During this ridiculously difficult year, Women Who Submit has offered hope. Our members have supported each other during accountability sessions and publication parties and virtual community readings. We have extended a warm, virtual hand to people when they receive rejections—“motivation letters” as our wonderful member, Hannah Sward, has encouraged us to dub them. And we cheer loud and hard when our members publish their work.
So three cheers for the following WWS members who published across all genres and venues during December, the final month of this long year!
Sitting here at home with a dying tree as the focal point of our holiday seems an appropriate way to end 2020. In these waning days and long winter nights of December, the year is dying. Los Angeles struggles for breath, symptomatic of a city where too many have refused to make decisions for the common good. Still, even this year holds beauty and light.
As I look back at my notes from the year, I’m filled with so much gratitude for Women Who Submit, for the spaces that emerged in this community across the days and nights of this pandemic.
We launched our first anthology, Accolades, and many of us made our way to AWP just before everything shut down. We held space for weekly check-ins on Saturdays where we danced and wept, shared and listened. We acknowledged accomplishments, set goals, and learned to ask for help.
We closed our eyes in grounding exercises and reflected on the houses of our work with Allison Hedge Coke.
We wrote alone together.
We participated in an all-day conference and a top-tier submission blitz. We supported and buoyed one another. We greeted one another, “Ahoy, girls!” and we published books, chapbooks, essays, stories, poems, and articles. We shared and listened in regular open mic readings. We submitted work in acts of hope and resistance, and we created a network for book reviews.
During a time when it was often difficult to gauge the right things to do, but also a time when the right things to do were obvious, Women Who Submit refused to cancel. We held one another accountable and shared resources. We read and celebrated and lifted up one another’s work because that is the kind of community we have created.
We held space and understood how both presence and absence were forms of grace.
Thank you all for making this community a place where we breathe and push and remind one another to keep going. Where a comment, a mention in the chat, a book recommendation, a call for a submission can become a thread that connects and sustains us through a web stretches across days and miles.
In a few days, I’ll take down this tree. It will be recycled into mulch and returned back to earth and soil. Women Who Submit will check in both before and after the calendar year shifts from 2020 to 2021. Women and non-binary writers across time zones will find ourselves at the hand-written page, or in the glow of our screens. We will write the first words of the new year, and then we will write the next words until we fill a page and then another. We will show up in our new spaces when we can, and they will provide what we need until we find safe ways to lift one another up in person again. Together, we will bury this year and use it to make something new.
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches eighth grade English at Emerson Middle School in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, and Hippocampus. She is spending her time in quarantine perfecting sourdough, biscuits, and pie crust. She has two kids and answers approximately three thousand questions a day.
