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.
There are gates that some of us are born outside of. We may try to scale the barbed fence, but without guidance, we only wind up nicked and wounded. When I grew up in Orcutt, California, an unincorporated city in northern Santa Barbara County in the 80s and 90s, these barbed wired fences were all around, holding livestock and rusted tractors.
Faded No Trespassing black signs hung on posts. Sometimes a gate would be left open and the temptation to pass would arise. However, uninvited, you never knew what was on that land. Might be a shotgun or a bull. That was what my mother, an Angeleno, told us, and being filled with trepidation, I listened.
I grew up the third of four daughters, in a family of blue-collar workers. Farmers on one side and house painters on the other. Hard working; dirt, or paint under the fingernails.
When I was 13, I went to work with my dad to paint a plant nursery. The Hampshire Gate was unlocked, and we drove up the easement. My dad pulled over to the soft sand shoulder and said the words I hoped to hear. “Would you like to drive?”
I slid out of the passenger seat and into the driver’s side of his white Chevy Luv truck. Barely able to reach the pedals, I pressed the clutch in hard and found first. He smiled. I pulled back onto the dirt road. I went into second. Pride filled my heart as it confirmed—I was indeed my father’s son.
The road was bumpy; we pulled up near the grower station. A kid and a dog played ball in the middle of the dirt road. There was a manure pile on the other.
Not knowing what to do, I forgot about the brake and swerved and hit the manure pile at full speed—15 miles an hour. The truck lodged two feet deep into the pile. My dad shook his head. “What were you thinking, Pueschel?”
“Not to hit the kid,” I said through the ache of my misguided intuition.
“You didn’t think about hitting the brake?” He slid out of the passenger side to dug us out leaving me alone in the driver’s seat for the first time. I had dreamt about sitting there alone since age eight, when he first allowed me to sit on his lap and steer. It was also the last until Driver’s Ed at fifteen.
The reality is my father could have told me to hit the brake and I would have obeyed, but he opted to let me figure it out myself. A moment of direct guidance wasn’t present. Along with work dirt, there was a constant reinforcement of rugged individualism. He was there, but simultaneously, I was alone.
Craft Gates
I thought writing was solitary. I saw the fence, but I couldn’t recognize the gate or see how to get to the other side. They did not leave it open like the nursery. My literary voice was unfamiliar compared to those I saw in the literary canon, and I had the rejections to prove it.
Growing up androgenous and with ADHD left me on the other side of gates my entire childhood and much of my adult life. Like a closed Hampshire Gate, I could see on the other side of things, but crossing without permission, I never knew what I was heading into. I would be bit by barbs when trying to break into community with being “too masculine” by my female family members and girls from my congregation or being called too stupid or immature by teachers without emotional intelligence or proper professional boundaries. It gifted me curiosity and alternative perspectives. In workshops, folks have pointed out that I have a lot of different POVs. That’s the thing about being able to see through the Hampshire Gate. All you can do is observe what’s going on inside of them, and when your brain is wired differently, it alters how things are seen and what stories want to be told.
Gate Opening
A screenwriting agent approached me when I was in film school. He had fallen in love with my film festival long-listed script and expressed interest in representing me. I did as I did not do with the manure pile. I pumped the brakes. I didn’t have guidance and didn’t know what would be on the other side of representation. The possibility of success seemed as daunting as a bull, particularly because my screenwriting instructor had stated how flawed that same script was and how I should stick to directing because it was obvious I was more passionate about that. It was the shotgun that scared me off from professionally pursuing screenwriting.
I was first published in elementary school as the winner of a young writer’s award. Later, as a young filmmaker, I published film reviews under a pseudonym on the web, which led me once being on a panel with F. X. Feeney debating from the feminist perspective to a full theater. They had let me in the gate a few times, but without direction, I didn’t know how far I could wander up sans permission.
Twenty years later, I remained solitary. I wrote a lot, finished little, and published primarily in the Wellness space until three years ago. I would occasionally venture out and submit a poem or CNF piece. My unhelpful screenwriting professor instilled doubt in me. I shut down sharing fiction and screenplays. The rejections I received from the few times a year I submitted poetry or CNF were verification: I was unwelcome in the literary and creative writing space. That changed three years ago when I found WWS, a community eager to support and lift. A community based on unity versus competition.
A workshop curated by a WWS member through a local university with another WWS member as facilitator was where I found my confidence to share my fictional creations once again. It was a prompted one-off. I read my work. At the end, when we were in conversation, the instructor said to me, “You’re a fiction writer.” I self-deprecated. She refused to let me do so.
This was a gate opened wide for me. Someone saw me on the other side and encouraged me to cross into the literary landscape. Then the pandemic hit. My business was impacted and decimated, and all I had was writing. My work went from primarily CNF to fiction: the type of story I could control.
Mentor Meanderings
I ditched the mythos of rugged individualism in creative writing as I became a fully vested member of the WWS community with engaged literary citizenship. A collective is much stronger than a solo writer. I found writing partners and generous guidance from members.
This experience led me to think that I had evolved beyond interactions with men who weren’t particularly good at guidance, who closed gates I had enough skill to walk through, but too much trepidation to move without permission. I thought I had gotten over this trend until I enrolled in a mentorship with a male editor I held in esteem.
I thought, here is a gate I can access, and it was open. I was a courageous writer and had thirty-plus pieces published in the last two years, twenty-six of them fiction, a few craft essays, some blogs for Women Who Submit, and a few CNF essays. I had been paid for twenty-five of them, for twenty-two I was paid handsomely. I had tested my mettle and proved to myself that they intended the open gate for me.
New post lockdown confidence and a lot of recent writing credits under my belt, I was sure this well respected and connected editor would be the mentor to guide me further into my success. Perhaps, one day indirectly it will have an impact, but in the now, the scabs from the barbs are healing.
The mentor had great credits, is well respected, and gave great craft talks. I went to a few of his drop-in workshops, and I had confidence in his ability to guide me. My interactions to this point were so positive, I recommended his workshops to others. Our first meeting went fine. We set up the parameters of what our one-on-one work would look like. I was hopeful.
When I received notes from him, I was extremely disappointed. He wasn’t cruel, but it was clear he did not get my work. Looking through the notes there was some useful feedback, but when we met it was clear, he either wasn’t the reader for me or he wasn’t reading the work fully (our last meeting he rescheduled, then the day of sent me a note asking if we could meet later so he could finish my packet). Some of his notes asked questions, that if he had read the text fully, he would have seen I answered those questions. I had others read the same works and verify that there were clear connections.
He seemed to be stuck in his world view, or maybe he was not into my writing. In one piece, I wrote there was a reference to feeling eyes undress the character to which he said “eyes don’t do that.” I argued, “It may be cliché, but eyes definitely undress people. Folks who live in perceived female form have had many an experience of eyes leaving them feeling attacked.” He disagreed because it wasn’t something he had experienced. In his worldview, eyes didn’t do that. I conceded with “what you are telling me is that it isn’t working, so it’s not working.”
The feedback was starkly different from that of other writers/editors I have workshopped with. As a neurodivergent writer, my work is meta. It’s part of who I am and it’s not something I can stop. My perspective watches patterns, focuses on the psychosocial aspect of human development, and often has multiple layers. Patterns emerge, not quite to the Beautiful Mind level, but they seem obvious to me.
The following meetings he kept bringing up that I was a genre writer, something I had never been called before. Genre writers do something far more difficult than I could ever do. They build complex worlds based on formulas. My brain rejects that kind of structure.
I think what he was meaning is I use accessible language, which I do, but my work is more complex than the words he read, it just didn’t work with his taste. After our third meeting and him repeating genre about 10x, I told him I had never been called a genre writer before, ever. He attempted to assuage my frustration and stated he didn’t mean it as an insult. In most literary spaces I find when people say someone is a “genre writer” it’s not generally a compliment. It is a closed gate.
I would be remiss if I said I didn’t feel destroyed after our meetings. Once, I cried in frustration for four hours. The solace was that WWS member and mentor Colette Sartor prepared me for this. She said, “You are an experimental writer. A lot of literary editors will not get it. That’s okay, you just have to submit to the places that will.”
The editor said I needed to be less metaphorical overall. In another piece, he said I was too universal. What this told me is that we were not a good match. A few weeks toward the end of our program together on Twitter, he said that if he could write like anyone, it would be Elizabeth Strout. Had I known that, I would have known we were not an ideal pairing. Elizabeth Strout is a gifted writer that writes MFA style prose, but it isn’t my style of writing or preferred reading. My writing is New California and Strout’s is New England literature. Mine is experimental; it is odd; it is as unique as my neurology.
The editor kept saying that I like to tackle different and difficult perspectives. I do not think he realized that this is the way my brain works. It’s not about liking to write a particular way, it’s my authentic voice. I choose accessible language most times because I find arbitrary barriers nonsensical, but the perspective isn’t forced, it just is. Trying to fit into neurotypical forms can make my brain feel broken and forced.
Friends, mentors, and colleagues all said the same thing: that he was a gatekeeper but not my own. My interaction with him triggered the same feelings I had going through elementary school with teachers that did not understand children who think and see the world differently. When all was done, I was able to detach from the feeling of being worthless.
Now, I take the wheel, knowing I am the driver of my writer’s voice. I do not need permission to travel this road, the words are always with me. I zip over the literary terrain in the vehicle of my imagination and I am still learning when to hit the brakes. Sometimes I find myself lodged in a mountain of manure. I dig myself out with the support of a community. I learn, I adapt, and I course correct to find another gate to access. Thankfully, I am a member of a community that opens gates and provides kindheartedness along with useful guidance and direction.
Thea Pueschel is a nonbinary emerging writer and artist, a member of Women Who Submit, a facilitator for Shut Up & Write, a California Arts Council Panelist 2022, and a Dorland Arts Colony Resident. Thea’s first solo mixed media exhibition “44: not dead, just invisible” ran at The Center of Orange from September 2021-December 2021. Thea has been published in Short Edítion, and Perhappened, among others.
While I have never birthed a human baby, I often benefit from the practices taught in birthing classes, the ones name-checked in this column—breathe, push. I spend much of my time pushing to be seen, heard, known, read, welcomed, held. I breathe between pushes, sometimes because I’m about to pass out.
Among the things that have carried me through my pushes to write, publish, read, support other writers, and teach—has been the support of having an action buddy (aka action partner). We’re both goal-oriented people, full of visions and the chops to carry them out. It happens with greater ease by having a consistent partner who serves as a reminder of our progress.
Even though I have a spouse and other friends who know a lot about what I do, a daily check-in with my action buddy means having a thoughtful witness to the details of my day-to-day actions and intentions. Meanwhile, I get to see her process, victories, challenges, and moments when she needs to catch her breathe. We listen deeply, ask if the other needs particular support.
The pandemic meant that most of us weren’t out in the world as much. It was easy to feel invisible. Yet each day, I’ve had someone watching out for me while I’m watching out for her. Our partnership helps me make mindful choices about activities concerning my writing goals, along with seemingly unrelated (yet related) tasks like hanging blackout curtains, which help me sleep better. Self-care is a recurring theme.
We correspond via email, often starting with a short check-in like “Spouse overfed the cat again. I’m furious.” or “Had a shitty night’s sleep, but hopeful anyway.”
Then, two lists. The first is the day’s action plan. I do mine in bullet points, which are so tidy and filled with hope the items will magically get completed.
eat to support well-being
breathe, rest, take breaks
savor my teaching success
welcome health joy, yes, peace
meditation/prayer
type up notes to students and email them
brainstorm new story pitch
read
yoga
avoid multitasking
date with stepdaughter and her fiancé on Zoom
lights out at 10:15
Even the items that aren’t completed are considered achievements. They mean we weren’t only pushing. We were breathing too.
The second list celebrates what went well the day before:
Gratitudes:
ate to support well-being
health
Mom got her hair done
amazing first class, teaching!
lady at Starbucks
Tom, Zari
handled issue at Mom’s place with grace
took breaks
morning walk
the last episode of Insecure
progress on writing projects
Beyond corresponding with one another, we talk by phone at least once a week to enjoy a more directly interactive exchange.
I’ve had many action buddies over the years as schedules and priorities have changed, and I’ve found them through writing groups and other social circles. We’ve had commonalities and differences, which has worked well in having someone who introduces me to new ideas and approaches.
Finally, my action buddy isn’t the only person who supports my writing and other visions. I rely on a team approach, reaching out to people when taking harder actions with texts like “hitting send on my latest story.” I also attend the WWS Saturday check-ins and stay current on our Rejection Brag.
However, having that one consistent person has been among the ways I’ve found stability, especially during the shaky nature of the past couple of years. We serve as birthing coaches, reminding one another when to breathe, when to push.
Laura Sturza’s writing is in The Washington Post, The LA Times,AARP’s The Girlfriend, Hippocampus, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She is completing her memoir, How I Got Married After 50 for the First Time. Laura wrote, produced, and starred in the one-woman show, Finding the Perfect Place to Live in 111 Gyrations. She recently started teaching writing to older adults. Laura lived in L.A. for 20 years and is now in Rockville, Maryland. laurasturza.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.
“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/
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.
I’ve scribbled away, diligently, in the margins of my life and, by now, in my fifties, I have a fully completed manuscript. Though it’s never done, is it?
To keep the creative spark alive, over the years, I’ve taken workshops, gone away to residencies, joined critique groups, attended conferences. With the support of a writing community, and because I’ve had no choice, I kept going. I’ve written and rewritten: the very first version was a novel. I deviated to other stories, essays, blogs. I’ve always come back.
I’ve mustered the courage to pitch to agents. I’ve gotten kind rejections. I’ve gotten silence. I’ve gotten a bite: Interesting,send it when it’s fully polished and ready to go.
It’s not ready to go; it will never be ready.
image of a West Virginia holler by Anne Pellicciotto
Then, one misty morning this past October, in a holler, in West Virginia, that hawk swooped down and caught me in the gaze of his beady yellow eye. I stopped in my tracks. Everything became still. My heart thumped in my chest as I watched him, expanse of brown and white striated wing, sail upward.
“Simplicity and freedom,” I whispered, as he hung above me like an untethered kite. Then a smile, the first in ages, spread across my face.
I’d escaped DC for a much-needed break from the pandemic and political mayhem, from the helicopters circling over my neighborhood, rattling the windows in their frames, from appalling events that had yet to unfold. Over the course of my week in the woods the panic attacks subsided, my racing heart calmed, the mind-numbing headaches waned. I slept through the night. I wrote through my days. I hiked through the fields, along the brook, taking in the scent of jasmine and decaying leaves.
Maskless, out in nature, I could breathe.
Back in Washington, I felt immediately trapped again. This suffocating feeling was not unfamiliar to me: trapped as a kid in a home with my drunken, enraged father; confined in a young marriage that was supposed to have saved me from my imploding family.
In middle-age, in this time of Covid, I felt a bubbling urgency, once again, to escape.
As a professional change consultant and coach, I’d spent the past six months guiding clients – business owners, artists, solopreneurs – through their pandemic pivots. In doing so, I’d navigated my own business pivot. I ported my services online and zoomed my days away like the rest of the white-collar world. My clients were inspiring: in the face of so much adversity, many made the shift from survive to thrive.
The problem was: I wasn’t thriving. I hadn’t been since way before the pandemic. The silver lining of Covid for me, one of the lucky ones who hadn’t been inflicted directly, was that I could see my own fragility – and its polarity – my vitality.
The encounter with the hawk had woken me up to a glimmering possibility. But what was I supposed to do? What did simplicity and freedom mean?
Initially, I took it to mean selling my house, divesting of my belongings, shuttering my business, and driving west across the country to seek out a new life. But that vision – along with a parade of real estate agents through my home of 22 years – only accentuated my fears. When I closed my eyes at night, the image of pulling away from Park Road, a car crammed with my earthly possessions, drifting around the wide-open west, untethered, ironically, did not feel like freedom. Instead, my chest felt constricted; the sleeplessness and anxiety returned.
My therapist told me, frankly, “Anne, you’re scaring the shit out of yourself.”
I chuckled nervously. I bit my thumb cuticle bloody. Did this mean I wasn’t ready? Ready for what?
I went back to my half-finished vision board for clues. The collage of pictures ripped from magazines and glued onto posterboard depicted serene scenes, isolated abodes with decks and Adirondack chairs facing vistas of water and mountains. A pink lotus flower bloomed out of the left upper corner with the word contemplate pasted above it.
When I really focused, I could see: the images were of me, very still, in quiet places. I had to close my eyes to access what was in the depths of my heart, a secret well-kept from even myself: I needed simplicity and freedom in my life to, shhhh, write.
Even typing these words, revealing this truth to the page, felt like a betrayal, like something I should backspace and erase. But that admission – that writing has always been my passion – was a door, and I stood on the threshold.
My manuscript sits, weighed down by secrets. When will it be ready? When will I?
It’s time to double down on Monday Night Writing Salon, I tell myself. I’ll sign-up for a memoir class at the Writers Center.
I blink my eyes shut and reopen them to my vision board, propped on the radiator. A calm river runs down the center, a kayak piercing the shady green water. A bluebird, not quite a hawk, drifts across a sunlit sky, song notes emanating from its beak.
I exhale a puff of exasperation, bend closer to the collage, brow crinkled. A woman in white dives into a tropical blue abyss. A hiker gazes across and open field toward the horizon with the message: Trails are merely suggestions.
The truth stares me in the face.
The truth speaks to me in my dreams. The hawk opens its hooked beak and says I can.
I don’t need another writing program, a swirl of busy work, a litany of applications, rejections, submissions, decisions.
I have but one decision to make.
I don’t need a grant; I need to grant myself permission to stop zooming and go.
Writing is a story burning inside me. Writing is a decision to feed the flames.
Writing is the hawk that has reminded me, has lured me, has eyed me.
I stand at the edge of the field feeling the nudge of the breeze against my back. I take my first step through the tall grass. The ground feels firm on this path; my heart feels light. I am in motion.
The next steps are practical; this is a self-funded sabbatical. I prepare my house for rental, post an ad, field the inquiries, draw-up a lease, begin to sort through my possessions. I take another step and reserve my cabin in the woods, in the mountains, by a river, with a good desk and chair and light and air. I make those symbolic pictures real.
I have already run up against Resistance – a very familiar voice that says things like: “Well, you’re not a real writer,” and “The world doesn’t need another book,” and “Isn’t it a little late for a career change?”
This time I reply sweetly, firmly: It’s never too late to become who you are. It’s never too late to be free.
Anne Pellicciotto, life coach and owner of SeeChange, writes about the crossroads in life that break and make us. Heeding the hawk’s message, she’s hit the road for a year of simplicity and freedom. In the void, Anne plans to complete Strings Attached, a #metoo coming of age memoir in which she marries her music teacher lover to save herself and, eventually, must break free from him. Follow her midlife coming of age adventures at www.seechangeconsulting.com/blog or on Medium at https://anneseye.medium.com/.
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.
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.
