken for a walk through different techniques to open the channels of communication.

Thea Pueschel is a hypnotherapist, yoga/meditation teacher. She writes, creates visual art, and teaches yoga teachers and doulas how to deliver and write meditations in and around L.A. and Orange County. She is committed to submitting, only in a literary capacity with light-hearted yet dark creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.