Uncategorized – Page 9 – Women Who Submit

November 8, 2017

An Interview with Lisa Cheby, Owner of the Desert Lotus House for Writers

by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

The Desert Lotus House for Writers is a new writing retreat in Joshua Tree, California, and is the passion project of WWS original member, Lisa Eve Cheby. Applications opened on 11/11/17 with residencies beginning in January 2018.

Women Who Submit: On the Desert Lotus House for Writers website, you mention time you spent at a residency in Knoxville, TN. Why did you want to start a writing retreat, and how did your residency experience help you create your own?

Lisa Eve Cheby: The residency at Firefly Farms and SAFTA was amazing. I had never been on a residency and doubted myself and what I would do with that gift of space and time. There was something about the process of applying and being accepted. It is not a fully-funded residency, but it was affordable and in a new place. The house was welcoming and comfortable. The landscape was new and beautiful. It was the first time in my adult life where I did not have an agenda. I was able to write and read poetry all day. I opted to not have a car that week, so I was really isolated to the farm and to walks on the property and neighborhood. All I had to do was feed the animal and write. I also loved having another poet in the house with me, in this case, Karen Craigo, and the writer in the “coop” who shared kitchen and bath with us, Sara Martin. We each retreated to our rooms or various places in the house to write, but cooking in the kitchen seemed to indicate we were open for conversation.

For about a year, I had been wanting to create a writing retreat for myself in Joshua Tree. The right place at the right price never really came along, and I am limited in what I can fund on my own. I was reluctant to Airbnb as I didn’t want to be a burden to the community. When I was in Knoxville it occurred to me that I could do this with a house in Joshua Tree. I realized it did not need to be a house like the many bought and renovated by professional investors who get homesteader cabins and renovate them to be hipster places for desert getaways. It just had to be a comfortable house where writers could go at an affordable rate to write. A month after I returned from Firefly Farms, I found the house and decided to go for it. Continue reading “An Interview with Lisa Cheby, Owner of the Desert Lotus House for Writers”

May 3, 2017March 6, 2018

Why Write About the Hardest Things

Woman dressed in a black, lace dress bends over the side of a bridge, facing a small, tree-lined canyon

by Antonia Crane

My mom’s aggressive cancer returned the same week I got into an MFA program for writing— a terrible idea considering the recession of 2008. Mom insisted I “Get that degree!” so I enrolled even though I had no way to pay for it. I’d lost my personal assistant job, and my sugar-daddy-once-removed, a stout, Mexican man who was missing part of his thumb, suddenly disappeared for good.

A few weeks into grad school, I drove up the California coast to Humboldt where redwoods cast long shadows and the icy ocean raged silently while I euthanized my mother. I immediately plunged back into sex work. There’s no pamphlet on how to keep showing up for class when your favorite person dies. It’s like waking up without arms or feet. I floated in the fog of her absence and I wrote about her frail limbs and her moans of pain when I took her off the morphine for a few hours those final days. I wrote about her peeing the bed. Spilling milk on the floor. Choking on water. I wrote about her writing her own obituary and her cobalt blue vases filled with her orange azaleas. I wrote about meeting men in motels off the 405 to jack them off—how I was usually one hand job away from being homeless. I wrote about my mom’s feeding tube and her pastel fuzzy socks I slid off her feet before they took her body away. In my mind and on the page, my mom’s dying body merged with mine going through the motions of sex work. I couldn’t separate the two because they were braided in my mind. I kept Cheryl Strayed’s essay “The Love of My Life” (The Sun, # 321) close at hand because it gave me permission to write about my specific raging body grief and how I hurled my pussy at the world and dared it to keep me safe. Continue reading “Why Write About the Hardest Things”

October 12, 2016

Public Notebook to Book: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz

Saturday December 3, 2016 Wendy C. Ortiz will lead the 3rd installment in the WWS Fall Workshop Series: Public Notebook to Book. Ortiz is the author of two memoirs, Excavation (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015) and has her third book, Bruja, being release October 31, 2016 from Civil Coping Mechanisms.

Ortiz has used journals and public notebooks throughout her career. In fact, “Hollywood Notebook, a prose poem-ish memoir, and Bruja, a dreamoir, both began as public notebooks and eventually found their way to becoming print books,” and in her workshop, Ortiz will share strategies for keeping a notebook and how to shape it into a piece of writing intended for an audience.

But first, Ortiz, who has been a contest judge for Blue Mesa Review, and a reader for Hedgebrook and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange, among others, shares her thoughts on confidence, submission, and community.

Women Who Submit: How have Notebooks been in important to your work?

Wendy C. Ortiz: I’ve been carrying notebooks all my life and still do, whether it’s a physical notebook meant for a specific subject or my phone’s Notes app. Notebooks and journals have always been a necessary part of my work.

WWS: When did you choose to take your writing seriously, and what or who helped you in that pursuit? Continue reading “Public Notebook to Book: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz”

October 5, 2016

On Movement and Writing: An Interview with Jay O’Shea

Saturday, November 5th Jay O’Shea, a martial artist and Dance Studies professor at UCLA, will be leading the second workshop in the WWS Fall Workshop Series: On Movement and Writing with Jay O’Shea. She recently offered a Ted Talk on the benefits of physical play and games with a focus on process versus winning, and of course fun.

With a unique point of view, O’Shea’s workshop is sure to shift participants’ stories and characters from the mind to their hands and feet. As O’Shea describes, “In this workshop, we treat movement as central, seeing it as a place where character, narrative arcs, and imagery can emerge in a different, sometimes more vivid, way than they do through dialogue and description.”

O’Shea writes fiction, non-fiction, and academic pieces, and below she shares with our WWS community some strategies for revision, submission, and rejection.

WOMEN WHO SUBMIT: How has movement been in important to your work?

JAY O’SHEA: Like most writers, I’ve always been a scribbler, and I couldn’t say when I started writing. I’ve also always had a physical practice: dance, yoga, rock climbing, martial arts. I spent much of my young adult life trying to figure out whether I most wanted to write or to dance. I found a way to join my passions, becoming a dance scholar and writing about dance in its historical, cultural, and political contexts. Only after finishing my PhD did I realize that I was different from other academics in that writing was not only a means to an end but a craft that I cared deeply about in itself.

Continue reading “On Movement and Writing: An Interview with Jay O’Shea”

September 5, 2016

The WWS Fall Workshop Series

Women Who Submit is excited to hold its first workshop series with three LA-based professional poets and writers who will share personal writing and accountability tools for success in order to help writers craft their next poem, essay, or story and build confidence in their own process. This workshop series offers an opportunity for people of all genders, genres and skill levels to gain practical take-aways from three of Los Angeles’ most fresh and exciting WWS authors and work with an organization dedicated to growing a socially conscious and diverse community focused on supporting women and nonbinary writers in the pursuit of equal representation in publishing and writing programs.

The Women Who Submit Fall Workshop Series, in partnership with PEN Center USA and Avenue 50 Studios, is a not-for-profit event created as a fundraiser for future WWS programming, events, and conference presentations. It is open to people of all genders, orientations, and creeds.

On Silence in Poetry with Ashaki M. Jackson
Saturday, October 1, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN

On Writing and Movement with Jay O’Shea
Saturday, November 5, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN

From Public Notebook to Book with Wendy C. Ortiz
Saturday, December 3, 2016
10am-1pm at PEN Center USA
Tickets: $80 regular / $60 WWS & PEN

Each workshop, led by a WWS member, leans into their own particular approach to developing work from inception to execution. A $200 ($150 for PEN and WWS members) discount is available for purchasing all three workshops.
Continue reading “The WWS Fall Workshop Series”

July 31, 2016

A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JULY

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

The summer has not slowed down the members of Women Who Submit who have accumulated yet another impressive list of literary awards and publication acceptances.

Lauren Eggert-Crowe had three poems published in Angels Flight Literary West. From “Never Shop Thirsty:”

My heart is a hole I want
to stuff with bread

so I go to our Trader
Joe’s for the first time

since you left. Rearranged
shelves are enough to bring it on.

Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JULY”

July 23, 2016

Claps and Cheers: Aya de Leon interviewed by Toni Ann Johnson

The first time I saw Aya was during graduate school at Antioch University Los Angeles. I noticed her immediately because she’s taller than most (while I’m shorter than most), and she has beautiful, long dreadlocks. Her intelligence, however (she’s a Harvard graduate), was the attribute that would remind me of who she was once we left campus and communicated from our respective locations for the rest of the semester. (Ours was a “low-residency” program.) During online conferences I’d read her posts and think: Oh yeah, that’s Aya, the really smart woman.

ADLheadshotMG_0132 — Aya de Leon – Author – Activist – Faculty – Mom – *Really Smart Woman*

Continue reading “Claps and Cheers: Aya de Leon interviewed by Toni Ann Johnson”

July 13, 2016

Women Who Submit Stands with #BlackLivesMatter: Resources for Awareness, Unity and Healing

Women Who Submit stands in solidarity with the #blacklivesmatter movement as we work for equality and visibility of not just women writers but all marginalized people. As we each individually and as a collective search for ways to help the movement, we share the following collection of articles, interviews, poems and videos that we have found helpful in this dark time. We hope you find them helpful too. Continue reading “Women Who Submit Stands with #BlackLivesMatter: Resources for Awareness, Unity and Healing”

June 30, 2016

A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JUNE

The summer has gotten off to a pub-tastic start! Congratulations to all the women who have had work accepted or published in June.

From Alana Saltz‘s “How ASMR Videos Help Me Cope with My Anxiety” on Bustle:

Until six months ago, I’d never heard of ASMR. All I knew was that I had a fondness for particular sounds and voices. When people spoke to me kindly and softly, it eased some of the symptoms that came with my anxiety disorder. Certain accents and tones made my body feel tingly and calm.

Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JUNE”

May 25, 2016

Writing English as a Polyglot

by Hong-My Basrai

When we finally left communist Vietnam, my father said: “Never look back.” His words had a finality to them. They stuck in my twenty-two-year-old mind, and so I began my never looking back process, starting with learning to communicate predominantly in English.

The acquisition and manipulation of languages were second nature to me. I had been doing it all my life—soaking up Vietnamese in the cradle, French in kindergarten, Chinese from classmates, English to survive, and Gujarati because I had married into a Gujarati Indian family.

Basic English had come to me easily enough. It was just a small step from uttering my first “thank you” to verbal fluency, then progressing fast from ESL writing class to English 1A composition. What was harder was learning to elevate my writing proficiency to a level suitable for a public audience. Since I had picked up English on the go, learning it by imitation, like a baby, with most words borrowed from my prior knowledge of French, I had to pay extra attention to spelling of similar words, particularly homophones like address and adresse, envelope and enveloppe, May and mai; false cognates, words that have similar spelling but different meanings, like infant and enfant, anniversary and anniversaire, song and son; and words of Latin and Greek roots like destroy and détruire, or abnormal and anormal, etc. Continue reading “Writing English as a Polyglot”