It’s hard to believe how quickly the first month of 2023 has flown by. While many of us are still trying to comprehend that we’re officially one month in to the new year, these Women Who Submit members have already been out there publishing their work in amazing places.
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during the month of January. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb (if available) if the publication is a book, along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in January!
a book review of Melissa Chadburn’s A Tiny Upward Shove
By Hazel Kight Witham
The title of Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel comes from a flashback in which young Marina, the main character, attempts to rescue a bird stuck in the drain valve of a water heater. Her mother, Mutya, comes along, in a hurry to get to the beach with her boyfriend. She needs Marina to abandon the girl’s vital mission, but Marina is too worried about the bird to leave it. Mutya, not to be slowed by some doomed bird’s plight, first tries to pull it out, but cannot get a good grip, and instead shoves upward, breaking its wing, and not so much freeing it as mortally wounding it. The bird flaps in pained circles before falling still. Marina is crushed, but Mutya brushes it off as “helping a hurt thing” along with a “tiny upward shove.”
Through its many twists and turns, this novel jolts the reader in a manner similar to Mutya’s no-bullshit approach to bird-rescue. The novel’s vivid, disorienting, furious opening paragraph introduces us to the singular voice of an Aswang—a protective, vengeful spirit from Filipino folklore— who takes us from the world of the living into another realm to bring justice for Marina’s murder. This omniscient Aswang fills in Marina’s battered backstory, introduces several supporting characters, and then hopscotches through the six previous generations of the Salles family the spirit inhabited. The Aswang also delves into the neglected childhood of the murderer: the real-life Willie Pickton, a man who killed 49 vulnerable women—or more—on his pig farm in Vancouver, British Colombia. These characters’ fates are intertwined and offer wrenching views at the damage we do to each other, particularly to children, when we do not pay attention, when we are too consumed with our own busy lives to stop for the fragile birds.
Chadburn starts the novel with Marina dead but renders her vividly alive through the whole of the book: as a child with her lola and mother, as a smart girl in a new school and a new city, trying to care for and contain her restless, reckless college student mother, and later, as a girl navigating the wilds of the foster care system, with all its lonely rituals and rhythms. Chadburn peppers in Tagalog terms for some of the most explicit words, deftly offering context, but then moving forward, trusting the reader to remember them. The Aswang brings us into the most pivotal moments—scenes of hideous cruelty and carelessness that follow Marina into places she never should have gone, places where her mother and others do not protect her. Eventually we meet Alex at a foster care campus, who brings warmth into Marina’s life, but who also carries some of the worst trauma children endure.
A Tiny Upward Shove reveals the vital work fiction can do to expose corrupted systems and spotlight abuse in a way that is a call to action for the reader. To do so in this case required a depth of knowledge on the part of the author, and the courage to mosaic lived experience and careful research into a propulsive story, rendering something new and transformative. In Chadburn’s case with A Tiny Upward Shove, it required delving into the brokenness of our foster care systems and researching the horror of Willie Pickton, his victims, and, even in the midst of so much wreckage, finding a way to have curiosity and compassion enough to explore what led Willie to such violence.
Chadburn’s use of the Aswang narrator, Tagalog words and phrases, and her extensive research renders a world of wrenching stories so real that they become a part of us and force us to look at the awful when we so often choose comfort by averting our gaze.
For readers who seek escape, a splash in the shallows of a beach read, a bird easily freed from entanglement, this may not be the book for you right now. But for those able to trust an author as skilled, caring, and badass as Chadburn to take us into the deepest woods, to bear witness to callous sexual violence, remorseless slaughter, and crushing systems, but then lead us back out again, is a way of honoring the women at the heart of this story, as well as their real-life counterparts. Chadburn, righteous Aswang writer, memorializes women unable to share their stories and urges us to take more care in this world of beauty and devastation.
As a Women Who Submit board member, Chadburn continues to support this network in submitting writing to agents, journals, contests, and presses. In 2020, Chadburn offered the WWS community a workshop on literary citizenship—modeling ways writers can support authors with reviews, and nudging us to find ways to uplift and nurture each other’s literary pursuits in the midst of deeply challenging times.
Chadburn’s debut novel asks readers and artists: where do we put our money, our time, our creative efforts to make change, to spotlight injustice, to bear witness? In what ways can we—especially those of us with the privilege to have avoided systems like the ones Chadburn explores—channel our energies for good? The courage it takes to stay with Chadburn’s narrator is just one small step toward greater courage in honoring and protecting women’s lives and caring for those on the margins and in the shadows. Melissa Chadburn’s A Tiny Upward Shove is a powerful catalyst for holding accountable the systems designed to support our most vulnerable.
Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, slam poetry coach, and writer who was made in Los Angeles and still calls it home. She has published work in The Sun, Bellevue Literary Review, Integrated Schools, Mutha Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Rising Phoenix Review and other journals. She is a proud public school teacher in LAUSD and was a 2020 finalist for California Teacher of the Year. She is a member of Women Who Submit, and gathering with them throughout the high seas of pandemic kept her afloat as a writer. Find her work here: www.hazelkightwitham.com.
It was December in 2016. In the warmth and light of Avenue 50 Studios in Highland Park, I attended my first, in-person Women Who Submit workshop. Our presenter, Sara Novik, attended via video conference to speak with us about writing and activism post-election. On that cold LA morning in those waning days of the Obama presidency, I hoped the nightmare of a Trump presidency wouldn’t materialize, that the election had been a bad dream from which I might startle awake. But as I listened to Sara and the work she engaged in as a refugee and deaf writer, I resisted closing my eyes and falling asleep to the reality of our country’s future. I galvanized myself for the fight ahead.
After Sara’s presentation, I participated in a WWS orientation, and then I got started submitting. All around that room, women were writing, sharing stories, submitting work and cheering one another on in the process. We were setting goals and pushing back against a world that was poised to work ever harder against us. As a new WWS member, I set goals for my creative work and this organization helped me submit that work for publication. Since then, I have averaged over 50 submissions a year. I have prioritized my creative work by applying for and attending writing residencies, and I’ve leaned into literary citizenship with this community.
A couple of years later, I volunteered to start a column for the WWS blog, and Breathe and Push was born. Inspired by Civil Rights attorney Valarie Kaur’s words: “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? […] Because if we don’t push we will die, and if we don’t push our nation will die. So tonight we will breathe, tomorrow, we will labor.”
This metaphor helped me through several challenging years and this column helped many of us breathe out essays pushing against gun violence, family separation, and state-sponsored police violence. We reminded ourselves that in the midst of busy lives, our creative work could push the world toward justice.
When I joined WWS’s leadership team in 2019, I took on management of the blog and a year later, we moved almost exclusively to virtual spaces. Throughout the pandemic we navigated a shifting and uncertain world by continuing to write essays, poems, stories and books. These past few months, we were able to celebrate so many members’ hard work with in-person book launches and readings, while continuing to acknowledge both publications, and passes. I am thankful to WWS for continuing to clap and cheer along the way.
This space will continue to allow us to connect in our increasingly fragmented world, to press against the cracks and let the light come in through so much darkness. The words that I have had on repeat during much of the past few years have been those of Colson Whitehead from his acceptance speech during the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony: “be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power.” My work with WWS has helped me do this. But in 2023 I will be stepping down as the Women Who Submit blog manager. This means we are looking for someone to help curate this space and embrace this opportunity. You will have lots of support and a quarterly stipend, so if you are tempted, considering, wondering if this might be for you, please send an email to womensubmit@gmail.com.
In pickup basketball, those waiting and watching the game from the sidelines let everyone know if they want to play the next game. It can be scary, but it’s court etiquette, and it works to call out, “I got next.” So, here I am asking: who’s got next?
Noriko Nakada is a multi-racial Asian American who creates fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to capture the stories she has been told not to talk about. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Hippocampus, Catapult, Linden Ave, and elsewhere.
