As Women Who Submit prepares to launch our second anthology, Gathering, we will be featuring WWS authors across the genres and highlighting their forthcoming work.
Students in Los Angeles celebrate Dia de los Muertos.
Our first featured writer is poet, Marisol Cortez, a member from San Antonio. We celebrate this poem on its one-year anniversary, long before the winter surge, the election, and the Delta variant. It reminds us that although so many days from the past year/month/days bleed together, the past also contains distinct moments. This excerpt reminds us what life was like 365 days ago as well as what life is and has always been. It expands on the idea of loyalty and allegiance; connecting and reflecting upon this fast-changing and forever constant world.
Loyalty Oath: Dia de los Muertos 2020
by Marisol Cortez
I pledge allegiance to birds and Black birders I pledge allegiance to sea turtles and silly gulls I pledge allegiance to yard sales, plate sales, voguing, ancient foraging circuits: nuez, tuna, nopal, yuca All the gifts of this land we once wandered, not lost like Cabeza de Vaca, but logically seasonally ecologically moving. I pledge allegiance to dewberries growing on the banks of the lake the Army Corps made from dammed up river and the red hornets who live there too, whose protective sting to my brow while foraging sends me reeling, falling backwards with the force of a strike
I pledge allegiance to sacred springs I pledge allegiance to every wetland and swamp that hid runaway slaves and Native boarding school children. May every effort to drain you fail, may we fill you up again instead, restore you, so that no White House built beneath the lash may comfortably occupy your Potomac slough.
I pledge allegiance to rivers that swallow up ill-gotten walls and the lies that built them I pledge allegiance to the burning forests— Amazonian, ancient redwood and all alveoli everywhere: from Floyd’s breath extinguished beneath boot and badge on a hot Minneapolis sidewalk to the breaths of elders artificially inflated by ventilators down in the RGV: I pledge allegiance to all lungs, all breath, arboreal or mammalian, Aeolian winds of the body which resist just by inspiring exhaling surviving
To read this poem in its stunning and expansive entirety, look for Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology. Preorder Gatheringhere!
Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. Always a poet, for a time she strayed into an academic career, earning a Ph.D. in cultural studies before returning to San Antonio to write in service of movements to protect la madre tierra. A mama of two, she currently juggles writing, parenting, and co-editing responsibilities for Deceleration, an online journal of environmental justice thought and praxis.
In 2020 she published her debut novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), which in 2021 won the Texas Institute of Letter’s Sergio Troncoso Award for First Book of Fiction. She is also the author of I Call on the Earth(Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry, and “Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the ‘Mission Trail of Tears,’” which together bear witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Other poems and prose have appeared in Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal, Orion, Vice Canada, Caigibi, Metafore Magazine, Outsider Poetry, Voices de la Luna, and La Voz de Esperanza, among other anthologies and journals. For updates on projects and publications, visit mcortez.net.
The past Tuesday, I woke up at 2:30 am when my COVID test results came in. I was negative, but I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was thinking about the email from a parent questioning the social justice lens of my instruction. I was thinking about how my first-grader was worried about catching COVID because he’d touched his own poop. I was thinking about the phone call with my college roommate who told me about her colon cancer diagnosis. I stared into the dark, trying to bring back sleep, but I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning around it all. I pulled myself out of bed, got a work out in, and attempted to breathe. Then, I sat at the page and wrote a few lines about teaching, living through a pandemic, and processing grief.
Wednesday morning, I woke up before my alarm. The day sat heavily in my belly, but a full night’s sleep had me like a knife: sharp and ready. I was going to need to be like that blade in order to teach in a pandemic, to coach soccer in a pandemic, to parent in a pandemic, to write in a pandemic. My first grader was home for the week after a someone from his class tested positive. It was our family’s first close contact. A dear friend from college was having surgery, and I was waiting on news. Family memorials for an aunt and cousin who had passed during this year of isolation loomed along the horizon. I made my way from bed and into some yoga, because even inside the chaos, I can choose to breathe. In that breath, I forced myself to see the good: the gubernatorial recall had failed, a school voucher funding scheme had been tabled; the Oregon football team was ranked number four in the nation. Soon, I would be hosting all of my vaccinated siblings.
A week later, I woke up to the full moon shining through the bedroom window. The first grader was still home even though we all tested negative. I was bleeding again after a few months when I believed I had reached menopause. But this pandemic is like waiting for menopause. You think the end has arrived, but then the cramps, bleeding, and discomfort come back. Somehow the pain is worse than you remember, and you wonder how you’ve survived all this time. You wonder how long it will last. You wonder if you will be able to make it. But making it to menopause means surviving, and to making it through a global pandemic, despite close contacts and shifting CDC guidelines, means you keep get up in the morning and keep breathing.
I wake up. I keep going every day, and look for the good: Women Who Submit continues to submit work. We’ve released books, opened art exhibits, and come together on IG live, Zoom, and in-person to celebrate. We continue to support and lift one another up, because that’s how the WWS community makes its way through this pandemic. We seek out brave ways to be in close contact, even when it’s from a distance, and we stay breathing.
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.
Within this global pandemic, there remains loads of uncertainty. Debate continues about masks and vaccines and what is safe and what is not. In this uncertainty, the family and I had our summer break, and after over a year of not seeing family, we decided to drive to Oregon. On our way, we witnessed the world on fire.
As we sped through the night through Northern California, the sky outside Redding glowed eerily. Flames shot skyward and plumes of smoke billowed. We kept driving. You can’t get too close to a world on fire.
As dawn light lifted into day, we drove through a scorched Southern Oregon. Last fall, I’d watched whole towns in this area burn to the ground, but we drove on and arrived in Portland to record-breaking heat. It was so hot, you’d think the world was on fire.
After long-awaited visits with vaccinated family members, we drove across the Cascades where the burn scars from this past year remained. For miles and miles, scorched forests lined the two-land highway all around the Detroit Lakes region. The world had caught on fire.
photo credit: Oregon State Fire Marshal via Storyful
It stayed hot in Central Oregon despite the elevation gain, and days later, when we made our return trip, we again drove past smoldering ruins of a fire that had just started, but has grown so huge, it sent smoke across the continent. You guessed it. The world is on fire.
But here in Los Angeles, the summer has been temperate. A long-delayed international sporting competition has begun, and although young women of color like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles continue to show us how to take care of ourselves, how to listen to our bodies and how to know when to step back, I’m afraid we might be burying the lede.
While there’s a global pandemic and sporting competitions dominate the headlines, we have to remember to breathe. But this year’s road trip reminded me that our current lives are not sustainable. We cannot forget: the world is on fire.
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.
A rejection letter leaves many writers devastated. For years, I would submit one to three pieces a year to literary magazines, and if the work received a rejection, it became dead to me. My nonfiction wellness articles had a 98% acceptance rate, leading me to believe I would have no problem getting my fiction and creative nonfiction published. I did not know about the incredibly low acceptance rates of literary magazines.
There are finite spaces to fill in the literary world, though the internet itself seems infinite. Writers hoping to be published in top-tier literary magazines are faced with startlingly low acceptance rates. According to Duotrope, The New Yorker magazine accepted only 0.14% of 1,447 unsolicited submissions received in a year. The lower-tier magazine Split Lip received 938 unsolicited submissions that same year, andonly 0.11% were accepted.
Rejection feels personal, though it isn’t. It’s a numbers game, even with smaller publications. To prove this, I reached out to Viva Padilla, the editor-in-chief of the annual literary magazine Dryland, and asked her about the submission statistics for her publication. “The most submissions we have ever received [for a single issue] was over 1000,” she said. “Every issue has about 50-55 publishing spots available, with around 40 reserved for poetry.” I did the math. That equates to an acceptance rate of 1%-1.5% for a work of fiction. For poetry, the odds are slightly better at 5%. That’s a rejection rate of 95-99%. The acceptance rate is higher compared to Split Lipand The New Yorker, but even then most of the work is rejected due to space limitations, among other reasons.
The work Dryland publishes is primarily through open calls. Most literary magazines and journals solicit work from writers they know or those with name recognition, presenting an entry barrier to emerging or unrepresented writers. In her 2015 article for The Atlantic, acclaimed writer Joy Lanzendorfer made two interesting assertions. First, that the average published story is likely rejected 20 times before being published; second, that slush pile submissions only account for 1-2% of published work. Simply put, most of the work you see in the literary spaces is based on connection or writer recognition. Despite the rejection stats, and the reality of how many times it takes for a story to stick to a magazine’s pages, this emphasizes the importance of being an active member of the writing community. Editors solicit work from people they know. To be known you have to be an active member of the literary community.
A few years ago, I became a member of Women Who Submit (WWS), a nonprofit focused on elevating the voices of BIPOC, women, and nonbinary writers. This organization helped me see behind the literary curtain. Various members have taken time to offer me guidance and mentorship through both the submission and rejection process. WWS showcases the importance of relationships and elevating each other’s voices. The reality is that writers who know writers get published more, and all editors of literary magazines are writers themselves.
Since having my eyes opened by WWS, I have become a member of other writing communities, including Shut Up and Write. Outside of my WWS bubble, I have seen that other writers in various spaces struggle with the inevitability of rejection like I did. I hope this helps reduce the sting of rejection, and I would encourage you to submit again and again until your work finds its literary home.
Recently, I received a really nice standard rejection from Zyzzyva. The last paragraph said, “I would like to say something to make up for this ungraciousness, but the truth is we have so little space, we must return almost all the work that is submitted, including a great deal that interests us and even some pieces we admire. Inevitably, too, we make mistakes.”
I asked Christopher James, the editor-in-chief of the five-year-old Jellyfish Review, how often his magazine rejects stories they love because of lack of space. He responded, “We frequently say no to a lot of very strong stories, we would never say no to something we loved. We often accept imperfect pieces because we’ve fallen in love with them and hope our readers might fall in love with them too.” As the newer journal matures, they too may have to say no to work they admire. At the moment though, if they read your work and love it they’ll make space for it. Most journals have a limitation and only accept a certain amount of work—Jellyfish is the exception, not the rule.
Rejection is part of the process of getting your work out into the world. Should you default to younger journals? You can, but I believe that as a writer you should submit to the journals that speak to you, the magazines that you envision as a perfect fit. Familiarize yourself with the work they publish, follow their submission guidelines, and keep submitting work that aligns with their aesthetic. It will increase your chances of acceptance.
Even though stats are against them, many writers still manage to succeed, and you could be one of them. I reached out to the writers I know and asked if anyone had received multiple rejections only for a piece to be published later. Carla Sameth, author of “One Day on the Goldline: A Memoir in Essays”shared that her personal essay, “If This Is So, Why Am I?” was rejected 22 times before it was published in The Nervous Breakdown,only to be selected as notable for The Best American Essays of 2019.Just because something receives multiple rejections does not mean it isn’t worthy of recognition, accolades, or publishing. It left me wondering if those other 22 magazine editors felt they missed their window and had inevitably made a mistake.
I asked Kate Maruyama, the author of my favorite novella of 2020, “Family Solstice,” about her experience. Eighteen editors rejected her first novel “Harrowgate”before it was purchased. A short story of hers was rejected 35 times before being published. “For the short story, rejection number 10 was from Roxane Gay when she was reading for a journal,” Maruyama explained. “She said it wasn’t right for that journal but that it was a damn fine story.” Those words of encouragement along with her writing community kept Maruyama submitting.
To improve your odds and to keep a stiff upper lip when rejection inevitably finds its way to your inbox, here are some pointers to help ease the painful experience:
Take resubmission requests seriously. If a magazine rejects a written piece of yours but asks you to resubmit, they are not being nice. They don’t have time to be nice. They enjoy your work! Resubmit.
Familiarize yourself with the places you want to submit. If editors keep telling you that your work doesn’t fit their publication, read the publication. If you can’t access the publication because of monetary restrictions, look for copies in your local library or read the work of the writers who have recently been published by the magazine or journal. A Googlesearch of the author will find other work of theirs that you can read for free. Compare their aesthetic to your own. Are you a fit? Then it’s a good place to submit!
Make sure your work is submission-ready. This is the number one sin of writers, according to Viva Padilla. Dryland doesn’t edit poetry; “…we expect poems to be ready to go,” she said. “When it comes to fiction and nonfiction that gets rejected, it’s mostly work that doesn’t seem to have a focus where we’re left wondering, what was that about?” Workshop your work with other writers and make sure to check your grammar before you submit.
Don’t expect an editor to provide feedback. If a magazine rejected you without giving a reason, pestering an editor for the “why” will quickly slam doors on future opportunities. Personalized rejections are rare. They are nice when they come in, but an editor doesn’t owe you a reason.
The reality is slush piles at literary magazines are immense, and many editors are volunteers or minimally compensated. These magazines are mostly labors of love for the written word. Rejection may seem personal, but it’s not. Even literary magazine editors get rejections from other publications. The more you submit, the greater the chance your work will find a literary home. The more time you take to prepare and research the best market for your work, the greater your odds for acceptance. Don’t be discouraged when you get a no. Look over your work and see if there are any structural or grammatical issues. If not, submit it again ASAP. If there are errors, fix them and send your piece out again.
Bottom line: it’s time to Shut Up & Submit!
Thea Pueschel is a writer, multi-media artist, and the winner of the TAEM 2020 Flash Fiction Summer Contest. Thea enjoys exploring the dark with light and the light with dark and a firm believer that without the shadow art and literature has less soul.
Maybe you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, Women Who Submit is celebrating 10 years! I mean, even Poets & Writers took notice of this badass organization and the women and nonbinary writers who are pushing against the patriarchy by supporting one another in our creative journeys.
As part of our first decade anniversary, we invite you to submit to our second anthology: Gathering. The first Women Who Submit anthology, Accolades highlights previously published work by Women Who Submit members, while Gathering celebrates how, in 2020-2021, “we continue to gather across the country, support one another, and find joy in the midst of our trauma.”
Gathering “welcomes submissions of both unpublished and previously published poems, essays, stories, plays, and hybrid work from all WWS members. Our goal is to gather work in response to the current conditions of our world. It is an opportunity to share the trauma and celebrate the joy.”
If you have already submitted, claps, claps, claps!
If you are still looking through your drafts for the right piece to submit, keep the May 31st deadline in mind.
If you don’t think you have anything written yet, here are some prompts for each of our genres. Go for it! You have a whole three-day weekend to draft, revise, re-read, revise, edit again, and submit something for Gathering. Or, just write to the prompts because it’s like improv and a fun exercise to jump into a different genre and write for fun for a bit.
PROMPTS
DRAMA: Write a scene between characters with an unresolved past who find themselves unexpectedly stuck in line together.
POETRY: Using recycled lines from poems you’ve drafted throughout the pandemic, write a new poem and incorporate specific flora and fauna. Maybe try a villanelle or a duplex!
FICTION: Capture a scene of post-pandemic bacchanalia where a character gets lost.
NONFICTION: Write three different brief scenes capturing various points of a relationship or a place. Weave them together into an essay.
Remember to read the submission guidelines and then, we hope you will breathe and push submit.
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian,Hippocampus and elsewhere. She edits Breathe and Push for Women Who Submit.
Hello Everyone, this is Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley, I am the Chapters Liaison for Women Who Submit, I also host the Long Beach Chapter via the Long Beach Literary Arts Center.
As the Chapters Liaison, I support our Chapters Director Ryane Nicole Granados and WWS Leadership to provide resources for our members and Chapter Leads and to connect those looking to join our community with chapters in their area. Our collective goal is to empower women and non-binary writers to submit their work to literary magazines for publication
I am happy to see a heightened interest from women and non-binary writers looking to join our organization. The Pandemic has affected all of us in different ways including some of our chapters. While some chapters continued meeting virtually since last March, a lot of them have not.
The Los Angeles chapter shifted their programing in 2020 and 2021 to online events and started hosting weekly check-ins for their members. Below is a list of chapters that continued meeting online during the pandemic as well as our newest chapters.
California:
Bay Area
*Long Beach Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley
*Pasadena Michelle Semrad Barrera
*West Los Angeles Alix Pham
Chicago
New York City
Portland
New Chapters:
Twin Cities
New Jersey
Wilmington, North Carolina
* Chapters hosting members virtually until in person meetings resume regardless of location.
If you have questions or inquiries about joining a chapter or starting your own, Ryane and I are here to help. We hosted an orientation meeting for new Chapter Leads in March and look forward to hosting the next one.
If you are a Chapter Lead looking to restart your chapter, we are here for you.
Lucy Rodriguez-Handley is a creative non-fiction writer, filmmaker, and mother of two. A Dominicana via Washington Heights now living in Long Beach, California. Her film, The Big Deal, won the Imagen Award for Best Theatrical Short. She is a VONA fellow and is on the board of the Long Beach Literary Arts Center. Her films and writing samples can be found at https://www.lucyrodriguezhanley.com/
As the world begins to peel and crack itself back open, whether we’re ready for it or not, whether we choose to enter or not, I am reminding myself of those early days of the pandemic. The world slammed on the brakes to keep us safe, and for the past year I stopped racing to work each morning. I stopped racing to that reading or panel. I stopped racing to pick up the kids, or take them practice, or stop for a quick errand.
My life transitioned to a pandemic pace, and there was nowhere to go. No errand was quick, and lines wrapped around buildings. Everything required time and patience. What opened up during the shutdown was time for resting, and reading, and reflection. Too bad the stress, anxiety, and fear made even resting, reading, and reflection a struggle.
I’m not angry about it though. There is no right way to make it through a global pandemic. Surviving when we have lost three million is enough. After meditating on time, continuing to write, and burying a year, I am ready to take things slow.
Before I sprint back out, eager and unmasked to write my next story, I want to remember we are still in this global pandemic. I’m going to take a minute and listen to Janet Jackson: “Let’s Wait Awhile.”
This time at home has shown me I can slam on the brakes, close my eyes, and breathe.
“Let’s wait awhile (slow it down).”
I have learned that if a line in a poem, a paragraph in an essay, or a chapter in a novel isn’t sitting well, it can sit on the shelf. I can send it to trusted readers, or re-read, and revise until all rests in its proper place.
“Let’s wait awhile, before it’s too late.”
We can take our time. We all really can, so before I rush this essay onto the Women Who Submit site: “Let’s wait awhile. Before we go too far.”
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian,Hippocampus and elsewhere. She edits Breathe and Push for Women Who Submit.
I know we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, but I am pulling my mask down, letting everyone see my fine lines. I am here to confess. My heart is beating fast, my breath shallow because what I am going to say breaks the two cardinal rules of my house growing up. Don’t let people know your business. Don’t let people know your struggle. I take a deep breath. I doom scroll, to hide. I know it’s pointless; I breathe to pivot and share.
The pandemic has hit all of us hard. It has peeled back several layers of national delusion reminding us that the only exceptional aspects of America are our crumbling infrastructure, racism and the corporate profit over people ethos.
My story is like others and admitting it fills me with a bit of shame. I am one of the 2.2 million women that fell out of the workforce this past year. Writing this makes it feel more real, and from firsthand experience, I have to say it feels gross. In 2020, I made less money than I did when I was in my mid-teens. The least amount I have ever made as an adult.
I have/had a wellness practice for over a decade. When the pandemic hit, I canceled my corporate yoga teaching gigs for safety. When the CDC announced in-person sessions were no longer safe, I canceled those too. After a few weeks, and the realization that the pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, I attempted to move my private yoga and hypnotherapy clients online. Only a few were willing, the rest wanted to wait the pandemic out. I had to cancel a meditation teacher training and issue refunds. My income slowly dwindled to near nothing.
Relief filled me when the state of California stated that there would be Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for sole proprietors. The EDD granted me PUA. However, when I received my paperwork, something was amiss; it said that I made zero dollars in 2019, and I would start receiving my payment of zero dollars by a specified date. I spent several months attempting to get through to fix it and called over twelve hundred times just to be subjected to a constant loop of messages moving me from one area to another. I never broke through not even to leave a message and gave up.
Luckily, my overhead and costs of operating a business dissolved too. Unlike many of my friends with small businesses, I wasn’t stuck in a lease or needing to figure out if I could keep employees on. My practice was mobile. I don’t have children and my mortgage payment is low. Even though it has been a struggle, my husband still had a career, and we could tighten our budget and breathe to pivot. I know even though I’ve experienced hardship, I also have privilege.
Even with fewer responsibilities, I was caught in the maelstrom. The world was out of control, people were dying, businesses shuttered, and work dried up. I applied for essential worker jobs, but my lack of experience in that sector and educational overqualification blocked me from positions. I sat and thought about what I could do. I couldn’t fight the tide so I yield and write. I breathe and pivot.
I had dreamt of writing a novel or creating a collection of short stories, but that was a fantasy filled with false starts and stops. As Paulo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, “People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel they don’t deserve them, or they’ll be unable to achieve them.” For me it was the latter. I wanted to, but I didn’t think I could write that much. Being able to create a substantive body of work seemed outside my reach and capacity. This past year, I leaned into the writing community.
The pandemic taught me humility and how to ask for help. It also taught me I can be a prolific writer. Currently, my historical novel is four chapters away from completion; I have over 100 short stories, fifty poems, and ten personal essays all created within the past twelve months. I also received a contract to write ESL readers in November, of which I have had twenty published. I applied to an MFA program, because if not now, when? It surprises me that my fingers are attached to my hands at this point.
Though I have generated a large body of work this past year, it was primarily possible because of the literary citizenship of others and opportunities that arose out of crisis. Women Who Submit, my writing buddies, my accountability partners, and my critique circle have all been instrumental in this time. I have applied for scholarships for writing programs, grants and fellowships. I won an award, was paid to write, and received funding. The writing community, especially the members of WWS, have been an invaluable resource with feedback, advice, and moral support.
In the words of Maya Angelou, “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” With gratitude, hope, and determination, I have been able to breathe, to pivot fully into my writing practice.
Thea Pueschel is a writer, multi-media artist, and the winner of the TAEM 2020 Flash Fiction Summer Contest. Thea enjoys exploring the dark with light and the light with dark and a firm believer that without the shadow art and literature has less soul.
The weekend after the inauguration, I woke up to flat Los Angeles light. I heaved a deep sigh into the fog that had settled in, and then urged myself from bed. Month nine of the pandemic meant getting up in the morning required a different sort of motivation. Still, I placed soles on cold floor, brewed some coffee, and settled in to write before the rest of the household was up. There was a new president now and a woman of color as vice president. No threatening tweets had been launched overnight. Still, a different sort of urgency settled in around me, like the gray that clung heavily to the world outside.
flat LA Light: watercolor on paper by Noriko Nakada
In February of 2018, we launched Breathe and Push. In that first column, I described listening to Valarie Kaur’s “Breathe and Push” speech as my family drove through the night from Oregon to Los Angeles. In the midst of so much political trauma, I wept as I stared up at a starless sky.
In that speech, Kaur suggested: “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?”
Over the past three years, Women Who Submit has played midwife to the labor of so many women and nonbinary writers. With the support of this community, we have written and published and shared our words. Many of you joined me when I asked you to breathe and push toward a better America.
But after these long, hard years of labor, how do we breathe and push differently in 2021? After taking to the streets, and writing letters, editorials, to push against gun violence, family separation, child abuse, racial violence, and a hostile publishing world, we have continued to feed our creative work. Now, after hunkering down for almost a year to keep our communities safe, the losses from COVID 19 continue to mount, revealing and exacerbating so many of the inequities we’ve pushed against. The world has changed, but much remains the same.
I stared out into the gray light that morning in a country under new leadership, but still in the midst of a global pandemic, and as the fog burned off, I was tempted to step outside, to walk with relief through a world restored to what it was before. But I didn’t urge myself from sleep and will myself to the page just for things to be the same. There is still so much to do, both in the world and with my creative projects.
Let our words set us on a path toward something different because our stories can heal us and heal those around us. From the isolation of what has been nearly a year of quarantining, let’s write the story of our America. Write it and then demand that it to be told.
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian, and Hippocampus. She spends her hours at home with her two kids answering approximately three thousand questions per day.
Sitting here at home with a dying tree as the focal point of our holiday seems an appropriate way to end 2020. In these waning days and long winter nights of December, the year is dying. Los Angeles struggles for breath, symptomatic of a city where too many have refused to make decisions for the common good. Still, even this year holds beauty and light.
As I look back at my notes from the year, I’m filled with so much gratitude for Women Who Submit, for the spaces that emerged in this community across the days and nights of this pandemic.
We launched our first anthology, Accolades, and many of us made our way to AWP just before everything shut down. We held space for weekly check-ins on Saturdays where we danced and wept, shared and listened. We acknowledged accomplishments, set goals, and learned to ask for help.
We closed our eyes in grounding exercises and reflected on the houses of our work with Allison Hedge Coke.
We wrote alone together.
We participated in an all-day conference and a top-tier submission blitz. We supported and buoyed one another. We greeted one another, “Ahoy, girls!” and we published books, chapbooks, essays, stories, poems, and articles. We shared and listened in regular open mic readings. We submitted work in acts of hope and resistance, and we created a network for book reviews.
During a time when it was often difficult to gauge the right things to do, but also a time when the right things to do were obvious, Women Who Submit refused to cancel. We held one another accountable and shared resources. We read and celebrated and lifted up one another’s work because that is the kind of community we have created.
We held space and understood how both presence and absence were forms of grace.
Thank you all for making this community a place where we breathe and push and remind one another to keep going. Where a comment, a mention in the chat, a book recommendation, a call for a submission can become a thread that connects and sustains us through a web stretches across days and miles.
In a few days, I’ll take down this tree. It will be recycled into mulch and returned back to earth and soil. Women Who Submit will check in both before and after the calendar year shifts from 2020 to 2021. Women and non-binary writers across time zones will find ourselves at the hand-written page, or in the glow of our screens. We will write the first words of the new year, and then we will write the next words until we fill a page and then another. We will show up in our new spaces when we can, and they will provide what we need until we find safe ways to lift one another up in person again. Together, we will bury this year and use it to make something new.
Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches eighth grade English at Emerson Middle School in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, and Hippocampus. She is spending her time in quarantine perfecting sourdough, biscuits, and pie crust. She has two kids and answers approximately three thousand questions a day.
