Author: womenwhosubmitlit

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Breathe and Push: Getting Through Winter

By Noriko Nakada

When I moved to Los Angeles and escaped Oregon over 25 years ago, I wasn’t just trying to escape the cloudy, dark, rainy, snowy winters. I was also escaping the homogeneity of the white, Christian majority that dominates the Pacific Northwest.

The diversity of LA has kept me here for decades, and the weather is a welcome bonus. I gained sunny skies, temperate winters, and long summers that even sneak summery days into winter, spring, and fall.

But this year, with wet like we haven’t seen in a long while, and a cold snap that gripped the southland so tight it even sent a few flurries down into the foothills, I was reminded of my fragile mental state on cold, dark days.

Shoes in show

When the dark of winter sinks in, even in sunny Southern California, I feel like sleeping, hibernating, pulling to covers tighter and longer and keeping my eyes closed to the world. I forget to exercise, to write, to eat green things, and sometimes I even forget to breathe. I wish for a snow day, and dream that, for just a minute, I live somewhere with snow. I feel like I would trade away my entire LA life for a single day off.

I should no longer be surprised when I find myself swallowed in this slothful seasonal state. But each year, it takes three, or four, or five weeks for me to realize what’s happening, that I’ve come off the rails, that I’m stuck in first gear, that even though my foot is on the pedal and I’m flooring it, I can only go so fast, and I’m probably doing real harm to my engine.

Thankfully, spring is here. The days are stretching longer and I am at the page, putting words down, one after the other. Yes, I’m still hitting snooze, and eating cake and French fries whenever I can. I’m not writing or reading as much as I would like, but I am going to be gentle on my winter-hating self.

a boy and girl on a baseball infield
A boy and a girl ready to play some ball. It must be spring.

I will breathe. I will get a column out into the world. I will revise and resubmit some poems and essays. I will watch my kids hitting baseballs and softballs into a blue sky. I will go for a run. I will even get up to Portland for AWP and when I’m there, I will engage with the writing world. I will, somehow, welcome spring.

As writers flock to rainy, gloomy Portland, I hope we can all shake off the winter that might still be clinging. And if you can’t, at least know you are not alone. Depression and seasonal affective disorder are real. Please take care of yourselves as we all crane our necks toward spring. Find the wildflower fields, the cherry blossoms, the sun shining bright for a little bit longer each day. But if it is all too much, please listen to the small voice that knows when you might need some help. Listen to that voice and reach out if you need it, because we need you.

Here are some resources for those struggling with depression.

Noriko Nakada, a racially ambiguous writer's headshot

Noriko Nakada is a public school teacher and the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

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Breathe and Push: My Humble Submission

By Hazel Kight Witham

It comes in nerve-frizzling, stomach-turning uncertainty. I scour every sentence, every phrase, triple second-guess myself. I ask my trusted readers to give me thoughts and cuts and end notes and validation before I submit.

It takes me months sometimes to craft and hone and spit-shine a piece until I deem it ready for world. I imagine the world will judge all the micro-choices, the thin premise, the overwrought vines of ideas I could not prune back. And so I draft, and revise, and put aside, pick up again, add some, cut more, trim, reorder, cut the opening, extend the ending, carve, whittle, sculpt. I workshop myself weary.

And even then, I am unsure, doubting, wondering: who will read, what will they think, is it as perfect as I can make it to be beyond reproach, likeable, no—loveable—to all. I want to engage with the world, and my people-pleasing bones make it very hard to do so without worrying what others will think of this collection of words.

My first published essay took a sizeable lifetime and an MFA program to create, excerpted from a still unpublished memoir I had spent years writing and revising. I loved that piece (“The Storm Between Us” at Bellevue Literary Review), but the work that went into chiseling it into diamond-sharp focus was months and months in the making.

a collection of notebooks with handwriting

I wonder if the chiseling was my worry. It was hard stone to handle. All the revising was procrastination of a sort. It was nerve-wracking offering this story to the world: a braided piece about the DNA I inherited from my grandmother, her hospitalization in Galveston, a dip back into the hurricane history of that seaside town that mirrored the storm of mental illness that threatened to crush us both.

When I told my father that I was writing about my own hospitalization a decade after the hell of it he said, “Why? Why would people want to read about that?” I want to say that he was trying to protect me, this man who talks about everything but the stories I most want to hear. I want to say he was not saying my story does not matter. That he was trying to shield me from criticism perhaps, or a lack of regard. I want to be generous in the face of his disregard.

But his question echoes across the years still. Even though I know now and knew then that my story matters—our stories matter—and are worth being well-told. Worth something not just to the heart of the listener or reader, but to the heart of the teller, the writer.

And yet. The question still dogs me as I try to help manuscripts years in the making find the light. As I become the advocate for my own story because sometimes your queries go unanswered, and emails from contests all start in apology and sometimes the agent shops a work and there are no bites and they quit the literary world for another one a bit more kind.

Still: I am learning to breathe and push the work out. I am learning to submit. Poems are easiest, bite-sized, not so demanding of working and reworking that prose and longer works require. Perhaps not so vulnerable to judgment. But still there are those jitters when I know a piece will go up, and someone might read it, maybe even my father, and I do not know how or if it will be received. I do not know what I am blind to in my own work, what I say that might offend. I do not know if you are even here with me still, holding on to the end, giving this a few minutes of your precious time.

There are many worthy words out there, and claiming space for my own is part of the writing life I have the hardest time with. But the words are worth it. And so: to submit is the precise word for this process. I submit despite the fear, I submit despite certain rejection, I submit despite the echoes of my father and the self-doubt and the uncertainty. I submit, I submit, I submit and every time, there is less apology and more clarity.

Hazel Kight Witham is a writer, teacher, activist, and artist whose work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Rising Phoenix Review, Angels Flight, Sixfold, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, Lunch Ticket and Lady/Liberty/Lit. She lives and breathes in Los Angeles with her family. www.hazelkightwitham.com

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Writing Through the Storm

A huge public education crowd

By Noriko Nakada

Even as I sit here writing this column, I’m not sure how it will be written.

I missed writing the last Breathe and Push post of the 2018. I had every intention of writing a summary of this column’s first year, of this Women Who Submit community willing into publication essays about the labor of writing, about Stephon Clark and Black Lives Matter, about teaching while breathless, and the refugee crisis, about writing while mothering, and creating poetry in the midst of tragic news, about gentrification, and Mr. Rogers, and finally, about the upcoming LA teacher strike.

And then, on December 19th, the day I was supposed to publish that column about Breathe and Push’s first year, the UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles) set a January 10th strike date and the words for that last column were lost in a sea of text messages and emails.

Winter vacation for our two-teacher household revolved around strike preparations, getting our heads around the work stoppage and organizing our family and school communities. Then we waited, wondering if and when the strike would come, until all of a sudden, after all of those days, it was here. 

If you were in Los Angeles during the strike, you might have seen us. We wore red and carried pickets. We chanted on neighborhood streets and on major thoroughfares. We accepted donations of umbrellas, coffee, and doughnuts. We carried beautiful handmade signs that disintegrated in the wet, and then we remade them. We danced on sidewalks and onto computers, and we screamed and sang until our throats grew hoarse. We moved through rain and wind all week in numbers that surprised even us: 30,000 teachers out on strike, rallying crowds of 40,000; 50,000; 60,000.

public ed rally in LA
Thousands rally for public education in Los Angeles.

We stood shoulder to shoulder in awe of the collective power of our city pulling in the direction of a common good: quality public schools for kids and families and communities. We pushed: a whole city, in rain and wind and finally into sunlight, and by the start of the second week of the strike, an agreement was reached, members cast votes, and small victories were won.

These were not the glorious victories you might think 60,000 people in the streets would win. The contract teachers won was not glamorous, but all of those teachers, and students, and families breathed and pushed public education in the right direction.

And guess what. I barely wrote a word about it.

But now the column is almost done, on the night after my first day back teaching, when I wasn’t sure I would be able to write at all.

Neil Gaiman says of writing “You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.”

So keep those words coming. Keep on breathing, pushing, and writing because that is what matters. We might not always win. Every draft won’t be pretty or perfect, but we have to keep moving forward. Keep going. Keep writing.

Noriko Nakada headshot in black and white

Noriko Nakada is a public school teacher and the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

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Breathe and Push: Why LAUSD Teachers Might Strike

By Noriko Nakada

Union Sign

Like most fall weekends, this past one was busy. There was a Friday night festival at my child’s school, there was a homecoming football game; there were soccer games and birthday parties.

But this weekend was not like all the others, because I’m an LAUSD public school teacher, and like every other year, I had many papers to grade and many students on my mind as I made my way through the weekend, but unlike other years, this year held an added stress. All weekend I carried the weight of a looming work stoppage, and very public contract negotiations that put my public school colleagues and me in the crosshairs of public conversation on the sidelines of sporting events or gathered around a table waiting for the cake to come out.

And in all of my interactions this weekend, I had to gauge, fairly quickly, where friends, old and new, stood when it came to public education. What did they already think about our public schools and what were they willing to learn? Did they ask me about what was happening with the teacher strike? Did they want to hear my perspective? Or, did they know nothing about this issue, because their kid goes to a charter, or a private school, or they don’t have kids, or upon hearing I teach in a public school they want to explain to me why community public schools just don’t work? Continue reading “Breathe and Push: Why LAUSD Teachers Might Strike”

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Won’t You Be My Neighbor: A Call to Action in Trump’s America

By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Fred Rogers spent decades asking children each day, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” It was an invitation to engage and understand. It was an offering of friendship and a call to build community. These are values lost on Donald Trump.

Within a month of the Trump Administration announcing its “zero tolerance” policy on May 7, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez was shot in the head and murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Rio Bravo, Texas, Trans woman, Roxana Hernandez, died while in ICE custody, Marco Antonio Muñoz, committed suicide while in custody after being separated from his wife and three year-old son, and an estimated 1,300 (the number grew to 2,500) children seeking asylum were forcibly separated from parents and guardians at the border and placed in makeshift government detention centers, one being a desert camp in Tornillo, Texas reminiscent of a WWII Japanese detention center.

Though Trump ended forcible separation after a country-wide outcry on June 20th, a September 13th report from USA Today counts 416 children are still separated, and an October 3rd article in The Guardian, reports the Tornillo detention center has not only not shut down as expected, but continues to grow, currently detaining an estimated 2000 minors. Continue reading “Won’t You Be My Neighbor: A Call to Action in Trump’s America”

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Breathe and Push: Moving in LA: Before and After

By Noriko Nakada

Before: Hyde Park Homework

UMFoC. Upwardly Mobile Family of Color: pronounced, “um, fuck.” This is what I kept saying to myself as my family and I prepared to move from one recently gentrified neighborhood and into another.

I moved to Los Angeles over two decades ago. It started with a studio apartment in Eagle Rock: pre-Colorado-Street-gentrification. Then, there was a Ladera Heights condo, after Magic opened his Starbucks. After that, it was a Highland Park casita where our front fence housed bullets from Avenues, before Mr. T died and his alley was restored. Next was a Mar Vista condo pre-Starbucks and road diet. Now, we would make Hyde Park our home: pre-stadium and Crenshaw line. Continue reading “Breathe and Push: Moving in LA: Before and After”

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Breathe and Push: “This Will Give You Poetry”

This year, May was gloomier than usual. Aside from a couple of blue-sky days, our typically beautiful Southern California May was thick and heavy, day after day draped in gray.

In the news, our school board chose a hedge fund manager to lead the district, public school teachers in Puerto Rico were being tear-gassed in the streets, and Chief of Staff John Kelly continued the current administration’s daily attack on immigrants.

"This will give you poetry"In my eighth grade classroom, a distinct culture had developed. Students were challenging one another’s privilege and entitlement at every opportunity, which was important but exhausting, and I was begin to wonder if my students had learned anything in my class. My students were testing my nerves, and although we still had several weeks left, I was ready for the year to be over.

That was when I started to wade through the stacks of poetry collections each of my students submit for National Poetry Month. It took me a while to get started. Some kids cared very little about the project and that was clear in what they turned in, but every year I am also left in awe by the intimate experiences my students share and the exquisite hand-crafted publications they create. For several days, I poured over poems about families, and cats, and food. There were whole chapbooks about Fortnite, and depression, life and love. Some poems told serious stories or grappled with current events. Others assembled light collections of linked haiku or short, rhyming poems. But each group of poems spoke volumes about these particular young people at this precise moment in time and helped me see each of their unique and precious lives.  

As I finished reading, the US relocated it’s Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem and in protests in Gaza, over 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. Our school community sits in Westwood, just south of UCLA in an area nicknamed Little Tehran because of the many Iranian families who made their homes here. Our racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity make our campus unique. There are students who fast for Ramadan, prepare for bar and bat mitzvahs, and attend catechism classes. I read articles about the most recent developments in the complex conflict in Gaza alongside poems by my diverse students who sit on both sides of this conflict, and wished Israelis and Palestinians could read one another’s poetry. It could show them their enemy’s heart and humanity and make it much more difficult to fire across that border.

Poems can provide intimate glimpses into the lives of others, and thankfully, according to recently released NEA research, poetry reading is on the rise. Although the gray of May still hung thick in the air and the headlines shifted away from the Middle East and toward the humanitarian refugee crisis at our own border, I found myself seeking hope in poetry. One of those poems was Yrsa Daley-Ward’s “Poetry” in which she writes, “You will come away bruised./ You will come away bruised/ but this will give you poetry.”

May was a bruise turned gray and cold, but from within all of the gloom, poetry brought out the human story. Poetry made me love my students again and see possibilities is the most problematic conflicts. As we wade through each tragic news cycle, keep pressing those keys. Keep reading each other’s words and writing your own. Keep sharing your work with the world. The world needs all of our stories, more than ever, to be a beacon through this dense fog.

Noriko Nakada headshot in black and whiteNoriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere.

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Breathe and Push: Writing While Momming

A table set up with a laptop for writingBy Jamie Asaye FitzGerald

Your identity as a writer doesn’t disappear once the responsibility of children come into your life. In fact, your identity as a writer may take on a more obvious shape, form and demand, and may give you the strength you need to deal with the challenges of being a parent.

There will be days filled with the joy and plenitude of childrearing, and days when you might feel like being a parent is, to put it bluntly, one of the nine circles of hell. As hard as it is to find the time to write, your refuge can be the page. Even if you can only write for fifteen minutes each day or fifteen minutes each week, that writing could be your lifeline—that writing could save you.

When you have a baby, you really have to take baby steps. For a baby, those first steps are huge. For a parent-writer, those baby steps to keep the writing life alive are equally huge. Give yourself credit for even the smallest effort.

To preserve your writer self, you will have to fight against forces that might not consider, value or acknowledge that part of you. These forces may be closer to you than you realize. They may even be your own loved ones. If you have a partner, you may have to contend with working things out with that person. They might be 100% supportive or 98% supportive or not supportive enough. The reality is that you will need their support and understanding.

If they’ve committed to being with you, they’ve committed to being with an artist—and an artist has needs. Getting your partner on board with you will make things much easier. Sometimes they just need to be reminded who you are and what you need.

Fighting for a writing life also means asserting it as a priority in small, achievable ways. Any parent knows that if you wait until the end of the day, after other responsibilities are taken care of, you will have very little left to offer the page—let alone the energy to brush your own teeth. If possible, write first, before you do the thousand things required of you each week, even if that means you write for just five or fifteen minutes.

I’ve found my best sustaining resources have been scheduled group activities. The literary submission parties held by Women-Who-Submit have been great ways for me to block out time to devote to my writing life and get work out into the world. I can tell my partner on this day and time, I will be away. It’s a scheduled event—it’s legit, concrete, with a beginning and an end.

On top of having time blocked out in advance, the meetings transform preparing submissions, a difficult and painstaking task for the uber self-critical writer, into a positive and uplifting experience when done in community. As Pat Schneider, in her book Writing Alone and With Others, counsels: “Find and keep in contact with other writer/artists who can provide you with an intimate community of support, give you honest critical response, strengthen you, and encourage your work.”

From time to time, I also participate in a writing accountability group called The Grind. Participants write something every day for a month and email it to an assigned group. For a time-pressed parent, this arrangement works for me. There is no comment, no critiquing, just the doing of the writing. The Grind got me in the habit of approaching writing as I do brushing my teeth—it’s just something one does every day. Forming the habit was the achievement. I found myself jonesing to write each morning like jonesing for that first cup of coffee.

I don’t always write every day, but now I know I can, and I know that jotting down any thought I may have at any moment could turn into something down the road. As a parent, you’re being pulled in many directions at once. It can be hard to concentrate. You won’t remember that pithy thought later. Record it on your phone. Jot it on a receipt. Throw it in your purse. You’ll stumble across it when you fish out a tissue for your snot-nosed kid, and it may become a poem, story or book!

Writing while momming is playing the long game. Everyone tells you your kids will grow up so fast. As writers, it often seems like that’s not the case. But it does help to put things in perspective when you can accept the limitations of your present circumstances while remembering that it won’t always be this way. Things change. Children grow up.

There is no reason why you should throw in the writing towel just because you have children to take care of, but you will need to accept the limitations placed upon you if you want to be an effective parent AND remain connected to your writing self. You have to feed your writer self and care for it to avoid despair and bitterness.

Moreover, your attentiveness to yourself as an artist is setting an example for your children, and especially for young girls, that in addition to being a mother, you are also your own person, with your own hopes and dreams, needs and desires. Following through on those needs, dreams, and desires is not selfish or taking time away from your kids. It’s good parenting.

author Jamie Say FitzgeraldJamie Asaye FitzGerald is a Los Angeles-based poet from Hawaii. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Works & Days, Poetry Daily, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University and a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she received an Academy of American Poets College Prize and the Edward Moses Poetry Prize. She is also the mother of two young daughters and enjoys playing piano in the evenings as they run in circles around the couch.

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Breathe and Push: When Survivors Speak, Who Will Listen?

This week in my eighth grade classroom, five different holocaust survivors shared their stories with my English classes.

diverse groups of young people with a survivor

Two of the five survivors made it out of the death camps as young people. The other three were babies, hidden during the war. It took years of research for them to learn their own stories of survival so they could share them with us.

Those three babies were separated from their families. One, became an orphan, and was then adopted by family who had survived by fleeing Europe. Another had been hidden, along with her mother, by an entire village. The third hid with her mother until the end of the war, and then, because of American immigration laws, she was separated from her mother. Her mother immigrated to the United States, and the family this small child was left with kidnapped her. It took over several months for her mother to locate her daughter and reunite with her in America.

Leaving my classroom that day, my heart was burdened by these stories, but I was also buoyed by hope and perspective. Each of these survivors carried endless gratitude for those who helped them: for their rescuers, or the upstanders. They spoke of kindnesses, large and small, and they helped provide much needed perspective about how we treat one another today.

Maybe it was because I had read this editorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Ripping children from parents will shatter America’s soul” the night before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the survivors’ stories and of the babies and children and their families being torn apart at our borders. I couldn’t stop thinking about the most vulnerable among us. What could I do about the unforgivable lack of humanity our country is showing them?

And then we hear about lost children. Nearly 1,500. This number is unfathomable.

We lose keys.
We lose nickles.
We lose pens.
We do not lose children.

These unconscionable losses, children with mothers who are mourning, siblings still searching, families with so many questions. What do we do?

The president refers to immigrants as animals, and people go crazy.

Nearly 1,500 children are lost. These are not puppies or kittens. These are children. These are daughter and sons, brothers and sisters. What stories will they tell as adults? What will these survivors tell our children of this America?

And the rest of us?
Are we rescuers?
Are we upstanders?
Or have we become the animals?

For opportunities to help immigrant and refugee families, here are seven ways you can help. 

Noriko Nakada headshot in black and whiteNoriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Lady Liberty Lit, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Linden Avenue.

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Breathe and Push: Teaching While Breathless

Classroom boardBy Hazel Kight Witham

This year has been a breathless one. Lately a clutch of lines from a poem by Stevie Smith has played like a refrain:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I am, this year, much further out than I thought, and, it seems, nearly every day, I am adrift, no toe-touch in the murky depths I find myself, staring back at the shore of my life, not waving but drowning.

I spend each workday treading water in the high seas of California’s public education system. Not waving but drowning.

Continue reading “Breathe and Push: Teaching While Breathless”