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Writing on a Budget: Candles & Sage

By Lisbeth Coiman

Happy New Year!

I believe in the power of intentions. When we decide the path we are going to take, the length of the stride, the weight of each step, we commit ourselves to follow that path. So often we get lost in the minutiae of our lives that we tend to step out of the trail even when we have spoken to the universe what we want to do.

During the past years, I have understood that writing down those intentions, in whatever form an artistic or analytic mind can find, sets a visual reminder of where we want to go and how we plan to get there. The more artistically inclined will create vision boards. Others write their goals in terms of projects, with  specific deliverables, time lines, and a break-down of costs. Whatever form it takes, the vision is the starting point of the upcoming year’s journey: growth, value, recognition, promotion, or survival. Meditation is usually necessary to express this vision in a single word and define the path to take. Some writers I know burn candles and sage at this stage of the planning process

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Writing on a Budget: On Our Watch

By Lisbeth Coiman

In Günter Grass’ Post WWII German novel, The Tin Drum, the chapter “The Onion Cellar” reveals the emotional struggle of an entire country grappling with the guilt of their most recent history. I imagine the cellar to be no larger than a dive bar with stairs leading to a dungeon-like space with round tables, where post-war Germans went daily to drink, peel onions, and cry. In my reading, the onion represents the layers of guilt the Germans had to work through to understand their role in the Holocaust even though in the bar they continue to see themselves as regular citizens, devout Christians who did not really know about the crimes committed by the Nazis.

It took several generations after WWII, for Germans to fully comprehend the slow erosion of democracy: the creation of paramilitary squads to intimidate any budding dissent among the general population; the effort to keep neighbors against neighbors creating divisions instead of dialogue; the role of propaganda to brainwash the population; the political maneuvers to perpetuate power in the hands of the Nazi party; the handout of favors, lavish parties, and gifts to collaborators and sympathizers; lucrative contracts for the industry favoring for the party. Some eventually understood that they had sold their soul to the devil to survive.

Post-war German art is heavy with guilt.

Venezuelans wrestle with guilt too. I recognized it when a friend told me, almost in a confessional tone that he regretted voting for Chavez, for believing in him. “He threw sand in my eyes,” my friend said.

The die-hard Chavistas who sworn to defend Chavez with their lives held onto their somehow privileged political positions until oil money ran out, and they, too, began to question the moral fabric of the “revolution.” By then it was too late to save the country, so they jumped ship and emigrated. The guilt and finger pointing runs rampant in the Venezuelan diaspora.

Like Post WWII Germans, and Venezuelans today, Americans will have to reckon with current history and our role in it.

We are witnessing a “regime-in-the-making.” A quick look at the history of any totalitarian regime is enough to find all the signs of a democracy in demise. Every absurdity has been carefully planned to make the followers laugh, the opposition cringe, and keep the megalomaniac omnipresent in the media. I dare to say, the goal is to produce enough political unrest to the point of chaos to justify the cancelation or postponement of elections in November.

The great majority of people in this country believe themselves good  citizens, church going, good neighbors, hard-working individuals. Some who would have died with a knife in their throats for Sanders, but not for their nation. Some stopped believing in the system; others  allowed robots to drive the conversation on social media; the great majority just joked about the demagogue’s enlarged ego. Never forget the devout Christians, bless their hearts, who voted against the possibility of an abortion, but didn’t care much about the death of democracy. Like Venezuelans twenty years ago, some thought this will never fly. And yet it did.

The worst are those who continued to give a demagogue starving for attention a platform on mass media because people were watching and numbers were more relevant than the future of the country.

Four years later, we are now at this point. We are rightfully worried and horrified at the outrageous efforts by the White House to undermine democratic process, repeatedly attempting to toss out votes . The peak of this anti-democracy campaign recorded on video when a group of domestic terrorist try to derail the campaign bus of his opponent.

The nation is swinging in the pendulum of cold war era ideologies, accusing each other of communist and imperialist while funeral homes run out of space for the bodies waiting for burial.

Have we sold our soul to the devil to keep our slice of privilege intact? As my friend Angela Franklin points out, “whiteness will not protect you.”

This is happening on our watch whether we were always aware or not. The history books are going to say 330 million Americans let this happen. Twenty years down the road, when the Canadians need to invade the USA to free us from a brutal dictator, we will all sit in dive bars called the Onion Cellar to peel our eight layers of guilt, and cry.

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Spectrum, Cultural Weekly, Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.

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Writing on a Budget: Writing Alone Together

by Lisbeth Coiman

Writing Alone Together is a community of writers who share the need of time dedicated exclusively to their craft. We are writers needing accountability in the long hours of a pandemic, when days melt into each other like a plastic spoon left unattended sticking to the metal edges of a hot grill.

By the end of March 2020, I couldn’t tell night from day anymore, the constant rain in those early days of the lockdown, and the grey sky, thick like a sun-blocking curtain, added despair to the two weeks of silence and solitude inside my apartment in Inglewood.

As usual, I reached for structure, the backbone of my sanity, blocking time for exercise, nourishment, chores, and work. But the lack of accountability to meet my writing goals put in jeopardy my ambitious plan to complete a bilingual collection of poetry before summer. Without the pressure of a concrete deadline, or the constraints of time spent on traffic and work, I ran the risk of retreating into my mind and surrendering to the overwhelming weight of the pandemic anxiety.

As a desperate selfish act of reconnecting with people who share my interests, I threw the idea of meeting daily for three hours in the morning in the abstraction of Zoom meetings to write in silence with fellow women writers. And just like that a community was born: Writing Alone Together (WAT). Initially four women joined me. WAT has now 40 members, and keeps growing slowly, with several small independent groups stemming from the idea.

A simple concept, WAT offers a safe cyberspace, structure, and a maximum of 15 minutes to chat before we silence our mics and write our souls out.

WAT is dependent of Women Who Submit, and accepts only WWS members who are committed to write. We meet now twice daily from 10 to 12 pm and from 4 to 6 p.m. That’s four hours of uninterrupted writing for women who are used to steal time from domestic and professional duties. We have already learned from the constrains of  life outside cyberspace to optimize time, and therefore, have become incredibly productive with these extra hours of work. Regular attendees have shared their success stories and make us all proud of what we can collectively achieve when we join forces.

WAT is building a community of women and non-binary writers exposed to the overwhelming conditions of 2020. We support and hold space for each other. We sometimes shed tears and try to reassure those who seem to be given in to the weight of our current common circumstances. And we write, silently in 2 hour segments, daily from Monday to Friday.

The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic with its potential of killing so many of us, together with racial tensions stemming for the contemporary lynching of people of color, protests, the threat of our country turning to totalitarianism, the effects of global warming destroying our landscape, homelessness, unemployment, all post a high risk to our physical and mental health, to democracy and way of life. But 2020 has also been a year of relearning life, learning to live, study, teach, communicate, and perform in cyberspace. Thus, we survive.

This is not the time to judge ourselves for selfish attempts of survival. Not all selfish acts are altruistic, but true altruism is in itself a selfish act, especially when in doing so, we reach for the nearest hand to survive with us. Selfishness knows no moral. It only turns bad if it causes the destruction of others. It turns good when a selfish act benefits those around us. Today, I am proud of the community created from my desperate attempt to survive writing during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020.

Thank you to those who co-host when I cannot open the room: Colette Sartor, Cybele Garcia Cohel, Thea Pueschel,  Deborah Elder Brown, Sakae Manning, and of course to the 40 other female writers who have come regularly or occasionally to join us in our adventure. Thank you to all who continue to hold each other in this cyber space.

Writer Lisbeth Coiman from the shoulders up, standing in front of a flower bush

Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.

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It’s Time for Submission Blitz 2020!

We, Women Who Submit, want to celebrate the last eight years of submissions, rejections, and acceptances with one giant nationwide online submission party.

We are inviting all women and non-binary writers around the country to submit to at least one tier-one journal (Or maybe five!) on September 12, 2020. Let’s inundate these top journals with our best work and shake up their slush piles!

How to Participate:

  1. Mark yourself as going on Submission Blitz Facebook Event Page.
  2. Before the day, study this list of tier-one journals with links to submission guidelines curated by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera
  3. On September 12, 2020 submit to at least one tier one magazines from where ever you are in the world
  4. Notify us on Facebook Event Page in the comments, on Twitter, or Instagram (@womenwhosubmit), so we can celebrate you with lots of claps and cheers
  5. Follow the stories on Instagram throughout the day for encouraging words and tips from members
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STORYTELLING IN ACTION – Egg, Larva, Pupa, Imago

WHEW. It’s crazy times out there, amirite? 

Just when we were thinking it couldn’t be any worse (partisan here: remember the GW Bush years?) society, the economy, the planets, Nature, LIFE serve as reminders that, as Event Horizon, one of THE classic 90s horror films states, “Hell is only a word; The reality is much, much worse.” (If you enjoy a bit of rotfl gore, click through here for the clip. If not, definitely stay away!)

I’m being a bit glib, as I don’t really believe in Hell as such, and therefore have no post-mortem fear of it. But that aside, the hits just keep on coming.

Keanu Reeves enjoys being repeatedly punched in the face.

Example: when I was dreaming about my future in an upstairs classroom of a building constructed in 1928 in pre-summer Pomona during the 1990s, it did not include a debilitating sciatica issue. Nor did I envision a future earning money via food and grocery delivery while I was racking up loans for grad school 10+ years ago. But here (the royal) We are. 

I’d also never conceived that I might *really* enjoy hiking or have an inclination to keep plants alive. Which I do, and have. 

Hiking was a thing that people with money or dads who lived at home did so I knew it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until I was fired unceremoniously from a job I didn’t love last year that I discovered all the trails – specifically trails I *haven’t* seen posted on social media – near me. It was the first time I was able to “Yes, And…” being fired. I’d never been super active in my life because I hate competition and I don’t believe in “no pain, no gain.” The two are not correlative by any means. But once I’d been convinced that hiking was just walking in the woods and that I wouldn’t need to scale a mountain, I decided to try it out. 

And it was the beginning of me. The beginning of a new era/phase/stage of development. I’d reached middle age and had been so focused on how far I hadn’t gotten and on the idea that what I *had* learned hadn’t done much for me. Hiking was much more of a mental and spiritual journey than it was a physical one, and it was a huge physical journey. I have been in therapy for most of my life and there were things in hiking I learned about myself that I don’t know I could have learned through talk therapy alone. The skills I learned negotiating my way across a tiny stream that my friend jumped across all gazelle-like were the skills I used to negotiate my way to the bathroom when my sciatica pain was so bad I could barely move. 

Last year, I lost a job, then I lost mobility. I didn’t feel like I should have lost either. “I have a Master’s Degree – why don’t I have a job? Why can’t I keep a job?” And “I’m only 43, I should be able to move. I shouldn’t be in this much pain!” It really was a crazy amount of pain. Consistent pain for eight months which kept me literally grounded. 

The week after I was set free from that job, I started taking a medicinal plant workshop. I may not have been the best student, but showing up was what I could manage at the time. And I’m so grateful for the opportunity to learn those things while I was learning to hike. It was a hard shift away from the “outside” world with which I’ve had such a complicated relationship for as along as I’ve been in therapy/have been told I needed it. 

I learned to make some preventative medicines for allergies, an amazing salve for muscle and nerve pain, and what it means to *really* pay attention. It turns out that the huge tree outside my bedroom window that I’ve been staring at for 11.5 years is a Eucalyptus tree. Eucalyptus, among its many amazing uses, is great for respiratory issues. 

I have asthma, which is a chronic inflammatory issue based in the lungs. Some suggested causes are allergens and stress. I learned in my herbal medicine class that addiction and asthma are afflictions related to loneliness/abandonment. I also learned that the left lung is smaller than the right, as it has to share space with our heart. Sometimes when the heart is sick, it affects the lungs. I also learned that the lungs are the place in the body where we most hold onto grief. 

The U.S. culture is not one that honors grief much less death as a part of life. It has dissociated itself from these basic life facts in an effort to delude itself into thinking it is godhead. But It. Is. Not. Some needed to be reminded; some have never forgotten. With all that is going on in this country, in this state, in this city, in this house, in this body, paying attention to the stage of development and nurturing it is key. We are not godhead; we are Life and Death and everything in between.

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Writing on a Budget: Immigrants, Community, and Allyship

By Lisbeth Coiman

Like a long distance runner, I travel solo at a fast pace, between villages, delivering my message:

Latinx immigrants are here to stay. We are an increasingly large group of people in all shades of brown, with complex identities product of the ethnic amalgamation that the process of colonization brought upon us.

Shelf with books by Black writers
What does your bookshelf tell about you?
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A WWS Publication Roundup for June

It has been a pleasure doing this publication roundup for the last 4.5 years. It’s allowed me to stay connected to this amazing community and inspired me to keep trying to publish. Though this will be my last roundup, I look forward to seeing all of you virtually and in the real world soon. Happy writing! Laura

Congratulations to T.M. Semrad who had 4 poems published at isacoustic! From “Absent Affirmation, a selfie, my mother’s doppelganger, deleted:”

I celebrate father, hold up
his present, my face an aching grin
to give him a gift who gifted me. Later,
when I am grown,
he and I will walk together
alone

From Lituo Huang‘s “Lake View” at Malarkey Books:

I had heard other trains on other nights—as a child in Indiana when the house our rented room was in abutted the track, I’d be jolted awake by the train passing by the open window until the child I was grew used to the sound and added it to a dream—a black crow overhead would open its beak and out came the shriek of the train, first louder and louder and then diminishing with a distorted pitch as it taxied away on the physics of the air.

Check out Lituo‘s poem, “The 101 at Benton” at Dust Poetry!

From Janel Pineda‘s “Rain” at LitHub:

the first time I ask Tana why she left El Salvador,
me dice: porque allá llueve mucho. its waters too vast and devious,
too quick to wash away everything she’s worked for.

From Cybele Garcia Kohel‘s “Acknowledgement: On Race and Land” at Cultural Weekly:

Our country is burning. Again. There is so much happening, it is difficult to find a place to start. The news is constantly turning, cycling. The protests, which give me hope, illuminate the stories of America we have for too long denied. Perhaps I could begin with the election of a tyrant, the subsequent wave (or resurgence) of fascism and racism, and finally a pandemic, which instead of becoming a great equalizer or unifying force, has served to magnify the inequities in America. 

From “June 24, 2010” by S. Evan Stubblefield at Past Ten:

The hills I drive past are as red as heat. The sky is muddy, and there are few cars on the road. The coolant in my air conditioning is low and my windows have to be cranked down by hand. That was my dad’s idea. “If your car ever ends up in the water,” he said. “You can just roll down the glass and get out.” But I-5 is all almond trees, citrus groves, gas stations, and cows. No ocean anywhere.

From Hazel Kight Witham‘s “The Power of Story:” Interview with Jared Seide On How Listening To Each Other Can Restore Our Humanity at The Sun:

Seide: We knew the twenty-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide was going to be a big one, so Bernie Glassman [co-founder of Zen Peacemakers] asked me to help support a Bearing Witness retreat, which would be an opportunity for people from Europe and the U.S., as well as Rwanda and other African nations, to come and participate in five days of bearing witness to the atrocities. Bernie had been leading similar retreats to Auschwitz for two decades.

From Elline Lipkin‘s “Remembering Eavan Boland: ‘I Was a Voice’” at The Los Angeles Review:

When I picked up Boland’s first book of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of The Woman and the Poet in Our Times, I didn’t devour this book so much as I inhaled it.  Here was a woman writing eloquently about unnamed issues I knew were real, articulating the ambitions of many other female poets who were also stymied by invisible barriers, the press of tradition, and the need to know their voices mattered.

From “For All the Girls: On Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls,” a book review by Anita Gill at Entropy:

Memoirs play with time. Through narration and reflection, the past meets up with the present, allowing the writer to give a closer eye to why what happened still remains so vivid. Díaz utilizes this manipulation of time and takes artistic license. She identifies several moments and brings them together like an accordion. “There was a time, before my mother’s illness, before my parents divorced, before we left Puerto Rico for Miami Beach, when we were happy. It was after Alaina was born, after Mami had gone back to work at the factory, after I’d started school and learned to read.” In an equal amount of befores and afters, she uses just the right moments to capture a lifetime.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong who translated 4 poems by Na Hye-Sok at Lunch Ticket! From “The Doll’s House:”

Playing with my doll
makes me happy and later
I become my father’s doll
and later my husband’s
I make them happy
I become their comfort

Congratulations to Dinah Berland whose Fugue for a New Life came out in June!

Congratulations to Desiree Kannel whose book Lucky John was released this month!

Check out Ann Tweedy‘s 3 poems published in Golden Handcuffs Review!

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A WWS Publication Roundup for May

We hope you and your loved ones are well during these challenging times, and that these literary successes from women in our community bring some hope and joy.

From Anita Gill‘s “Banghra” at The Offing:

As laughter echoed in the lobby of the Katzen Arts Center, I began to ponder collective nouns. If a group of crows is a murder and a group of owls is a parliament, what would the term be for a group of undergraduates? No word came to mind, so I christened the gathered American University students a “headache.” 

From Toni Ann Johnson‘s “The Megnas” at Vida:

We knew about the Arringtons before they got here. Irv Silverman tap-tapped on our back door the day the moving truck driver refused to venture up his black diamond-run driveway. Irv asked if the guy could use ours. Of course we were accommodating. We were good neighbors. Ours stretched down from Oakland Avenue in the back, instead of up from Stage Road in the front, and it was a bunny hill compared to his. So, the driver came that way and the truck pulled onto Irv’s property from ours. There was never a “for sale” sign and Irv waited until then, when it was obvious, to tell us he was moving.

From “Avenging Angel” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When we first meet Lily Wong, the protagonist of Tori Eldridge’s The Ninja Daughter, she is in an empty, desolate building, hanging from a platform, sardonically addressing her Ukrainian tormentor in a bid to extend her life and interrupt the pain of his swinging rope.

Congratulations to Désirée whose story, “Habia Una Vez,” was published at Crab Creek Review!

Congratulations to Noriko Nakada who had two poems, “Family Haiku” and “Meditation on the Morning Spent at the Soccer Field,” published at The Tiger Moth Review! From “Family Haiku”:

Our Family Name / translated into English / means in rice field, to
flee Okinawa’s / smattering of rocky isles / overrun with pests.
Sail amber waves for / land in America where / anything will grow.

Congratulations to Lituo Huang who had two poems, “Prize” and “05.09.2020,” published at Decameron Writing Series. From “Prize”:

The first time I saw the claw machine, I was at a guy’s birthday party. The guy was someone my sister had dated a few times. The party was at Dave and Buster’s because the guy was turning twenty-one. I went even though I was thirty-one and hadn’t been invited.

From Carla Sameth‘s “What to Read When You Need to See Someone Else’s Light and Darkness” at The Rumpus:

Already imperfect, memory is often fragmented and fragile with trauma, making telling our stories more elusive. Just as life does not usually move in a straightforward, organized narrative, my stories were not always moving toward a linear, traditional format. In fact, while I was working on my manuscript, I found that its main characters kept messing up my story arc. Sometimes writing in alternative forms can help to excavate this material, so this is one of the things I looked for in my reading.

The books below were my friends on the road to publishing One Day on the Gold Line, waiting on my bookshelves whenever I needed their company.

More congrats to Carla whose poems, “Each Day” and “Not Hand in Hand,” were published in Sheltering in Place at Staring Problem Press!

Congrats to Karin Aurino who had two poems, “My Name is Wife” and “My Man Stayed with Me,” published at North Dakota Quarterly!

Check out Sarine Balian‘s “1840” at The Coachella Review!

Congrats to Lauren Eggert-Crowe whose poem “I Have Not Taken Proper Advantage of Scorpio Season” was published in Gigantic Sequins!

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Storytelling in Action: The After Party

by Ramona Pilar

From Wonder Boys – 2000

“What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment? [Insert laughter from a drunken undergrad] Faith. Faith that your story is worth telling.” – Q played by Rip Torn in Wonder Boys, 2000

This excerpt is taken from pretty close to the top of the film, which takes place during a very prestigious writer’s conference in New England. I assume it’s supposed to be something like Bread Loaf. (Do writer’s books get optioned at Bread Loaf?) I wouldn’t know because I’ve never attended. And I’ve only been to one AWP Conference, which, incidentally was because it took place less than 10 miles from my home.

I’ve never written an entire book, much less published one. And why? “Faith. Faith that [my] story is worth telling.” I have had challenges with that aspect of writing and creating altogether. I have faith that it’s important to me, but that it would be to anyone else enough to listen, read, or purchase that story? Infinitely less so.

Which is why I’m immediately a huge fan of anyone who finishes a complete collection of creative work – literary, musical, performance-based – all of it. Especially non-commissioned works. As a writer who hasn’t completed a novel or collection – I’ve written full length plays and songs, but not a book. And as someone who has tried via NaNoWriMo for the better part of 15 years, I have an idea about what it takes to complete a full-length work, but I don’t know. 

Something… something… something… Socratic Paradox… something… something…
Continue reading “Storytelling in Action: The After Party”
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Writing on a Budget: a Nation in its Infancy

By Lisbeth Coiman

My mother used to warn about the perils of a leap year. “Este año es bisiesto. Cualquier cosa puede pasar,” her voice dropped to a lower tone for added drama.

Maybe because of that warning, I have taken this stoically, promised myself not to complain about the new circumstances. I can’t stop a pandemic with whining.

  • Typewriter and single wedding band
    Compensating circumstances letter

I don’t want to think too much about the future either. I can have an earthquake kit ready at my door, and practice drop-cover-hold drills twice a year, but I can’t sleep with an opened eye waiting for the next big one. Although not as frequently as earthquakes and hurricane or those darn Oklahoma tornadoes, economic recessions and pandemics come and go. There is always a chance one or several will hit us in our lifetime. This is not a why-me situation.

Nothing is secure anyway. The idea of 50 plus years marriages, 40 plus years careers under the same employer, a house where you raise your children, your grandchildren visit, and becomes an estate sale when you die belongs to another generation. That generation, by the way, created the form of life we enjoy/or not, but it’s ours now. They are most at risk of dying in this pandemic, gasping for air, alone in a hospital, and placed in a zipped back and thrown in a refrigerated truck. Whether we appreciate their patriarchy, capitalist, conservative values or not, we are inheriting the country they helped shaped. At least we owe them the right to a dignified death surrounded by beloved ones.  So I do my part, me quedo en casa, help flatten the curve, don’t infect somebody’s beloved grandma.

Many of us will have to rebuild. But if you think about this as a hurricane that hit the entire world at the same time, first you have to deal with the aftermath before you think of rebuilding. I think of Moore, OK, a town that has a talent for attracting devastating tornadoes, eight in 21 years.

We haven’t reached the aftermath yet. We are still in the eye of the storm. Social Media will let me know that NY is under control. That will be my indicator. And so far, that’s not what I am hearing. What I am hearing is this country’s inability to deal with uncertainty or to follow instructions– two basic adult skills –because we are a young nation, still in infancy, throwing tantrums to have a haircut because we want the lollipop.

Maybe some people are right. It’s easy for me to talk because I am privileged. I don’t have children to raise. So far I’ve kept my job. So far things are ok for me, and will never compared to their suffering: a single mother with a cashier job and no insurance, or a Venezuelan without electricity or water or food, in a pandemic, with a dictator. I try helping those within my reach. I feel bad, but not guilty. What they see in me today is the product of a profound transformation, of years of individual growth, battling my own demons alone. Even if they saw me at birth, they still don’t know all of my stories.

That leads me to another take away. I don’t have the right to call privilege on anyone because I don’t know their complete story arc,  the size and weight of their cross. Even that Karen in yoga pants we all love to hate is carrying a cross – a stillborn, trauma she swallows with loaded margaritas, a stage four cancer she carries with stoicism.

In the meantime, I carry on with discipline: strict exercise routine, healthy food, enough sleep, and steady work for hours without interruption, advancing the goals I set for myself. Those goals do not depend on the economy or the pandemic, but on my focus and personal energy. It is a good time to do everything you want to do or do nothing at all. Just give yourself permission to live the way you feel life at this moment.

Call me selfish, but I have enjoyed every minute of owning my time. I have even gifted the joy in my face to neighbors passing by my window. “Es un año bisiesto. Cualquier cosa puede pasar.” And I decided to take a leap.

Writer Lisbeth Coiman from the shoulders up, standing in front of a flower bush
Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches and dances salsa.