The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during August 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), 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 August 2023!
Congratulations to Lisa Eve Cheby, whose article “Elizabeth Hoover Interviewed” appeared in BOMB Magazine.
Poetry and librarianship are vocations dedicated to details and evidence, as we attend to the essence of a thing. Librarianship endeavors to sate our curiosities, and yet it is bound by categories and controlled vocabularies born of the limited imagination of society. Poetry breaks us out of those limitations. In their debut poetry collection, The Archive Is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street Press), Elizabeth Hoover employs poetry to unbind the archive, bringing emotional evidence to physical evidence, and giving voice to stories that have been silenced.
In addition, Lisa’s poem “If I Don’t Tell the Truth About Myself” appeared in Palindrome Journal.
I can pretend that my loathing
of my mother is not
self-loathing; I can
pretend I did not wait at the door like the worried mother
as if she did not deserve a twenty-minute detour
on the way home from the store, a vacation
from the burden of a life she did not plan:
Congrats to Noriko Nakada, whose essay “Consoling Spirits: A visit to the sacred Ireichō at the Japanese American National Museum” appeared in High Country News:
I can’t remember when I first learned about it; it was just something in the collective of our family history, something in the air the Nakadas breathed. There were books with photos on the living room bookshelf, and Dad spoke casually about life in “camp.” Whenever his sisters and brothers were around, if there were questions about when something occurred, it was either before or after camp, this bookmark in their lives of the war and of removal. I bore witness directly from the generation who lived the experience of incarceration. But now, a generation later, I wondered how my kids would learn about this scar that marked our family and our country’s past.
Kudos to Elizabeth Galoozis, whose poem “In the Rothko Chapel” appeared in the Indianapolis Review:
The giant paintings The labor is visible
look black at first, when
the deep violet revealed you get close
only through
sustained attention, I have words
acclimated to inked into my arm
the low light that I have loved
a long time.
A shout out to Aruni Wijesinghe, whose poetry chapbook Bedside Manners was published by Arroyo Seco Press.
Congratulations to Lauren Eggert-Crowe, whose poem “Bobby Pins” appeared in Sugar House Review (Issue 26).
Congrats to Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo, whose poem “Campus Safety” appeared in Text Power Telling Magazine.
[Oxy-students-announcements-l] CAMPUS SAFETY – TIMELY WARNING
CLASSIFICATION: FONDLING
DATE: January 11, 2018
TIME: 12:28 PM
LOCATION(S): Off Campus: Westdale Ave., near Eagle Rock Blvd.
SUSPECT: Described by victim as male, Hispanic, short hair, facial hair, medium build, approximately 5′ 9″, wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue pants.
At approximately 12:28 PM this afternoon, a female student left the fitness center and noticed a Hispanic male standing across the street, at the corner of Campus Road and Alumni Ave. She proceeded to walk on Westdale Ave. and Campus Rd. (toward Eagle Rock Blvd.) where the offender appeared from behind and groped her.
Kudos to Judy Gitterman, whose flash fiction “A Little Help from ChatGPT” appeared in Defenstration.
My kids hate my boyfriend.
They say he’s a dick. In my gut I agree with them. So when I say I’m going to break up with him they’re overjoyed. I tell them I can’t do it in person or on the phone. I’m too much of a coward and he’s too manipulative.
A shout out to Katie Christian, whose poem “I’m Having Fun, What Are You Having?” appeared in underblong.
Yes, mammals are born alive, not from eggs. Their mothers have teats. Anything else? Sometimes I can’t remember what other kinds of animals there are. Reptiles are all I can think. What are—sorry to bring them up—roaches? My science education was sub-par, and maybe I wasn’t listening. I was drawing my hand on the back of my notebook and praying to some kind of god.
Congratulations to Carla Sameth, whose poem “Unspooled” appeared on poets.org.
Sometimes I feel as if I’m undone,
a big spool of yarn
rolling down a steep hill and out into the street,
down the garbage-gathered drain.
Carla’s poem “Love Letter to a Burning World” also appeared on poets.org.
Praise the dark that covers us with ashes,
this morning’s tears, reminding us why we cherish
the not-burning baby cry of awake, not heartbreak.
Mom, I need a hug, please,
I just can’t seem to do anything right.
Raphael, the angel name, should we have birthed
a warrior instead, one who could fight the demons?
Congrats to Carolyn Siegal, whose short story “Please Don’t Feed the Coyotes” appeared in the Pomona Valley Review (Issue 17).
The sharp crags of the San Gabriel Mountains rose behind the rooftops like a scenic postcard, a vast wild horizon. Sandy hopped down the front steps of her new house, blonde ponytail bouncing under a white Dodger’s baseball cap. She could be anyone—a spicy redhead or a chic brunette—but she stuck to Revlon 85B, strawberry blonde, the color of her twenties. The sun cast long, ominous shadows across the sidewalk. She hesitated, unsure of which way to go. The movers drove away yesterday afternoon, leaving her alone with rooms of furniture and stacks of boxes.
Congrats also to Laura Sturza, whose Op-ed “A Love Letter to Print Newspapers and the People Who Deliver Them” appeared in the Baltimore Sun.
As I walked my Rockville neighborhood one recent morning, it wasn’t just birds and flowers I enjoyed in all their summer boldness. It was the number of newspapers I saw in my neighbors’ driveways. I realized I’m hardly the last of the die-hard readers of print news. I felt connected to my community as I thought about my neighbors and people all over the region who would soon open the same copy of the paper that I would.