Hello everyone and happy November! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during November of 2024 (and five of our members heard about these opportunities either through WWS programming and/or another member, which is a wonderful tribute to this community!).
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 take a moment to extend congratulations to our amazing members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!
Please give a shoutout to Melissa Chadburn whose creative nonfiction piece “Rarebit” appeared on Terrain.org.
I saw it in my mother’s face sometimes when she shook me by the shoulders. The other face she so often showed to the world, the one she wore in church and at work long gone. This one—the angry one—was it her legit face? Was she always working to suppress it? Maybe so. Maybe she was aswang—a shapeshifting, baby-eating vampire. Secretary by day, soul sucker by night. I could see that. Maybe she was a witch; all these women who live alone, who know longing, they’re called witches.
Huge congratulations to Love TaShia Asanti whose fiction novels The Seer: Legacy of Stone & Spirit and Any Heart Open have been published and are now available for purchase!
Kudos to Marya Summers for her poem entitled “On This Post-Election Shore, 2024” being featured in Dissident Voice.
Today, election results run, a river
of grief for another river that never
became a wave. Tomorrow, perhaps
a collapse we never imagined:
a bridge, a body, a body
politic, the world.
Still, the tide comes & goes.
As I stand in the sand, the under-
tow pulls my heels, dragging
me insistently deeper. These
returns can suck folks
in beyond their depth, so I know not
to wade further into turbulence,
into a world half-eaten, equal parts
hoorays & handkerchiefs.
Big shoutout to Monona Wali for her fiction piece “Love Thy Monster” being picked up by Santa Monica Review.
Please join me in congratulating Heather Pegas whose fiction piece “The Mermaid Has Finally Had It” was published with Does It Have Pockets?
It is the mermaid’s birthday, and she’s feeling her age. Sailors still like the shape of her tail, it gets their attention, but they turn away at the missing breast, the scarred floor of her chest. They see her hair has turned grey-green, call her a merma’am, and laugh.
The mermaid’s daughter and her friends need constant reassurance and talking down from erotic encounters with fickle seamen. They are forever falling in, and painfully out of, “love” but they reject her hard-won wisdom.
Congratulations to Lauren Salerno for their article “How Princess Leia teaches us not to lose hope as we head into another Trump presidency” being featured in The Mary Sue.
Times like these always lead me back to my Patron Saint of Hope, Leia Organa. Being a life-long Star Wars fan, my relationship to Leia is something that evolves as I go through changes in my own life. That relationship took a new turn in 2017 when I attended the Women’s March in Los Angeles. It was an important moment for me in my political life. The streets of Downtown Los Angeles were packed with people who knew that the next 4 years would not be easy.
Big kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzacoatl whose poems “Gigage,” “Tethered Tongues,” and “Diaspora” were chosen as a feature by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the 2024 Native American Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide. See excerpt from “Gigage” below:
Red is the blood that boils within my veins. Red are the murdered and missing.
Red is the lipstick he sees as slut. Red are my eyes filled with rage.
Red is the war paint tattooed on my skin. Red are the hands of every broken treaty.
Shoutout to Laura Sturza whose creative nonfiction piece “The Super Saleswoman” appeared in Oldster Magazine. She also published “Our own Golden Bachelorette” in The Beacon. See excerpt of the former below:
Mom put those skills to work in future jobs. She became a saleswoman for whom “no” meant revving up for advanced negotiations. After her dad passed away, Mom revealed he’d been a terrible salesman. “He laid it on too thick,” she said. “They saw his desperation. You have to reel customers in with a good story, make them believe they can’t live without what you’re selling.
Please join me in congratulating Valerie Anne Burns whose creative nonfiction piece “Cornflower Blue” was featured in Sad Girl Diaries.
While my mother was still alive, we’d moved to a brand-new home in one of those strangely uniformed suburbs in South Miami. Because blue was her favorite color, the walls inside were mostly shades of blue, and the exterior was painted in a soft shade of sky blue. The builders of the houses in that neighborhood swept away every natural thing in sight as they put up countless blocks of new homes leaving one lonely palm tree to sway in the breeze.
Lastly, kudos to Carla Sameth for the publication of her poem “Thanksgiving” in Mutha Magazine.
Before the crab stuffing and the molten greens,
the grieving turkey, crispy leg reserved
for my wife, there is this year’s drink—
tamarind, tequila, lime, mint, soda, jalapeño,
and champagne. I am the eager taster, hiding
in the corner from my previously sober son.
Fix you a non-alcoholic drink? I ask jerkily
while he lurks nearby this tureen of booze.
Really, everywhere you look there’s booze,
wine and beer and champagne, drinks that look
like innocent cans of soda named spicy or fully loaded.
Would you name your car, your cat, your girlfriend that?
Do what you need to do my son, I murmur.
*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*