September has ended, bringing us even closer to the end of 2021, a year that has felt as unreal, uneasy, and unresolved as 2020. Yet our WWS members continue to send out their work and publish in amazing places.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during September of 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 September!
Congratulations to Carla Sameth, whose poem “The Fragility of Home” appeared in Anecdote Magazine.
Mom, I don’t think I should see you this week. Best friend’s roommate’s boyfriend’s roommate, their bubble, has Covid. When did my son float in and out of my bubble?
*
Used to be I’d introduce the music to my son, his dad and I listened to ‘70s soul
and funk. I took him to see Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire.
In kindergarten, he played in little boy band “The Blasters” with Janice Marie Vercher
(Taste of Honey). Now he sends me a Spotify list 30 hours 19 minutes
for my wife and I to dance out pandemic blues:
House Music for the Soul, my way of describing what house music means to me.
Congratulations also to Kate Maruyama, whose short story “Three Alices” appears in the anthology December Tales, published by Curious Blue Press. The anthology “features twelve brand-new eerie tales by award-winning and best-selling authors, as well as eleven chilling classics.”
Kate also published a review of the movie “Shirly” in Cultural Daily.
I went into watching the Hulu movie Shirley with an open mind. I love Shirley Jackson, her short stories, her novels, her essays on raising her four kids in small town Vermont with a 1950s style husband. I enjoyed the biography of her. I knew this film was based on a novel that was a fantastical take on some scant details from her life, but I was ready for the journey…
I adore Elizabeth Moss, but the moment I saw her portrayal of Jackson in early scenes I knew we were in for trouble. Within a few frames, I saw that we were stepping into the tired, “only crazy women write dark fiction” trope. To put it more plainly, the idea that, “only a sick person could write a story that disturbed me so.”
Kudos to Sonia Reddy (pen name S.R. Ponaka), whose flash fiction “A Warning” appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review.
“If my severed hand were to wash up on shore, would you recognize it?” I asked. A simple question. We were sitting under my beach house portico, sipping martinis, and watching the tide roll in.
For the record, I would have recognized his severed hand any day of the week. His olive-toned skin, that white thread of a scar that swims across his thumb like a tapeworm. Even if that hand brined in seawater for weeks– even after bacterial bloating set in, or crabs got involved, I’d still recognize it anywhere.
Let’s here it for Yvette Siegert, whose article “Forgetting Language: Translating Diana’s Tree” appeared in Mentor & Muse.
I translated Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry collection Diana’s Tree on a Black Friday morning in Los Angeles, at the family dining-room table. My father was cooking breakfast a few feet away. As he scrambled the eggs and cheese, I read him poem No. 28 and asked him how he would say this in English:
te alejas de los nombres
que hilan el silencio de las cosas
(you hide yourself from the names
that thread through the silence of things)
He asked, in our native Spanish, what it meant. He asked why anyone might even say such a thing. I wanted to tell him, Can’t you see that Alejandra is inscribing part of her name into a line about becoming alienated from names—that this idea of distance and solitude is part of her name?
A shout out to Elline Lipkin, whose essay “The Terrible Math” appeared in the anthology Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After Forty, published by Dottir Press. The anthology is a “collection of essays, poems, and creative nonfiction, more than twenty-nine writers offer witty and incisive insight into the unique experience of being or having an older parent in today’s world.”
Congratulations to Erica W. Jamieson, whose essay “How to Shoot the Photographer” appeared in Passengers Journal.
Enter your father’s hospital room carrying his vintage Nikkormat camera outfitted with the 17-35 zoom lens. You pilfered this camera from his house years ago as a memento for a trip taken just the two of you. A workday overnight to Grand Rapids when you were sixteen. It was late afternoon when you grabbed the camera and focused on your father. The wind had kicked up and he said to increase the shutter speed. The camera caught him with a full tooth grin, his hair in midflight. It was a solid shot and told no lies. Your father’s advice on photography made him a better amateur photographer than he was a part-time father. Hold back the roller coaster of anger that rushes at you when you see him in the hospital bed. Use black and white film, high speed for low light just like he taught you.
Kudos to Donna Spruijt-Metz, whose poem “Legacy” appeared in EcoTheo Collective.
In his house on the river, the man
restores broken things, for instance
the boy who is a fish, who hoards
secrets in his pockets, who shimmers
in and out of himself while the river
foams, pulling like the mad moon
In addition, Donna‘s poem “American Psalm” appeared in Poetica Magazine.
—after Psalm 91, line 9-16
It’s Friday—our date night. I will show up no matter how busy YOU are—I will retreat to my white couch, pull my small world in around me, warm blanket, good friends. I will do my best to be frank, and sometimes I will sense YOUR presence
OK, admittedly, YOUR presence and my ability to sense YOU—it’s a Venn diagram—YOUR oil is always slick, YOUR motor always running—my mirror always stained—and us—always face to face
And Donna’s poem “Women at Shiva” appeared in Tahoma Literary Review.
When a mother dies
she leaves her residue—a snail’s trail
across the days of her daughters—
the trails form
glittering webs
—crisscrossing
sidewalks everywhere—
cracking them
Congrats to Helena Lipstadt, whose poem “Me Graxxy Limbs a Garden Make or, Asylum for Two Foolish” appeared in Pinky Thinker Press.
They stalk on four graxxy legs.
She first, all buggle eyes and frounce.
He rumble talk with thunder teeth.
thlow like thlug and creepish.
A shout out to Ashunda Norris, whose article “Black Women’s Avant-Garde Poetics: Politics, Creative Survival & the Afro Surreal” appeared in Root Work Journal.
In this analysis, I strive to create a way to see Black Women’s avant-garde poetics as creative survival with an emphasis on the Black female body as spectacle, an inherently political notion, in a quest to name Afro-surrealism as the lens from which to view the work itself. I aim to highlight, build from and focus on the experimental poetry of Black women which has been marginalized in the canon. Unlike a great deal of scholarship on Black experimental poetics, this reading will not focus on the lack of inclusion in a colonized canon, but instead, will delve into the notion that Black women’s avant-garde poetics are, of themselves, the canon. An argument shall be made that the existence of Black women’s avant-garde poetics is a decolonization, a transmuting of language. This study shall provide a way to see how afro surrealist poetics decenters colonized language and combats madness with an analysis that leaves room for the ancestral lineage to continue. An exploration of poems, politics and poetics of where I see my own work belonging in the tradition.
Let’s here it for Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, whose short story “Cultural Inspection” appeared in the anthology Ramblings & Reflections: Winning Words from SouthWest Writers 2021 Contest, published by SouthWest Writers. Says SouthWest Writers of this anthology,
“[SouthWest Writers’] motto is ‘Writers Helping Writers,’ and one of the fruits of that labor is their annual short writings contest, open to everyone. It gives writers of prose and poetry, both fiction and non-fiction, an opportunity to showcase previously unpublished work. Their 2021 contest featured 20 categories, including Animals, Biography, Crime/Mystery, Fantasy/Futuristic/Science Fiction, Historical, Humor, Horror/Suspense/Thriller, Love, Loss, Memoir, Nature, Romance, Spirituality, Social Consciousness and Travel; a literary smorgasbord containing something for every reader’s taste, with several proudly showcasing southwestern themes; Native American culture, Cowboys, even alien encounters. From 337 entries received—each double-judged—the top 58 were selected for cash awards and publication.”
Congratulations to Ruby Hansen Murray, whose short story “Passing” appeared in Midwest Review. In addition, Ruby’s essay “Desert Creatures” appeared in Pleiades Magazine.
Kudos to Angela M. Brommel, whose poem “Sober” appeared in Timshel: An Anthology of Grief and Joy.
And congrats to Tanya Ward Goodman, interview with artist, Laine Nixon appeared in Luxe Sarasota + Naples.
In addition, Tanya’s essay “Being a Little Less There” appeared on Spark.
By the time you read these words, I will be three thousand miles away from my usual spot, awash in the emotions that come with returning to New Hampshire after two years away. The last time I was there was the fall of 2019 when I, with my sister and my dad’s wife, helped my dad from his home to the memory care unit of a wonderful assisted living facility only a few miles from his house. A week from today, we finally gather to bury him.