April has been an incredibly productive month for the Women Who Submit members, who have published far and wide. I’m awed by the gorgeous writing they’ve put out there in the world, and in incredible journals. For all writers, I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) and a link to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate these authors for their accomplishments in the month of April!
Congratulations to Cassandra Lane, whose lyrical memoir We Are Bridges was published by The Feminist Press. Her memoir is described as:
When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdalene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt’s lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.
We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.
Congratulations, Désirée Zamorano, who published “1969,” an excerpt from her novel, in the Spring 2021 issue of Hunger Mountain.
Désirée also published the book review “Payment Is Due: On Cynthia Pelayo’s ‘Children of Chicago’” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Cynthia Pelayo’s writing displays a wickedly delightful depth of folklore and fairy-tale knowledge. In Children of Chicago, she gleefully puts the expurgated gruesome back into Grimm. Throughout the novel, we get discussions of the Grimm brothers’ bloody hits: Cinderella’s sisters lopping off bits of their feet to squeeze into the glass slipper, the excavation of bones from the Juniper Tree — all a vivid reminder that modern horror owes so much to folk tales.
Kudos to Roz Weisberg, whose short story “The Sussman Service” was published by The Manifest Station.
At Rachel’s first funeral for her father’s Uncle Milton, her mother leaned over and whispered, “Promise me when I die you won’t put your father on top of me. I’ll come back to haunt you.” Rachel nodded yes. She was ten. Ten years later, Rachel arranged the open casket, lavish spray of roses and lilies, and the details to make her mother look like a version of her alive self for the open casket. A hundred and fifty people moved from the chapel to the graveside where her mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Standing at attention, Rachel waited for her mother to scream from below reminding her of the consequences of breaking her promise.
Kudos also to Sakae Manning, who published a short story in Issue 20 of the The Tahoma Literary Review.
A shout out to Maylin Tu, whose flash essay “Mimesis” appears in Composition Rearview, a new chapbook from Exposition Review.
And to Romaine Washington, congratulations for publishing her chapbook Purgatory Has an Address was published by Bamboo Dart Press. The chapbook is described as follows:
Purgatory Has an Address is a dream state woven of origin myths, it is the search for birth parents; and it is the sober reality of living in a beautiful, pungent, red-lined neighborhood. Washington’s collection of poems speaks to the powerful desire to belong and be in community. It is an homage to the rugged determination of tumbleweeds and an encouragement to keep asking questions even if the answers do not magically appear.
Congrats also to Liz Harmer, who published three poems in Image Journal. The first one is “Proof.”
See, I’d forgotten. Hemmed
in by space, made meaningless
by time, took always the wrong path.
My limbs stretched so far from my body
they turned to greedy-mouthed
children. They call this nursing.
Liz’s second poem in Image Journal is “Long Engagement.”
Last night a young man said to me, every Christian
will tell you, it isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship.
He said this twice. The young man’s wife nodded
and one of their dogs jangled over to me to rest
her head in my lap. Perhaps it could sense my pity.
And Liz’s third Poem in Image is “Time Slice of Marriage After Fifteen Years.”
Today I exercised my love on a mint-green bicycle.
For three miles, I was mother hen alert to wolves
as cars, cars as wolves, ushering small children
across passages. I watched them walk, still helmeted,
into a fenced yard. Every day I lose them.
Kudos to Lituo Huang for publishing her short story “The Penitents” in Telephone.
My sister and I lumber towards the diamond of light, the wounds on our backs still bleeding.
First, we had whipped ourselves. We had torn off our clothes and whipped ourselves until the thick blood came down like tar. It had not been enough. Then we had whipped each other. The diamond of light still shone too brightly. I bit my nails into sharp points and my sister did the same. I carved my name into her back and she into mine. The diamond shone.
Congrats to Donna Spruijt-Metz, who published two translations from Dutch of poems by Lucas Hirsch in The Literary Review. The first is “Lament.”
Having had to absorb a lot of life lately
I learned through so much pain that being dead doesn’t seem so bad
It is up to the stragglers to hold a ruler
to the living
Measure what is left
The second is “Necropolis.”
Woken up in a hut on the Bay of Baratti under a blood moon
Barking dogs on hilltops ripped silence to pieces
held the dead in check, called me to vigilance
Chalk white light illuminated the sight of what was buried
Donna also published a review of the poetry collection Frances of the Wider Field by Lauren Van Pooyen in diode.
In Frances of the Wider Field, Laura Van Prooyen’s third full length book, we never really find out who Frances is. Francis is ethereal, she could be anyone, anything—a vagabond, a haint, Saint Francis, a god, the land, perhaps a confidant—Frances permeates everything. Whoever or whatever Frances is, she is a major presence in the book. The reader gets to fill Frances in for themselves. Filling in missing information to piece together stories has been very much a part of the author’s background, and she bequeaths this to the reader here.
Congratulations also to Merna Dyer Skinner, whose poem “Rocking Chair” appears in Front Porch.
Ever so slightly, I press one foot upon the floor
setting my rocker in motion
back and forth
forward and back.
Hardwood floorboards creak their greeting.
In addition, Merna published three poems in Subjectiv Spring 2021. Merna’s first poem is “Walking My Golden On a Rainy Day.”
I squint to see picked over whalebones
along the inlet path
No–scattered palm fronds–
Clatter as we pass. Frenzied
barking keeps flora threats at bay,
but not slushy rain.
Merna’s second poem in Subjectiv Spring is “Catch and Release.”
Father’s thick fingers bait our hooks and cast our lines,
sending shimmery circles across the lake. When
the ripples smooth to nothing, I sigh, as if with them. I am five.
Merna’s third poem in Subjective Spring is “A Private Reveille.”
The cook slips from the kitchen
in the pre-dawn grey
wipes his hands across his apron
crosses the gravel drive.
Congrats also to Angela M Sanchez, whose article “Deconstructing the hidden curriculum in COVID-19” appears in eCampus News.
“When you’re a college student, you have to learn to work the system to get help. And trust me, there is a system.”
This statement, made by a student to an audience of campus administrators and higher education advocates, generated a few uncomfortable chuckles from a group well aware of the system she was describing. Often referred to as “hidden curriculum,” the system is “the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and perspectives that students learn in school.” In other words, the social and cultural norms instructors don’t explicitly teach or discuss.
Kudos also to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, whose short story “We Are Five Cousins and We Are 13” appears in Peetsmoke.
We Are Five Cousins
We gather in El Centro on Christmas Eve. We wear dresses made of velvet and lace. Tia sewed them from the same pattern, each a different color. Viejitas at church ooh and aah when we pose by the Virgen de Guadalupe. No one cares that the dress is too tight across Elisa’s chest, too short on Maribel so she slouches, cuts off the circulation on Delia’s arms, and hangs all loose on Larissa. Only Joanna’s fits perfect. We’d rather wear something else.
And congrats to Deborah Edler Brown, whose short story “The Kiss” appears in The Ekphrastic Review.
His arms support her in the black-and-white world of a February Paris morning. She leans back but not completely. She still does not know how strong he is, how far to trust him. Not too far. While his right arm pulls her back, while he plants a kiss on her face, his left hand clutches the leather bag, ready to move forward toward the train. Maybe to work. Maybe away, just away. To create distance from the sheets that swaddled them. To inhale the perfume — still too fresh — on morning secretaries and the scent of cigarettes.
Congratulations to Margo McCall, whose short story “Season of Rocks” appears in Think.
The sky was ruby-streaked slate by the time Silver closed her workshop door and re-entered a world gone strange after hours staring at tiny beads and wires through a magnifying glass. She didn’t know where she went when she got in jewelry-making mode, only that dazzling baubles would appear on the worktable as if delivered by unseen hands.
Kudos to Mary Camarillo, whose poem “Lowrider Magazine, August 1980, Page 22” was published by The Santa Ana Literary Association as its poem of the week in The New Santa Ana.
cross the border at Nogales
heading north from Michoacán
to a farm in Palos Verdes
Mama cooks what Dad brings home
and then Pearl Harbor, no more school,
she and Mama, canning tuna
on the wharf in San Pedro
she meets Sam from Santa Ana
poses on a Baja road
her eyes smile straight at the camera
in black and white her lips are red
and then the babies–one, two, three