I have a confession to make: I am in love with my budget. Yes, my budget. Those five letters that usually spell constriction, that have always sounded like a stern math teacher glaring over her glasses growling “No,” have become an exciting almost magical portal to possibility and peace of mind.
As a freelance writer, budgets always scared me. They took the long view: what do you make in a year and what do you spend? Because I didn’t know the answer to the first question, I was afraid to look at the second.
Then a poet friend announced that she had eliminated $10,000 of debt with a program called YNAB (You Need a Budget). Interest piqued, I jumped in. More than a budgeting program, it was a philosophy. It was also an educational system & community. The key questions were how much money I had now and what were my plans for it. Forecasting was discouraged (what if that check never comes?). The goal was to stay current, clear-eyed, and flexible because life happens. My first goal was total awareness…which suddenly felt doable and kind. I started to understand my finances, what they could and could not do. I now only budget money that is actually in my account. I give every dollar a job and only one job (because, unlike me, my money can’t moonlight). The sheer sobriety of this approach washes over my financial fires like spring water. I can’t wait to allocate my paycheck each month, and I breathe easy when I pay bills because I know the money is waiting.
So, inspired by the elegance of clear numbers, I turned the budgeting lens onto my overwhelming schedule. I opened a new file and named it “TimeNab.” Every day, I deposited $24 and, for a few weeks, tracked where I “spent” it. Total awareness struck again. With travel and prep, my four-hour teaching assignment ate up eight full hours of my workday. Sleep took another eight, which left the remaining eight to cook, clean, write, exercise, socialize, watch TV, shop, and attend medical appointments, not to mention driving there. I was not lazy! I was trying to pack three weeks of clothing into an overnight bag; it just didn’t fit.
Sometimes time is money…although what it’s worth will vary by who is paying me. Sometimes money can buy time, like paying someone else to do something I hate or can’t do. The value in both is in the life they allow me.
As writers, we negotiate time to write, to edit, to research, and submit. And while writing is one of the least expensive arts, we still pay for supplies, submission fees, and workshops. Having both as realistic budget categories puts us in the driver’s seat.
This month’s destination is the 8th Annual WWS Submission Drive, so it’s time to check my budget. When will I polish my pieces? When will I research target markets? How much can I spend on submission fees while respecting my other goals? Those questions are like gas in my tank: they tell me how far I can go. But they do more than that. Each decision I make with time and money is a decision about where I want to go, where I plan to go. It’s like casting a spell to make it happen. Who could not love that?
Deborah Edler Brown was born in Brazil and raised in Pittsburgh. Her poem “Cubism” won Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Prize, her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart, and she was 1998 Head-to-Head Haiku Slam Champion. She lives in LA, where she teaches reading to adults and dances daily.
In 2021, I was admitted to workshops and received fellowships with Tin House, Macondo, VONA, and the Authentic Voices program via the National Women’s Book Association, my poems and essays were accepted for publication in various venues, and I completed the first full draft of my creative nonfiction manuscript. I somehow did this while surviving a pandemic, working from home with no childcare, and being a single parent/teacher/everything to a fifth grader who was distance learning. And as we shift to a “new normal” this fall, I am still exhausted. There is still so much that is unsaid and unfelt. And yet, I remain hopeful that many of us will retain our virtual communities of care, including our writing communities. That is the way that I survived.
When the world panicked in March 2020, I had nowhere to go but online. I joined Women Who Submit and began attending the weekly Saturday meetings. At first, I doubted whether I truly belonged there because I had internalized the belief that I had to “prove” myself as a writer with external accomplishments, such as publications or awards. But I slowly learned to challenge my mindset. At WWS, rejection letters became “motivation letters” and we applauded each other for writing and for not writing, for trying and for not trying, for hitting “submit” or for not hitting submit. And then we did it all over again. I learned that everything matters, no matter how small, and it opened up something new in me. I had something to say. I filled multiple journals. I started scribbling poems on the backs of receipts again. I began to remember my childhood dream of being a published author. What if?
Asking “what if” led me to have a relationship with my writing, which is to say that I began to have more of a relationship with myself. The page is where I found the fullness of myself. And I claimed myself as a writer while the world was on fire. It felt both marvelous and terrifying. Did I really have the luxury or the audacity or the confidence to be a writer? Yes and yes and yes. I am a writer simply because I say I am.
And yet, no one ever does anything alone. Not even writers. Especially writers. When I drafted my first statements for fellowship applications, the words felt clunky and odd. I didn’t know what I was doing. I feared that I would never be selected for the fellowship. I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. But I asked for help anyway because support will always move us closer to our goals. And once I finally crafted one fellowship application that seemed strong, it was easier to tailor it and apply to more workshops and fellowships. At the same time, life happens, and I didn’t worry much if a deadline for a certain opportunity passed. I did what I could at the time and I am okay with it because there will always be more chances.
The first fellowship that I completed was the Authentic Voices program with the National Women’s Book Association (NWBA). Directed by the NWBA President, Natalie Obando, my cohort and I met over the course of four months with her and other guests, including a six-weel writing workshop with the wonderful writer Mireya Vela. As someone without an MFA, I am still learning about so much, and the fellowship taught me about the business of publishing, the art of writing and revising, querying, and other concrete tools that will help me as an emerging writer. It also felt almost surreal to be in a BIPOC-only space where we could understand each other without explaining or censoring ourselves or our writing. And while institutional racism and other forms of inequities remain embedded in traditional publishing, programs like Authentic Voices make me hopeful that more change is coming.
The next workshop was the Tin House summer workshop. At the final happy hour meeting, a fellow participant said that it felt like an entire semester compressed into one week, and I wholeheartedly agree. I was pleasantly surprised that most of the Tin House faculty were BIPOC and they were privileged in the programming for the talks and lectures. However, I did not anticipate how grueling the schedule would be. Each day had over 12 hours of live programming. While all the talks and lectures were recorded, I made arrangements with my job to attend Tin House and so I wanted to use all the time that I could that week. I had meetings with a literary agent and editor, both women of color, who were honest about institutional racism in the publishing industry but encouraging. For the workshop portion, I was both inspired and a bit intimidated to work with the incredible Jaquira Diaz. My cohort and I talked with her about ghosts, speculative nonfiction, and what it means to write into the complexities of our lives. More than anything, Jaquira taught me that anything is possible, including our dreams.
My final workshop was the Macondo writers workshop. While the Macondo schedule was not as time-intensive as Tin House, it also felt rigorous. I was delighted to work with Daisy Hernandez who challenged us to consider space and place in our writing. My cohort and I wrote about mothering, beds, science, childhood homes, hopefulness, and helplessness. I also read a short excerpt of a personal essay during the Macondo open mic which felt like an accomplishment to me because I have not participated in many readings. And yet, at Macondo, the new Macondistas were welcomed with open arms and I felt a sense of belonging. Of all my fellowships so far, Macondo feels the most sentimental to me because I worked with the Chicana feminist writer and Macondista, Carla Trujillo, as an undergraduate. And Macondo’s founder, Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, was the first book that I ever read that was written by a Chicana. With Macondo, I felt more certain than ever that I am not simply a fan of writers, but I am a writer too.
Even a year ago, I never would have dreamed of having any of these experiences, but here I am. For my fellow emerging writers, don’t give up and remember these phrases.
No means next. I learned this phrase from my friend, Yvette Martinez-Vu, who uses this phrase to help motivate her students. When I submitted to a Tin House workshop for the first time, my application was declined. But when the next round opened up, I applied again and was accepted. No means next, not never. If a venue says no, apply again or somewhere else. Don’t stop.
Your pace is the right pace. What if you did not write today, this week, this month, this year? Or perhaps even many years? It is okay. Whether or not you put pen to paper, you are still a writer, no matter what. Release the guilt and stress. The page will always welcome you back when it’s the right time for you and only you. Your pace is yours.
Ask for help. This one still feels difficult for me even today because asking for help can sometimes mean exposing your vulnerabilities and insecurities. And yet, building relationships with others in the writing community means that there are always friendly folks who are willing to help you with feedback, support, or advice. It is okay to ask for help. In fact, it is necessary. And then the best part is that we can pay it forward by helping the ones coming up after us.
Don’t compare and despair. It is normal to feel jealous, doubtful, or insecure when we compare ourselves to other writers who seem to have all the dream publications, awards, fellowships, book deals, etc. Feel those feelings and then let them go. There’s more than enough for us all and what’s meant for you will not pass you up. And remember, no one else’s success will ever diminish the inherent value of your work.
Lay a brick a day. I saw this phrase in a meme and I immediately loved it. The little things do add up. Even if you write just one sentence a day, it matters.
The magic is in the mess. Marvel in the mess and then marvel some more because that’s where the magic happens. Stay with the discomfort and the doubts. The right words will come, I promise.
Remember, your writing is worthy. But, even more important than that, you yourself are worthy.
With love,
Cecilia Caballero
Cecilia Caballero is an Afro-Chicana single mother, poet, creative nonfiction writer, teaching artist, speaker, and educator based in Los Angeles. Cecilia is a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work collective and she is co-editor of the book The Chicana Motherwork Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución (University of Arizona Press 2019). As a teaching artist, Cecilia designs and facilitates poetry workshops for BIPOC folks to cultivate more spaces of healing and social justice. She has been invited to give workshops and talks at numerous institutions and organizations such as UCLA, UC Berkeley, San Diego State University, East Los Angeles College, the University of Arizona, Parenting for Liberation, and more. Cecilia’s prose and poetry is published or forthcoming in Dryland Magazine, Star*Line Magazine, The Nasiona, Raising Mothers, The Acentos Review, Chicana/Latina Studies, Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology, and more. Find her on Twitter @la_sangre_llama
It’s the end of August and the heat is kicking in here in Southern California, with more hot weather through at least September, if not longer. But the heat isn’t slowing down our WWS members, who continue to send out their fabulous work and publish it.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during August 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate our members who published in August!
In years past, we’d called this annual event the “Submission Blitz,” reappropriating a destructive term in pursuit of gender parity and wider representation of marginalized voices in literary publishing. But as the last 20 years has brought unbearable violence punctuated by recent catastrophic times, we at WWS thought it was time for a new direction and outlook.
SUBMIT 1 is the one day out of the year WWS encourages women and nonbinary writers across the globe to send out at least one of their top pieces to one top tier journal as one community. This is no longer about bombarding editors’ desks and slush piles.
SUBMIT 1 is an act of solidarity and faith in our own voices and communities.
WWS hosts quarterly workshops and panels to help demystify the submission process and provide professional development to the writers. One of my personal favorites was “Strategies for Submitting to Contest” in 2016 with Tammy Delatorre, winner of the 2015 Slippery Elm Prose Prize and 2015 Peyton Prize.
On that day she advised us to send our best work, the pieces we loved, the ones we had to see in the world, our absolute favorites. This was an aha moment for me.
If I want an editor to love my work and champion it in their pages, I have to love it first. If I want to turn the heads of the readers at the top journals, the work I send should be top shelf quality.
This year, in our 8th installment of this literary submission drive, I invite you choose one piece of writing, your best and most beloved piece, and do the work of sending it to at least one top journal (Or five!). And when it’s rejected (because chances are it will be), send it out again, and then again, offering as many editors as possible the privilege of reading your work, until you finally find it the right home.
This isn’t an attack. This is an act of love.
How to Participate:
1. Before September 18th, study THIS LIST of “Top Ranked Journals of 2021” with current open calls to find a good fit for your work. Links to guidelines are included.
2. On September 18th, submit one of your best pieces of writing to at least one tier one magazine from where ever you are in the world at any time of day.
3. Notify us on Facebook, Twitter, or IG. Be sure to tag us @womenwhosubmit, so we can celebrate you with lots of claps, cheers, and funny gifs.
4. Hang with us on IG Live at @WomenWhoSubmit from 7am to midnight for a full day special guests, support, and resources. Here is where you can ask WWS members for tips on submitting, get encouragement, or receive LIVE claps for when you hit send.
5. After submitting, fill out THIS FORM to help us track how many submissions were sent out, which will help us in our continued mission towards gender parity and wider representation of marginalized voices in literary publishing.
Submission Drive Origins:
After the first VIDA Count was published in 2009 illustrating the dearth of women’s voices in tier one publications, members of VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, began asking the editors of these journals why they thought the numbers were unbalanced. The most common answer was women don’t submit as often as men. In response, Women Who Submit and the monthly submission party was created in 2011 to support women and nonbinary writers in submitting their work for publication in order to raise the number of such voices coming across editors’ desks.
Our annual submission drive is a call to writers to submit their well-crafted and cared for work en masse to tier-one literary journals that historically have shown gender disparities in their publications. It is a call to action. Our first WWS submission drive was in September 2014 at Hermosillo Bar in Highland Park, CA.
Many years ago, a friend of mine gifted me a kit advertised as a spiritual tool for affirmation. It’s a cute concept: write a wish on a piece of fine paper, roll the paper like a funnel, place it on a platform, and lit on fire. The paper quickly burns and lifts your wish into the air in a magical moment that lasts seconds. It’s cute.
Only I had stopped placing my intentions in the universe as wishes. Instead, I plan and design my life based on well informed decisions, considering risks and unexpected circumstances. The process is not always pretty and most of the time far from smooth.
Bookkeeping concept aside, budgeting is a way to keep an eye on where the expectations reside while we watch the colors of the balance sheet go from black to crimson red. Budgeting is mental health into the future.
Sunset near Edwards, CO 7/3/21
Budgeting a small investment for retirement for the untrained entrepreneur requires a steady hand and an incredible amount of trust in the Self. Those monetary decisions should allow for the unexpected changes and turbulences pass through our lives without breaking us, even as they shake us.
Only five months into the pandemic, I took a risk greater than anything I had tried before and bought a house. Then the budge burnt with a puff in the air, like that spiritual tool for affirmation my friend gifted me.
After eight months waiting for a building permit, prices of lumber went up 400%. Plumbing material tailed behind. Inspectors found fault and the project was delayed even more. I am now into the one-year mark of building a tiny ADU unit and still no end in sight. At times, I wondered if there was any joy left. I felt depleted.
Then the past came back to threaten my sense of security. I reacted with more work and a flood of tears.
But I didn’t budget my emotions.
I allowed myself to feel all the anxiety, fear, abandonment, and anger. I considered these negative emotions as valid as joy and laughter and love, and they were necessary to remind me that being human requires authentic feelings, that my face doesn’t have to be IG ready every day. The reality is I wouldn’t have gone through it without friends holding me. They listened with patience on the phone when the sky turned dark. I am grateful they checked on me and offered advice, “Do not let anybody get into your head. Do not engage.”
With the help of those friends, and a good reserve of joy stored deep inside me I have hiked through this stretch.
What we can do to budget our emotions is to experience joy in its fullest whenever it steps into view because joy’s duration is unpredictable. Fill ourselves with its invigorating energy. Take the risk to love again. Get in touch with our senses. Jump into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean and let that childish moment fuel the next heavy days. And write because the role of poetry is to survive and find beauty even in despair.
I don’t complain about my life because I am convinced I have done the right thing. Despite the budget being way into the red palette, I am content in my achievements so far. During all this time, I have lived intensely and with purpose. I am satisfied and impressed of my own ability to reinvent myself even when somebody threatened my sense of security.
All my decisions have been well informed. My personal life is on hold but not over. It’s compartmentalized into being a word artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. All these parts of me come together to give myself what I didn’t give me before: a chance to design my own joy and future.
Both look spectacular from here, rough as the uphill road might be.
Lisbeth Coiman is an author, poet, educator, cultural worker, and rezandera born in Venezuela. Coiman’s wanderlust spirit landed her to three countries—from her birthplace to Canada, and finally the USA, where she self-published her first book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017). Her poetry and personal essays are featured in the online publications: La Bloga, EntropyAcentos Review, Lady/Liberty/Lit, Nailed, Hip Mama Magazine, Rabid Oaks, Cultural Weekly, and Resonancias Literarias. In print media Spectrum v.16, The Altadena Literary Review, and Accolades: A Women Who Submit Anthology. An avid hiker, and teacher of English as a Second Language, Coiman lives in Los Angeles, CA.
It’s hard to believe we’ve made it past the midway point of 2021, but here we are, close to turning the corner into Fall.
Meanwhile, our determined members have continued to send their beautiful, provocative, insightful work into the world and publish it. This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during July 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate our members who published in July!
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 been a musician all my adult life. Songwriter, rhythm guitarist, and front woman, I have toured with metal bands and recorded blues, rock, hard rock, and progressive and symphonic metal projects. And I’ve spent a good portion of my career tripping on, stepping over, and climbing atop boxes.
You may ask, “why not just get rid of them?,” but how could I, when they aren’t mine, they just simply- ARE. The boxes of genre, look, age, and gender, that litter the already loaded minefield of rock and roll.
When I started out in the LA scene, I was already too old, and that caused me to focus twice as hard on my appearance, as a way to “apologize” for my decrepit late-20’s condition. I got unsolicited advice from the wrong people, music managers, usually older, white men, who all had opinions on what I “needed” to do to get my songs out: Lose weight, sing pop, be blond, sing country, look more “polished,” change my name, etc., etc.
After a few years of despair and anorexia, I realized that all of them had their own agendas, and that my best shot lay in being true to myself.
That meant writing and singing in multiple genres, as my muse dictated, cultivating a look that truly felt like me, even if it was polarizing, and understanding that I was most likely cutting myself off from mainstream commercial success and being at peace with that.
To some degree, that has been a lonely pursuit. I never neatly fit anywhere, so I feel a bit like an artistic pilgrim, joining one group of nomads after another on their journeys and sharing their campfires for a few evenings of stories and camaraderie, only to reach that place in the dust where our paths diverge and once again, waving farewell – see you on down the road.
Why have I chosen this?
I could have picked a box, climbed in, and nested in it, but instead, I navigated around the edges of each. Perhaps it’s because, subconsciously, I knew that my destination lie beyond them.
Along the way, I have learned so much. I’ve spent time in the singer-songwriter community, the blues world, the hard rock and metal scenes. I’ve dabbled in musical theater and burlesque. And I’ve absorbed so much beauty from the people who lived there, understood so much more about humanity through the sound of their songs and stories. And I’ve woven that knowledge into my webs, my lyrics and poems that strive to grasp what this life holds and what it means.
For me, it has taken years to become an artist with something genuinely important to say. That’s been my calling. You see, I believe everyone has something unique to offer, something that only they can contribute to the human tapestry. My part simply took time to ripen.
Cher tells a story about how a man approached her and said, “Don’t you think you’re too old to be running around onstage, singing rock and roll?” To which she replied, “I don’t know, ask Mick.”
This year, at 45 years old, I saw myself on the cover of a music and modeling magazine for the first time. Confident, bold, and colorful, the woman I saw was the artist that took 20 years to build, and THAT story, THAT reality, is what I bring to the world.
There is no “too late,” there is no ONE WAY to do anything. In fact, when each of us creates their own way, we show the next generation what is possible, we give them wings and dreams and hope… hope that we can all grab a box and clear that path. For there is much ground to cover.
VK Lynne is a writer and musician from Los Angeles. She is a 2016 recipient of the Jentel Foundation Artist Residency Program Award for writing. She penned the award-winning web series “Trading on 15,” and she has authored the period novella “Even Solomon,” along with two poetry volumes, “Crisis” and “Revelation,” which make up the audiobook “The Release and Reclamation of Victoria Kerygma.“
Her writing has been published in Image Curve, The Elephant Journal, GEM Magazine, and Guitar Girls Magazine.
We’re headed into the sweltering heat of summer, which sometimes can wilt the resolve to do anything. Not our members. They’re still sending out their work and getting it published in wonderful outlets.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during June 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Congratulations to our members who published in June!
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/.
Deborah Edler Brown was born in Brazil and raised in Pittsburgh. Her poem “Cubism” won Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Prize, her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart, and she was 1998 Head-to-Head Haiku Slam Champion. She lives in LA, where she teaches reading to adults and dances daily.
