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.
by Noriko Nakada for the Women Who Submit Leadership Team
This week my ten-year-old had her annual physical. Her dad took her, but that afternoon, when she came home to tell me about it, she said, “I’ve never had a man before.” In her ten years, every pediatrician she’s known has been a woman or non-binary physician. She is growing up in a world where women can be and do so much: they are doctors, they run for president, they play professional sports. In my work in a public middle school, I see young people pushing back against sexist dress codes, and exhibiting so much freedom in what they want to do with their bodies and their lives, but the leak of the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade cast a long, dark shadow across any of the improvements to women, non-binary, and transgender folks’ rights, reminding us that our bodily autonomy is under aggressive attack.
We have seen this coming in the election of a blatant misogynist, in the efforts at the state level to restrict abortion access, to silence stories through book and conversation bans, and in the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. We have watched this unfold slowly, like the shifts in our planet’s climate, but with this ruling, for the first time in many of our lives, abortion will no longer be protected in the United States.
Over the course of the pandemic, chapters and memberships have sprouted up across the nation and globe, and while some of us might reside in solidly blue states where access to safe and legal healthcare remains intact, but even there, care can become precarious as clinics shut down, or voting restrictions make it more likely that the conservative minority will come to power. We watched this over the years as in so many places the reasonable availability of abortions has eroded. And for those of us living in poverty, no matter where we reside, healthcare options are often financially out of reach.
Women Who Submit supports safe, legal, affordable abortion access for all and encourages members to support and lift one another up as we navigate these hostile waters. We see you and acknowledge the range of emotions this week’s news might have triggered. We urge you to take care of yourselves and those around you as you seek out opportunities to turn the tide. We acknowledge that the ways we all push back are diverse and unique. Maybe you are grieving silently, writing a story you have about your reproductive struggles or health, or having difficult conversations with loved ones about the significance of this ruling. However you are processing, we are here, we are creating, and we aren’t going anywhere.
If you have the wherewithal to push back financially, here are some funds and resources to pass along. Most are set up to help people in areas where access to abortion and healthcare is already limited and is likely to become more challenging in the coming months.
A review of Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing by Hazel Kight Witham
I first heard Toni Ann Johnson bring voice to a character onstage at a reading in the MFA program we shared. I barely knew Toni Ann, but I was swept into the world of her fiction by the characters she illuminated with her humor, vivid dialogue, intriguing conflict, and acting chops.
I didn’t know she had a significant history as an actress, both on stage and in film, and experience giving characters voice through her work as an award-winning screenwriter: she won the Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Ruby Bridges,” another one for “Crown Heights,” a true story about two teens who connect in the wake of the Crown Heights unrest of 1991.
Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing, winner of Accent Publishing’s Novella contest in 2021, explores vital questions we all need to reckon with. The book opens in New York City, the winter of 2006. At the outset, Maddie, a singer, has just suffered her second miscarriage and her husband, who reminds her he “wasn’t ready” for a baby anyway, is bailing back to Los Angeles.
She is twisted with grief and the shock of betrayal, “curled up like a fist on the floor.” A phone call with her mother, Velma, reveals that she is more interested in who from their mostly white neighborhood in the New York suburbs has ended up on the obituary pages. Her mother’s inability to listen or empathize with Maddie, or even allow space for her to share the news of her miscarriage, is breathtaking.
Hollowed by these twin losses: her baby, Nina, and her partner of ten years, Rolando, Maddie is further leveled by the inability to voice her grief. Her mother doesn’t know how to listen, and neither does her father. She spends a week invisible, bedridden, underwater. She can’t go to her job as a singer in a piano bar, she is cut off from her voice. A visit from her mother gets her up and moving but she is still heavy with sorrow that no one seems to want to let her express.
On the TV all the channels begin covering Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s racist meltdown on the stage of the Laugh Factory in LA, the place Maddie’s husband is headed without her. Richards’s vitriolic performance of this country’s deep-seated racism, compounded by her mother’s mourning of a white neighbor, brings Maddie’s childhood rushing back. She grew up the only Black child in a white, conservative town in the wealthy New York suburbs, where kids who are her friends in kindergarten “realize she’s Black” by third grade. They perform the racist behaviors they inherit from their elders, and no one seems to think there’s anything wrong with that.
The performance of overt racism becomes a through line. While the comedian is publicly called out, Maddie reckons with the trouble of returning home to that mostly white, conservative town as the holidays descend. A neighbor’s death brings her back to her hometown on New Year’s Eve to both mourn one more loss and contend with the harms of the past. The kids who filled her childhood are all grown up now, and Maddie, raw with grief and the loneliness it brings, asks some of them to account for their childhood transgressions and their cowardly silence.
The responses range, and reveal the complexity of reckoning: her own mother dismisses Maddie’s memories, the bully acknowledges and apologies, her friend Tobias, “breaker of her young heart,” just wants to move on.
But the story is not, of course, only about grief and racial reckoning. Johnson’s humor is a through line too. It comes in memorable scenes, like when Velma’s spiteful Dachshund seems the embodiment of microaggressions—a snapping, snarling, unapologetic creature that Velma defends unconditionally. It comes in the dialogue that renders each character vivid and compelling.
Humor and reckoning collide too when Velma once again offers her daughter up to this community with all its blind spots, racism, and privilege. The novella rises to a crescendo in the scene where Maddie’s mother Velma has volunteered Maddie to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the deceased. Maddie learns she will be performing just moments before when she sees her name on the program, and has no time to prepare for this sudden call. She is furious with her mother, but takes the stage anyway, standing before the mostly white community, the handful of people of color, performing a beloved anthem in this display of public grief.
Johnson reminds us of the complexity of this song, an ode to awakening, to being lost and then finding redemption, a song written by a slave trader who made his fortune trafficking in African lives. As Maddie sings before the crowd she asks herself, “What am I doing standing in this white church in this white town that crushed my spirit, singing the words of a white supremacist who wrote it for his own forgiveness? Why should I forgive?”
Maddie’s grief—for her lost child, her broken marriage, her challenging parents, and the betrayals of this childhood home, make for a tricky performance. “Singing magnified every feeling,” and when she falters, her childhood friend, daughter of the deceased steps up, calls for the community to step up, and they begin to sing together, offering this complicated, beautiful song back to Maddie. The moment is riveting, but also another kind of performance: what is it to sing of being lost then found, blind, then seeing, when so much has still been unaccounted for? What grace is this community asking without having done the work to earn it?
It is a moving moment, but Johnson quickly reminds us of how far we still must go. When that childhood friend Tobias is bitten by her mother’s vicious Dachshund, he offers a trade: the harm and disregard he perpetrated in the past for present forgiveness of canine transgression, as if the two could be comparable: “Maddie, how ’bout, I let this go, and you let your stuff go?”
She responds: “Let it go where? Where do I send it?”
Shortly after, a neighbor with Alzheimer’s unleashes a racist diatribe against Maddie, lunging at her as he hollers the n-word and rails that she doesn’t belong in the house. It is a scene that brings the Laugh Factory moment directly to Maddie, highlighting all the vicious ignorance of our shared past.
When the beleaguered wife of the man apologizes for his behavior, Maddie thanks her, but doesn’t let her off the hook: “I’m surprised though…Because you called me the same thing when I was a kid. You hated ‘us people’.” Now the woman is friendly with Maddie’s mother, and Maddie wants to know: “What’s changed?”
By the end, Johnson’s character understands the impact of this place of her childhood better. “The voice of this place had been loud and she’d carried it with her all her life. Now she saw that the voice was nothing but a beat-down, demented, old fossil clinging to the need to be better because its own image was so fragile.”
“What’s changed?” is a question that Homegoing asks of all of us. What does healing look like? How can we reckon with the past if we do not listen to those hurt by it, and make authentic amends? How do we hold each other accountable for harm? How do we reconcile with each other in this country where so much brutality was baked into the beginning, and the legacy of it lives on in our language, in our actions and inactions? How do we make amends, instead of dismissing old wounds, or hiding behind excuses?
What truth and reconciliation might be possible in this country if we could do that? If we could hold space for the grief and trauma our history has brought, and that our present perpetuates, but work toward better for one another as we move together into something new?
Toni Ann Johnson’s Homegoing invites us through the story of Maddie and the vibrant scenes she inhabits, to consider how we listen, how we honor, and how we make amends—authentically, not performatively—so that we may move toward collective grace together.
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.
How do you deal with your emotional wounds? For me, as a writer, telling what I hope are emotionally engaging stories, doesn’t that mean the wounds need to be examined from all angles? Prodded, to see where the most tender parts are, and returned to, over and over again, even if the wound has healed?
Towards the end of 2019 a close friend of mine for over decades stopped talking to me. She and I had gone through the child-raising years, health crises, family struggles. I had ignored the distancing hints, even as I hid parts of myself from her. I had for the last few times set up our coffee dates. The last time we met, I gave her a copy of my daughter’s zine.
A month later I didn’t hear from her. I emailed, got thanks for the zine, then silence. My birthday passed, unremarked. Christmas passed, with no traditional photograph of four smiling faces in front of an elegant backdrop.
The isolation of the pandemic gave me plenty of vacant, musty hours to immerse myself in this. I brooded on the fact that when she mentioned her (mostly white, like her) book group had just read, The Sun of Distant Lands I had suggested her club might also consider reading White Fragility. Had that been it?
I examined that friendship from every angle there was, from wounded self-justification, to prostrate abject apologies over unknown crimes. (All right, full disclosure, I never considered I had done any wrong. But I can apologize on the drop of a dime.)
Rumination, holding a scalding puzzle piece to my past, or my present, or my blighted future; taking its measurements, its temperature, its weight, examining its psychic heft and dimensions, mentally recoiling, mentally recording. This is my personality, and I can excuse this behavior because it’s good for my art, I whisper to myself. All this rumination, neurotic or artistic, is who I am, I tell myself.
A few weeks into California’s lock down, where the traffic nearly vanished and the streets were instead filled with the chirruping of birds, I, part from the need of distraction, part from my restless self-improvement compulsion, enrolled in the popular, free Coursera class on the Science of Well Being.
Mid-course, I ordered one of the recommended readings: The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky. There I discovered terrible truths about myself: I have a penchant for social comparisons. Where do I rank? How far up, how far down? Research shows we tend to compare ourselves up, to what’s missing. And even if we compare ourselves downward, against those who are lower down whichever scale of our choosing, it brings us no consolation whatsoever, only guilt or a sense of inadequacy or a sense of undeserving whatever gifts or greatness or joy we have. What a happiness buzz kill, amirite?
The answer, according to these well-being experts? Stop. Doing. It.
The horrible thing is, these insidious social comparisons for some of us (me, me, me) are as second nature as breathing in and out.
I don’t know where you are on the social comparison scale; perhaps, like my husband, it never enters your head to think if that person walking by is better fit than yourself, more fashionably kitted out, or whether an acquaintance or friend has a smaller behind and a larger bank account; the measures are limitless, almost like our capacity for self-loathing and self-recrimination.
Sonja Lyubomirsky links social comparison and rumination together, although her term is “over thinking,” How presumptuous! Dammit, Sonja, I’m a writer and over thinking is something we pride ourselves. If there were a test on it I’d score 110%. Again, you’re telling me to simply cut it out?
Actually, she offers five specific strategies for subverting your own worst impulses in order to open the possibility of leading a fuller life, opening your brain waves like passageways to more positive possibilities. One in particular involves writing it all down. Of course, I am simplifying things here, because if you want her strategies completely spelled out, and if you want to find areas for your own flourishing, do Sonja a favor and buy the damn book.
For my particular neurosis, I was prescribed to spend a minimum of fifteen minutes writing about this very thing you are ruminating over, for four consecutive days. Write about the incident that you’re reliving, write about anything connected to it, write about other things you’re over thinking, over and over again. So that’s what I did, kicking and screaming and cursing, and then I forgot on the third day so I started the clock again.
This was not fun. This was not pleasant. I am here to say, it was actually kind of painful doing an autopsy of the events that seemed to seared into the obsessive/compulsive part of my brain. I had to force myself to continue writing for fifteen minutes. When that ended, I did not feel much better. When the full four days ended, I did not feel much better.
(Oh, Lord, what is the objective criterion one can use on oneself for how we feel?)
As the weeks passed, I admit I was not paying much attention, but my mind no longer seized on the missing friend. When my mind fluttered across her, it blithely, cheerily, kept going. No more pauses. No more spiraling loops and recriminations and ruminations and accusations. Nope. On to something else.
That had been happening, but it had taken me a moment to actually notice. Huh, well, indeed, I no longer had that anxious mentally racing laps circling her. Huh, well, my oh my, was it all really as simple as that?
Recently, more than a year after the realization that my friendship had ended, I received a card from my former friend. I groaned. Had she sent me an early, cheery, smiling Christmas family photo? I dreaded what I would find inside.
I slit the envelope open and pulled out a birthday card. I examined the text for clues as to why things had ended. There was nothing, only neutral birthday wishes, signed off with “take care.”
Did I scrutinize every interaction again? Did I, like previously, unpack the years before she stopped talking to me, for further possible hints and clues layered between child-rearing activities or political disagreements?
No, I did not. I felt released from the tug of this dangling thread of a severed relationship, and tossed the card and envelope into the trash bin. That writing away your ruminations strategy has the depth charge of a long-lasting, slow-release wonder drug. I felt freed and light-hearted
The next time I catch my mind going round and round the toilet bowl of obsessive rumination, or over thinking, I’ll be sure to sit down for four days straight, and write it out and flush it away like the mental waste it is.
Désirée Zamorano is the author of the novel The Amado Women (Cinco Puntos Press). Her work often explores issues of invisibility, inequity, or injustice. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Cultural Weekly, and The Kenyon Review, and upcoming in the Akashic anthology series South Central Noir. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, she was recently a scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
I first met Colette Sartor in 2020. She was sitting in her backyard, adjusting her glasses and announcing, in the middle of a women’s writing meeting, that she had a sourdough bread to check. I was smitten.
Of course, whether my admiration translated through the portal of Zoom is anyone’s guess, but she became a friend through those Women Who Submit check-ins, and then later through the pages of her enchanting book, Once Removed.
Colette’s writing is much like the woman herself: No nonsense, yet sensitive; incisive, yet gentle. She was one of the first in the group to listen to my music and tell everyone else to do the same, and when I told her that I planned to read her book in order to write a review, she briskly popped a copy in the mail before I could object.
There is always that one person, when you join a new group, who you gravitate toward to find your footing. I had joined Women Who Submit perhaps a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, but had not really felt like a concrete part of the community, until the meetings became virtual and weekly.
That first morning, as I scanned the boxes, something about the woman with the half-smile, long dark hair and knowing eyeglasses settled my nervousness, and gave me the courage to return, Saturday after Saturday.
So of course, I really wanted her book to be good. There are few things worse than building something or someone up in your head, only for the idol to come crashing down from the pedestal once the statue is exposed as mere stone.
Fortunately, as I turned page after page of the short story collection, it became clear that it was not a gilt facade, but a solid golden cathedral.
Each story is discrete, yet all the tales are connected. In this way, Colette acknowledges that there is dignity and value in our starring roles in our individual life stories, while gently reminding us that we are also a supporting characters in many others’.
As the stories describe various women’s journeys, and losses they suffer along the way, it becomes a book that commiserates and comforts its reader. We are all struggling, we are all succeeding and failing, and while our tragedies are to be honored, they should not isolate us in despair- for we are not alone.
Colette deftly stitches the pieces of each life’s fabric together into a bittersweet tapestry that reveals its glorious pattern gradually, beautifully, until the final page, when the entire work is thrown into the light to take your breath away.
Once Removed is one of the very few books I’ve read that left me greedily turning back to the beginning immediately upon completion to walk the path again. More slowly this time, I began to notice the sweet harbingers, the dangerous forebodings, and the profound lessons strewn along the way.
The Saturday after I finished reading, I logged on to Zoom and saw Colette propped in her bed, a smile curling up one side of her face, and I longed to climb through the screen to hug her in gratitude for the experience that is her book. Ruefully, I knew that even if we’d been face to face at that time, we still could not have embraced, because we were still in the plague of distance.
So instead, I wrote this down. Colette, for me, your book served as a reparative to that isolation. It brings its reader edification and visibility and empathy. It offers perspective, healing, and wisdom…and not a small amount of joy.
Thank you.
VK Lynne is a writer and musician from Los Angeles, and a 2015 recipient of the Jentel Foundation Artist Residency Program Award for writing. She penned the award-winning web series ‘Trading on 15’, and authored the novels ‘Even Solomon’ and ‘A Pook is Born.’ Her two poetry volumes, ‘Crisis’ and ‘Revelation,’ make up the audiobook ‘The Release and Reclamation of Victoria Kerygma.’
Her writing has been published in the LA Poet Society’s Anthology “Los Angeles Poets For Justice: A Document for the People”, Image Curve, The Elephant Journal, GEM Magazine, and Guitar Girls Magazine.
“One thing I know about writing is that you don’t have to be in the mood to do it.” — Julia Cameron, The Right to Write
Morning pages. Morning stillness. Starting anew on a Monday. Stars are still visible while birds sing up the day as you sit in your pajamas to write. If all you ever penned were these pages, would they be enough? Doubtful. Your hunger is a whisper, gnawing from within. No need to feed the beast an entire feast at once. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
Start with a few words, a few pages. Find relief writing in the cool morning. No pressure to produce. No worries about whether or not it’s worthy—of that award, that publication. Just put words on this page. And that one. Grateful for the blue pen at 5:30 AM. Turn to the next. See how easy that was? Here’s permission to go wild on the page. You don’t have to be perfect. Just have fun.
Yes, the taskmaster wants it all done without a fuss, without the mess of emotions. Ah, that impatient critic! It has little room for complaints. But sometimes an inner voice needs coaxing. Attend to it. This is not a performance, not a play. Unless it’s an imaginary game of let’s pretend. When you were little and talked to stuffed animals and made up games and dances did you ever wonder who might be watching or worry whether or not you were good enough? Is that what you’re afraid of? When did it start? Maybe you have many works in progress to see to completion. The same way you read books: stuck midway in the stack.
Where to begin? Where to dig in? What were you last working on? Where did you leave it? Give it an hour, without any outcome in mind. Read your work through and jot down a few notes. Let curiosity lead. Sit with frustration. Allow the uncomfortable feelings and self-doubt to arise (“I don’t know where this is going!”). It’s okay not to know. Uncertainty is human. Later you can look for the big-picture view, mapping the manuscript.
How can you make writing more manageable, less insurmountable? Establish systems to support your creative life. Instead of listing all those aspirations, why not mark what’s done? Like a child’s incentive chart with stickers to celebrate any progress made. Too often we berate ourselves for being unproductive instead of honoring the small wins.
Warming up your writing muscles may feel like starting anew at the gym; effort is required to pull yourself to and fro on the rowing machine before the flow. It’s tempting to spend your time reading about writing instead of writing. But putting off writing will only make it a chore. So many things compete for your attention. Later you can tally the credit card, get the groceries, look over that insurance policy, hang laundry on the line.
Stop pushing those writerly dreams to the sidelines. Keep moving forward, step by small step. Now, look up and notice the inky sky switch to cobalt while you scribble.
Nicole R. Zimmerman (she/her) is a queer Jewish writer with an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her writing, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Essays, appears in literary journals such as Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Nicole lives with her wife on a sheep farm in Northern California and leads women’s writing workshops that follow the Amherst Writers & Artists method. https://www.nicolerzimmerman.com/
Our last featured author from GATHERING: A Women Who Submit Anthology, is Alixen Pham. Her poem, “How I Respond to a Health Care Survey” is a call and response to life and death and how between the answers we provide to the questions asked in the most tender moments. To hold Alixen’s poem in your hands and all of the work featured this past month, order your copy of GATHERING here.
How I Respond to a Health Care Survey
by ALIXEN PHAM
after Solmaz Sharif
IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS how often have you seen your
PROVIDER? The one who charges me $300 for
CHECK-UP and SPECIALIZED CARE about my health, but never
ADVICE about what to do when my mother was dying. Instead asking:
HOW MANY DAYS DID YOU USUALLY HAVE TO WAIT for her body to shut down?
MEDICAL QUESTIONS needed to be asked
DURING REGULAR OFFICE HOURS as I waited in darkness for the sun’s
FOLLOW UP to give me death’s time table. Would it squeeze my mother in:
SAME DAY
1 DAY
2-3 DAYS
4-7 DAYS
8-14 DAYS
15-30 DAYS
MORE THAN 30 DAYS. At which point, who do I call? Who would
EXPLAIN THINGS IN A WAY THAT WAS EASY TO UNDERSTAND? Who would
LISTEN CAREFULLY TO me cry, Don’t go, I’m sorry, even as the
BLOOD TEST, X-RAY OR OTHER TEST alerted the machines to order the casket.
CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF gave me End-of-Care forms to sign, as if giving
WORST POSSIBLE – BEST POSSIBLE ratings about ways to die from, or survive the trauma of losing limbs, hair and organs, or loved ones could be reduced into sensible ways to
MANAGE YOUR CARE the way my mother used to manage her kitchen, treating knives, meats and vegetables with
COURTESY AND RESPECT. The neighbors and entire church praised her fried eggrolls, fried rice and shrimp & cabbage salad. Never noticed me cooking by her side. Mom’s mini-me. I realized years later, she was my Institute Le Cordon Bleu, the Michelin in my star.
HOW WOULD YOU RATE YOUR OVERALL MENTAL OR EMOTIONAL HEALTH during this time? The choices are:
EXCELLENT
VERY GOOD
GOOD
FAIR
POOR—which surely can’t be the lowest option, considering death is obliviously worse than poor. Where are their Bedside Manners? Didn’t they learn Level 101 in school? Instead, they ask me:
WHAT IS THE HIGHEST GRADE OR LEVEL OF EDUCATION THAT YOU HAVE COMPLETED? As if heaven is partitioned by high school, college, some college, graduate, PhD or Other degrees. How did anyone get in pre-language? Pre-civilizations? Pre-everything?
WHAT IS YOUR RACE (MARK ONE OR MORE), as if skin color was a factor in doling out empathy and morphine. It seemed they had failed to grasp the compassion of death when it asked:
DID SOMEONE HELP YOU COMPLETE your mother’s dying? YES, I ended her suffering. Turned off her oxygen. Upped her painkiller. Watched her last breath take I love you beyond my reach.
author Alixen Pham
Alixen Pham is published with The Slowdown,New York Quarterly, Salamander, Gyroscope Review, DiaCRITICS, Soul-Lit, and Brooklyn Poets as Poet of the Week. She has been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology 2020-2021. She leads the Westside Los Angeles chapter of Women Who Submit, a volunteer-run literary organization supporting and nurturing women and non-binary writers. She is the recipient of Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program and PEN Center / City of West Hollywood Writing Craft Scholarship in Fiction and Nonfiction. She fusion bakes between writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction work.
As Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology makes its way into the hands of readers, we celebrate this essay by leadership team member Sakae Manning. Their work crosses time and oceans, sits in the smoke we still breathe from war and wildfires, and examines how the decisions of one generation impact the next and the next and the next. To read this essay and other powerful work from WWS members, order Gathering here.
This essay first appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 20, Spring 2021.
Shikata Ga Nai
by Sakae Manning
My mother died in the time of pandemic, on a morning when fires raged all over California, and smoke was choking her garden into dust. George Floyd was already murdered. Breonna Taylor’s murder was going unanswered. Americans of all races and ages took to the streets to protest 400 years of systemic racism and injustice. A reality TV host was running the country. I’m left to wonder if she knew what was happening outside her house set in the foothills bordering the Sierra Nevada and only miles from where Mark Twain made frog jumping famous. By now, her eyes were failing, making running impossible.
My mother died on a Tuesday; the first of September. She secretly liked being first, so the date seemed fitting. The coroner described it as a sudden and catastrophic death. A massive heart attack or a stroke. She had spent ninety years running, putting others’ needs in front of her own, hiding from bombs that echoed inside her long after the war was over. She found a way to freedom in a wavy-haired, Oklahoma-born merchant marine. A big talker. A smart man who claimed salt air and the open sea were his home. She straightened and cut her hair like Audrey Hepburn, rouged her full lips into a pout. She came to America, believing she could be American, but the ground never felt like home. The food, the language, the people—as foreign as a sliver of glass lost in the flat part of her small foot.
If she were here, my mother would say hers was a good death. Not even her head touched the ground. The crossing to join her ancestors was quick. Much easier than when she traveled on a freightliner twelve years after the war ended. My father said it was cheaper than travel on a passenger ship. She’d be fine, he decided, without considering comfort or that she couldn’t speak English. My mother was locked in a lower-level room without a window. She was, after all, an alien, a lingering reminder of a war that kicked-off in Pearl Harbor. Seasickness overwhelmed her. She tossed and turned on her cot, losing weight, wondering about a widowed mother and four siblings left without an older sister. In that small dark room, normally used for storage, my mother’s starched traveling dress hung from a hook on the door, swinging with the pitching ship, wilting from humidity. For two weeks, a bucket was her constant companion until the freightliner pulled into San Francisco. Her hope waned, as cargo unloaded before she could step foot on shore.
My father finally rushed up to receive her, pointing out the Golden Gate Bridge, as she stood on the pier, queasy, following his finger traveling along the horizon. San Francisco filled her lungs, reminding her of Yokohama. They drove inland, traveling north on a highway bordered by pastures and grazing cattle, empty hills with swaying grasses, and passing freight trains crawling on long, curved tracks towards Oakland. They drove into Suisun City, a small rough looking town dotted with pool halls, bars, and farmhands loitering around neon-lit liquor stores. My father pointed out the market where she would shop, the high school he had attended, the butcher he liked, but her English wasn’t good enough to understand. All she heard was pride.
My mother’s heart knew there was no point in trying to tell him this is not what he promised. She said there was no going back when you marry an American so learned to hide inside herself, in a mind wound so tight, she hardly slept. She feared America even more when he gave her a baby; then, another eleven months later. They knotted her future to this man. A woman running in circles, a baby on each hip, weighing her down, with nowhere to go.
My mother died, having never told my brother what she wanted—not her dreams, nor her death wishes. She told stories once. There were no repeats like people do when they get older, forget what happened yesterday, or run out of things to talk about. It was on the listener to remember, because if asked about the story, she denied ever having the conversation. I learned to pay attention when she was catching her breath from all the running.
She told me she had not wanted to marry a Japanese man and have a foot on her neck for the rest of her life. I responded, “So you came here and had a foot on your back instead?” She triple blinked, her mouth a line so tight a fine needle, the kind used to sew organza or chiffon, couldn’t slip in. Her fingers went back to pinning a tissue pattern to an emerald green bolt of taffeta. That’s what my mother did; she made fancy dresses for rich wives of government officials, for weddings, and for quinceañeras. The latter made my mother most happy, because she ended up making sixteen gowns, fourteen in the same design, one for the quinceañera, and one for the mother celebrating her daughter’s entry into womanhood. The girl in white tulle and satin, put on display for all to admire, to set her up for a life in patriarchy.
My mother understood the patriarchy, living with a husband who controlled her every move. She said she liked being a second class citizen, infuriating my brother, and entrusting men to make decisions for her. Except for the dollar amount, my father signed checks before she went grocery shopping. The cashier wrote in the amount. She walked in rain or triple-digit heat, four long blocks with a full grocery cart, while my father smoked his pipe or napped at home. All credit cards were in his name, so she requested and he pre-approved all purchases whether it was a pair of shoes or a pack of underwear. My mother understood the cost of staying in America, of saving face.
She’s gone now, my mother. My brother said her glasses remained on her face. Her hair in place; wispy at the neckline. The Buddhist priest chanted prayers here, in Los Angeles, while her body cooled on a table at the coroner’s up north in Gold Rush country. For Shinto, the body should never be separated from the prayers, nor from its sacred departure rituals, but that’s what happens when living on strange ground, a former mining town where Chinese were lynched. When my parents moved there, I warned her most Americans can’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese, and she laughed.
She was used to being the only one, alone in a country where she had no mother, no aunts, no sisters. Not one relative came to visit in the sixty-one years, four months, and ten days she lived here. It is what happens when a Japanese woman leaves the family register, released to forever float alone in her decisions.
My mother died before she took off her gardening shoes and turned on the air conditioner. It was a morning routine and included shutting windows and the back door. My brother called to say the coroner decided no autopsy was needed. She was ninety years old and a three-time cancer survivor. She is now high up in her kitchen cabinet. I told my brother his choice is perfect given she couldn’t reach high shelves, and she always liked looking down on people. Our mother is in a special transport urn, because my brother thinks ahead. With my sons, we envisioned trekking to Hiroshima next year, driving to a small suburban area, checking into an Airbnb before presenting her ashes to three younger sisters and their adult children. Only they’ve decided my mother shouldn’t return to Japan. There is a legend that when a person leaves the family, they cannot come back. It is bad luck. This is what my mother’s sister tells my cousin to Google translate to me. This, from the aunt my mother kept safely hidden in mountain caves while she scavenged for food, picking maggots from yams to keep the family from starving. She and her mother herded the children through those final months before Hiroshima.
My mother said I couldn’t ever understand the type of sacrifice needed to survive war. I am not a good Japanese daughter. I don’t listen, refuse to let men walk in front of me, laugh too loud, and ask too many questions. She’d be relieved. Her pushy daughter is taking her home regardless of legends, bad luck, or aunts who politely don’t want their sister. We’ll carry her ashes, a fine powder, a perfect cremation the funeral home said, in a carry-on, tucking it securely into an overhead compartment. We’ll transition our words into how Japanese refer to honoring the dead. Cremation is known as bone cutting, and the ceremony is called bone spreading. The Japanese have gotten it right. Our mother’s bones are resting after spending a lifetime being cut, fractured, and chipped in preparation for this journey. Returning her to the waters around Hiroshima where she swam as a child, the beaches where she dug her toes into the sand, is what is right for a woman who dreamt of being a teacher, was the fastest runner in her school, whose life was marked by failing to raise an obedient daughter, who survived the terrors of a world war, who forever saw images of the Tokyo fire bombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
bombs,
bombs,
bombs.
My mother came running to a new country, an unblemished place with gold paved roads, no hunger or burned cities, no bullet holes in buildings, no people with the slackened faces of intergenerational trauma, walking with soured mouths repeating shikata ga nai at every disappointment, every insult, and slur thrown by American GI’s. She came running, breathless, hopeful, to birth babies on the ground of those who hated her, what she represented, by being a small woman, a nearly five-foot-tall, dark-haired woman, eyes pointed downward, speaking English without pure “r’s” or “l’s” in broken syllables. Living and dying on stolen ground.
My mother died without finishing her coffee or starting the laundry. She left the back door open, and the heat, the smoke drifted in, and moved around the house. Realizing no one was home, except for a spirit waiting to run free, they carried her outside, high into the ash-filled skies over California.
author photo by Rachael Warecki
Sakae Manning’s storytelling centers on alliances and intersectionality amongst womxn of color. Their work lives in The Tahoma Review, Carve Magazine, Dryland, and Blood Orange Review. Manning was writer-in-residence at the Annenberg Community Beach House, a 2019 Summer Fishtrap fellow, and is a contributing fiction editor for Barren Magazine. Manning writes in Los Angeles with their heart in Oakland and may be found on twitter @sakaetrist.
In conjunction with the launch of Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology, we celebrate the fiction of member Toni Ann Johnson. In “Time Travel” from SPROUT MAGAZINE and republished in RED FEZ and ARLIJO, Toni Ann helps us looks across decades in just a few paragraphs. Congratulations to Toni Ann whose work was recently awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. To hold this story and others order Gathering here now!
by TONI ANN JOHNSON
Twenty-one years later I’ll run into you outside the Path Station in Hoboken in front of the wide green awning that leads down to the trains. Sounds of rumbling below and the din of chatter swirling, you’ll yell my name above the noise, saying it like a question, as if you could actually be unsure that it’s me.
I’ll turn and totter on the top step. Just in time. Seconds later and I’d be swept into the stream of bodies flowing to the tracks.
It’ll be shortly after 5pm on a late September weekday, humid and sunny, with air that smells of commuters caught in unexpected high heat. Perspiration will roll down my back and leak between the butt cheeks you used to make fun of.
I’ll squint against the sun and stare at you. You’ll smile with closed lips and brown eyes that’ll be gentler than I’ll remember. Several seconds will pass before you’ll say, “Wow. First time I’ve ever seen you away from home. Where’re you living these days?”
“Manhattan,” I’ll say.
“Oh. The big city,” you’ll say, like it’s a truly good thing.
I’ll nod. I won’t ask you anything. I’ll look at you and wait.
Suits of blue, black, gray, and tan will dodge and whoosh past us in both directions. Heels clicking on concrete, huffs and impatient scoffs; we’ll be in the way.
I’ll shield my eyes with one hand and be silent for so long it’ll feel impolite. You’ll hold a cheap gray suit jacket over one shoulder, your white collared shirt bearing sweat marks under the arms. You’ll smell of Obsession For Men, alluring and more sophisticated than the Old Spice I used to notice at the bus stop during high school, when you rarely spoke to me. Your chest will be broad and you’ll be slim, like me, which will mean something, because twenty-one years earlier we were chubby six-year-olds foraging together for Ding Dongs and Oreos my mother hid deep in the pantry so we wouldn’t overeat. We’d find them, and eat them all, and that thrill was a bond we shared.
But being connoisseurs of Nabisco Cookies and Hostess Snack Cakes, and being buddies from the time we could crawl, never made our bond as strong as the one you shared with every kid in the neighborhood but me.
Someone’ll bump into you and you’ll fall into me and grab my arm before I lose my balance on the top step.
“Sorry. You alright?” you’ll ask.
I’ll say, “Fine, thanks.” And take my arm back.
That day, twenty-one years after I lost you, I’ll be wearing a tomato-red kufi atop unapologetically kinky hair —wild kinks I tamed the soul out of when I lived across the street from you, hoping straight hair would make me pretty, and more like everyone else. But you called me an ugly, bubble-butted nigger at the bus stop. Elementary school became junior high, which turned into high school and I barely existed. You had all those years to speak to me. That day I’ll wonder, why now?
I’ll have on black chunky boots and a dress that’s lime-green, like LifeSavers candies. Red, black, and green are Pan-African colors and I’ll wear them because at the time, I’ll be mad and militant, saying fuck you to you and everyone else from home who said my color, my hair, and my big butt made me ugly. That day at the Path Station it won’t matter to me that you were only a boy when you said those things.
I won’t smile. I won’t be warm. I’ll forget any mean things I may have said back at the bus stop. I probably said some, because I will remember how you winced at the mention of your fat mom, crippled father, and port-wine stain birth-marked baby sister. My tongue, sharpened on figurative and literal sticks and stones hurled at me by neighborhood bullies must have pierced your soft spots sometimes, too. Yet you’ll look at me that day with a tenderness that insists cruel words never passed between us.
Your dark hair will be short. Your skin clean-shaven, clear, the spots of adolescence healed and faded. Your face will flush and your eyes will brighten the way they used to shine when you were my round-cheeked running buddy. You’ll look deep into me with such warmth that against my will you’ll begin to melt the icicles that numbed me inside.
My name, when you say it, will sound like songs from playtimes past. In your eyes I’ll catch a glimpse of us singing on swings, flying above the grass where we found four-leaf clovers. You’ll invite me into a little chamber of your heart where you saved us. But I won’t go. I won’t be ready to remember how to get there.
There’ll be no mention of what happened to us, or what didn’t happen that should have. You’ll sing my name again, a young boy’s sweetness shining out of your grown man’s face and you’ll say, “You were my first best friend.”
I’ll know you’re telling me you’re sorry. You didn’t mean to hurt me. You were just a kid.
I’ll nod politely and shrug off your words of apology. I’ll carry my bubble-butt and my baggage down the stairs, catch my train and move on with my life.
In another twenty-one years, I’ll be middle aged and softer inside and out, the rough edges of resentment worn down with experience. I’ll remember how you said my name that day and the way you looked at me with affection. I’ll transport myself back to the Path station, in front of the stairs, trains rumbling below, bodies whooshing by, and I’ll be kinder to you. I will. Because by then I’ll know that love is the only feeling left once enough time has passed.
Flannery O’Conner Awardee Toni Ann Johnson photo by Rachael Warecki
Toni Ann Johnson is the winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her linked short story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2022. Johnson’s novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel was released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 NAACP iImage award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. A novella, Homegoing , won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was released in May of 2021. Her short stories have appeared in The Coachella Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo Journal, and many other publications.
As we continue to feature Women Who Submit writers from our Gathering anthology, we welcome our first publications in drama. This monologue from Amanda L. Andrei sheds violet light on our loves, losses, and how we carry those burdens.
JUSTICE
by Amanda L. Andrei
A liminal space shifting from Hecuba’s LA Filipinotown bakery to her memory and dreams.Violet light.
HECUBA
All of my lovers, I named Priam. I don’t remember any of their given names, they are all Priam to me. Men have so many faults, it’s best to collapse all those lovers into one man, one ideal, and hope that their faults will cancel each other out and only the good memories will remain.
Of course, you could go the other way, remembering only their faults and none of their good qualities.
I remember one Priam, who kissed me on the hand as he left my house, only a few minutes late after martial law curfew. I never saw him again.
I remember one Priam, who climbed the top of a coconut tree when I was thirteen, just to bring me a green coconut with the freshest juice.
I remember one Priam, so dark he was almost blue, with an accent I had never heard before, who then left on a ship a week later.
I remember one Priam, who worked with me in the newspaper office, who laughed every time I edited his articles, but made the corrections anyway.
I remember one Priam, so kind when I first arrived to this country, who didn’t even touch me during our sham marriage, and quietly divorced me with my new citizenship intact.
I remember one Priam, pale and freckled, who thought I was crazy and still loved me for it. I wish he had rejected me instead.
I would tell my unborn daughters, your fathers are all one father – one Priam, a king among men, and you are princesses, each of you – not because your father is a king, but because I am a Queen, and I am so much of a Queen that even when battered and pulled apart by the spirits of war and fury, I can give up my crown and still be royal.
A knock on the door.
HECUBA (CONT’D)
There is no justice in this world.
For more powerful words from Women Who Submit, preorder Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthologyhere!
author photo by Rachael Warecki
Amanda L. Andrei is an award-winning Filipina Romanian American playwright residing in Los Angeles by way of Virginia/Washington DC. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history and societies from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women. Her work has been developed with Echo Theatre, The Vagrancy, Pasadena Playhouse, Playwrights Arena, Artists at Play, La MaMa, Relative Theatrics, Parity Productions, Bucharest Inside the Beltway, Southeastern European Film Festival, and more. She is currently working on a new commission for the Golden Tongues project and a new play for Echo Writers Lab. University of Southern California (MFA). www.AmandaLAndrei.com
