It’s hard to believe we’re already at the end of February, but here we are. And, as usual, the members of Women Who Submit continue to publish their remarkable work in outstanding publications.
So let’s celebrate the WWS members who published during the month of February!
Continue reading “February Publication Roundup”By Noriko Nakada
The weekend after the inauguration, I woke up to flat Los Angeles light. I heaved a deep sigh into the fog that had settled in, and then urged myself from bed. Month nine of the pandemic meant getting up in the morning required a different sort of motivation. Still, I placed soles on cold floor, brewed some coffee, and settled in to write before the rest of the household was up. There was a new president now and a woman of color as vice president. No threatening tweets had been launched overnight. Still, a different sort of urgency settled in around me, like the gray that clung heavily to the world outside.
In February of 2018, we launched Breathe and Push. In that first column, I described listening to Valarie Kaur’s “Breathe and Push” speech as my family drove through the night from Oregon to Los Angeles. In the midst of so much political trauma, I wept as I stared up at a starless sky.
In that speech, Kaur suggested: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?”
Over the past three years, Women Who Submit has played midwife to the labor of so many women and nonbinary writers. With the support of this community, we have written and published and shared our words. Many of you joined me when I asked you to breathe and push toward a better America.
But after these long, hard years of labor, how do we breathe and push differently in 2021? After taking to the streets, and writing letters, editorials, to push against gun violence, family separation, child abuse, racial violence, and a hostile publishing world, we have continued to feed our creative work. Now, after hunkering down for almost a year to keep our communities safe, the losses from COVID 19 continue to mount, revealing and exacerbating so many of the inequities we’ve pushed against. The world has changed, but much remains the same.
I stared out into the gray light that morning in a country under new leadership, but still in the midst of a global pandemic, and as the fog burned off, I was tempted to step outside, to walk with relief through a world restored to what it was before. But I didn’t urge myself from sleep and will myself to the page just for things to be the same. There is still so much to do, both in the world and with my creative projects.
Let our words set us on a path toward something different because our stories can heal us and heal those around us. From the isolation of what has been nearly a year of quarantining, let’s write the story of our America. Write it and then demand that it to be told.
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches 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, and Hippocampus. She spends her hours at home with her two kids answering approximately three thousand questions per day.
