It’s the end of August and the heat is kicking in here in Southern California, with more hot weather through at least September, if not longer. But the heat isn’t slowing down our WWS members, who continue to send out their fabulous work and publish it.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during August 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate our members who published in August!
In years past, we’d called this annual event the “Submission Blitz,” reappropriating a destructive term in pursuit of gender parity and wider representation of marginalized voices in literary publishing. But as the last 20 years has brought unbearable violence punctuated by recent catastrophic times, we at WWS thought it was time for a new direction and outlook.
SUBMIT 1 is the one day out of the year WWS encourages women and nonbinary writers across the globe to send out at least one of their top pieces to one top tier journal as one community. This is no longer about bombarding editors’ desks and slush piles.
SUBMIT 1 is an act of solidarity and faith in our own voices and communities.
WWS hosts quarterly workshops and panels to help demystify the submission process and provide professional development to the writers. One of my personal favorites was “Strategies for Submitting to Contest” in 2016 with Tammy Delatorre, winner of the 2015 Slippery Elm Prose Prize and 2015 Peyton Prize.
On that day she advised us to send our best work, the pieces we loved, the ones we had to see in the world, our absolute favorites. This was an aha moment for me.
If I want an editor to love my work and champion it in their pages, I have to love it first. If I want to turn the heads of the readers at the top journals, the work I send should be top shelf quality.
This year, in our 8th installment of this literary submission drive, I invite you choose one piece of writing, your best and most beloved piece, and do the work of sending it to at least one top journal (Or five!). And when it’s rejected (because chances are it will be), send it out again, and then again, offering as many editors as possible the privilege of reading your work, until you finally find it the right home.
This isn’t an attack. This is an act of love.
How to Participate:
1. Before September 18th, study THIS LIST of “Top Ranked Journals of 2021” with current open calls to find a good fit for your work. Links to guidelines are included.
2. On September 18th, submit one of your best pieces of writing to at least one tier one magazine from where ever you are in the world at any time of day.
3. Notify us on Facebook, Twitter, or IG. Be sure to tag us @womenwhosubmit, so we can celebrate you with lots of claps, cheers, and funny gifs.
4. Hang with us on IG Live at @WomenWhoSubmit from 7am to midnight for a full day special guests, support, and resources. Here is where you can ask WWS members for tips on submitting, get encouragement, or receive LIVE claps for when you hit send.
5. After submitting, fill out THIS FORM to help us track how many submissions were sent out, which will help us in our continued mission towards gender parity and wider representation of marginalized voices in literary publishing.
Submission Drive Origins:
After the first VIDA Count was published in 2009 illustrating the dearth of women’s voices in tier one publications, members of VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, began asking the editors of these journals why they thought the numbers were unbalanced. The most common answer was women don’t submit as often as men. In response, Women Who Submit and the monthly submission party was created in 2011 to support women and nonbinary writers in submitting their work for publication in order to raise the number of such voices coming across editors’ desks.
Our annual submission drive is a call to writers to submit their well-crafted and cared for work en masse to tier-one literary journals that historically have shown gender disparities in their publications. It is a call to action. Our first WWS submission drive was in September 2014 at Hermosillo Bar in Highland Park, CA.
Many years ago, a friend of mine gifted me a kit advertised as a spiritual tool for affirmation. It’s a cute concept: write a wish on a piece of fine paper, roll the paper like a funnel, place it on a platform, and lit on fire. The paper quickly burns and lifts your wish into the air in a magical moment that lasts seconds. It’s cute.
Only I had stopped placing my intentions in the universe as wishes. Instead, I plan and design my life based on well informed decisions, considering risks and unexpected circumstances. The process is not always pretty and most of the time far from smooth.
Bookkeeping concept aside, budgeting is a way to keep an eye on where the expectations reside while we watch the colors of the balance sheet go from black to crimson red. Budgeting is mental health into the future.
Sunset near Edwards, CO 7/3/21
Budgeting a small investment for retirement for the untrained entrepreneur requires a steady hand and an incredible amount of trust in the Self. Those monetary decisions should allow for the unexpected changes and turbulences pass through our lives without breaking us, even as they shake us.
Only five months into the pandemic, I took a risk greater than anything I had tried before and bought a house. Then the budge burnt with a puff in the air, like that spiritual tool for affirmation my friend gifted me.
After eight months waiting for a building permit, prices of lumber went up 400%. Plumbing material tailed behind. Inspectors found fault and the project was delayed even more. I am now into the one-year mark of building a tiny ADU unit and still no end in sight. At times, I wondered if there was any joy left. I felt depleted.
Then the past came back to threaten my sense of security. I reacted with more work and a flood of tears.
But I didn’t budget my emotions.
I allowed myself to feel all the anxiety, fear, abandonment, and anger. I considered these negative emotions as valid as joy and laughter and love, and they were necessary to remind me that being human requires authentic feelings, that my face doesn’t have to be IG ready every day. The reality is I wouldn’t have gone through it without friends holding me. They listened with patience on the phone when the sky turned dark. I am grateful they checked on me and offered advice, “Do not let anybody get into your head. Do not engage.”
With the help of those friends, and a good reserve of joy stored deep inside me I have hiked through this stretch.
What we can do to budget our emotions is to experience joy in its fullest whenever it steps into view because joy’s duration is unpredictable. Fill ourselves with its invigorating energy. Take the risk to love again. Get in touch with our senses. Jump into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean and let that childish moment fuel the next heavy days. And write because the role of poetry is to survive and find beauty even in despair.Â
I don’t complain about my life because I am convinced I have done the right thing. Despite the budget being way into the red palette, I am content in my achievements so far. During all this time, I have lived intensely and with purpose. I am satisfied and impressed of my own ability to reinvent myself even when somebody threatened my sense of security.
All my decisions have been well informed. My personal life is on hold but not over. It’s compartmentalized into being a word artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. All these parts of me come together to give myself what I didn’t give me before: a chance to design my own joy and future.
Both look spectacular from here, rough as the uphill road might be.
Lisbeth Coiman is an author, poet, educator, cultural worker, and rezandera born in Venezuela. Coiman’s wanderlust spirit landed her to three countries—from her birthplace to Canada, and finally the USA, where she self-published her first book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017). Her poetry and personal essays are featured in the online publications: La Bloga, EntropyAcentos Review, Lady/Liberty/Lit, Nailed, Hip Mama Magazine, Rabid Oaks, Cultural Weekly, and Resonancias Literarias. In print media Spectrum v.16, The Altadena Literary Review, and Accolades: A Women Who Submit Anthology. An avid hiker, and teacher of English as a Second Language, Coiman lives in Los Angeles, CA.
