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Breathe and Push: “Let’s Wait Awhile”

by Noriko Nakada

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.”

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

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.

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Writing On a Budget: When Writing is Your Business

By Cybele Garcia Kohel

We writers are a lonely crew. Well, at least that is how we are depicted. And this is true much of the time, when we are at work. We seek time alone in bits and stretches to get our work done. Writers often fail to see ourselves as part of a larger picture, however: The Creative Economy. We are part of a larger engine which moves sums of money, large and small, around our communities. I can predict what you are thinking. I don’t get paid to do my writing… yet. I understand. I am the same. I don’t get paid to do my creative writing. But I do get paid to write grants. I consider that to be creative work, but it isn’t my personal creative work. And, I am lucky and grateful to get so much support from Women Who Submit for my creative writing work.

Women and non-binary writers are constantly doing the work of mothering writing–nurturing it–giving feedback, writing reviews, editing for our friends and small organizations that we help to survive. It’s not monetized, these bits of work. None of it. But it is still our Business (yes capital B) and we should be strategic about it. This isn’t a plea to get you to stop your unpaid work. Besides, there are other types of compensation. The support we give to community-centered organizations ensures that marginalized people and voices are heard. That compensation is satisfactory to me a lot of the time. This column is really an encouragement to recognize we are part of a bigger picture, a business sector, and as a business people we should be watching trends, downshifts, upshifts, etc., so we can be ready when opportunity comes knocking.

So how do we do that? In California we are lucky to have something called The Otis Report for the Creative Economy . The Otis Report is an idea hatched by administrators at Otis College for Art and Design to map the creative economy of Southern California, and set out to prove American’s for the Arts adage: Arts Means Business. The idea behind the report started as an argument for the “why” behind Arts Education, and, the why “having a vibrant arts sector” is important in every community. Because arts jobs are viable, even critical, to thriving communities. The Otis Report has been around since 2007 and has blossomed into an examination of the creative economy across California. And you, writer, are part of it.

Each year The Otis Report comes out in February or March. It is free to attend the presentation, or download the report, or view the synopsis of the report. I encourage you to do so. Writers may have a hard time finding themselves in the report. But we are there. The report is divided into different sectors, and we are in the Entertainment and Digital Media sector. This sector according to The Otis Report, is the largest of the five sectors, weighing in at 57,120 businesses. That includes micro-businesses (you and me) to large newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. It goes on to say that, “establishments with less than 10 employees account for 10% of the industry’s workforce.” Taking a look at this report may help you make writing decisions for the future. We are artists, and of course we should be paid for our work. Sometimes it is a stipend, an honorarium, a royalty. Sometimes the compensation is the community that is built. That’s okay.

But never forget you are an important part of something bigger. See yourself in it. Because if you don’t, who will?

Cybele Garcia Kohel is a Puerto Rican (Borikén Taíno) writer living on unceded Tongva land, called Pasadena, California. She writes poetry, short stories and essays, in a loud voice from the margins. She is a mom and fierce dog lover. You can read her individual poems the Altadena Poetry Review (2017, 2018), New American Legends (2019), Screaming from the Silence Anthology (Vociferous Press, 2020), the Women Who Submit anthology, Accolades (2020), and the Altadena Literary Review (2020). Her latest essay is Acknowledgement: On Race and Land, read it online at Cultural Weekly. https://www.culturalweekly.com/acknowledgement-on-race-and-land/ 

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March Publication Roundup

March has been marked by both tentative hope, with the heartening increase in vaccinations across the country, and by horrific violence, with mass shootings in Orange, California, Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia. The yoyoing of emotion caused by these uncertain, frightening times can make it difficult to write, much less send out work for publication.

Still, our members have kept publishing their incredible writing in outstanding outlets. So let’s celebrate the WWS members who published during the tumultuous month of March.

Continue reading “March Publication Roundup”
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Women Who Submit uplifts and affirms Asian American and Pacific Islander voices

by Women Who Submit Leadership Team
Cover image from the media toolkit for Asian American Day of Action.

Xiaojie Tan
Daoyou Feng
Soon Chung Park
Hyun Jung Grant
Suncha Kim
Yong Ae Yue
Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez
Paul Andre Michels

Rest in power.

Another act of white supremacist misogynist violence has torn a hole in the world.

Again, women who should be living, loving, creating, eating, laughing, hugging their families, working, writing, resting, women who should still be here to live their cherished and beloved lives, are gone.

Again, the institution of policing extends its empathy to a man who acted out of white entitlement.

Again, those in power throw around insulting excuses. “A bad day.” “Sexual temptation.”

Again, a white-centered media tries to gaslight us by hesitating to call the gunmen’s murder of eight people, seven of them women, six of them Asian women, as anything other than white supremacist and misogynist. 

Again, Women Who Submit mourns the lives of the women whose lives were cruelly cut short by a man who viewed them as disposable, a man who was cushioned and encouraged by a system that confirmed those views and abetted his actions.

WWS members are AAPI. We are mothers and grandmothers. We are workers. Immigrants. The children of immigrants. We reject a world where women of color are expected to live in fear of their lives being severed at the hands of a violent white person. We reject surveillance and policing “solutions” that only increase harm done to Black, brown and indigenous communities. These responses only increase the harm done to AAPI women and all women of color already made vulnerable by jobs that demand enormous emotional labor with scarce protection in return: hospitality, personal care, sex work. Our hearts are with the loved ones of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels. We reject their erasure. We affirm their irreplaceable humanity.

We know that no words can bring them back and make the world whole again. We know that this is not the first act of violence towards Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, that this violence is older than the United States, and has increased dramatically over the past year, and that denouncing the pattern of racism, harassment and assault is not enough. Declarations are not enough. They must be paired with action. We encourage all of our readers to take action with us.

We want to amplify the voices of those in our literary community who celebrate AAPI life and resist white supremacy culture. Please join us in showing love and gratitude to these organizations:

Kaya Press

Kundiman

EastWest Players

Asian American Writers’ Workshop

Asian American Literary Review

Arkipelago Books

Bamboo Ridge Press

Hyphen Magazine

Hmong American Writers’ Circle

We believe words can be a balm and a fire. We have deep love and respect for these writers and we hope you will let their words ignite you to demand transformative change:

Sex Work is Care Work by Jean Chen Ho

A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts are Still Breaking by R.O. Kwon

The Atlanta Shooting is Another Reminder that the Police are Not Our Friends by Steph Cha

Sundress Publications Interview with WWS Member Muriel Leung, by Julie Leung

Anti-Asian Violence must be a bigger part of America’s racial discourse, a conversation between Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong

They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist by Jenny Zhang

We encourage everyone to follow and support these organizations that advance justice for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Stop AAPI Hate

Red Canary Song

Asian Americans Advancing Justice

Tsuru for Solidarity

Japanese Americans for Justice

We will continue working for a world that uplifts the dignity and humanity of AAPI women.

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Breathe to Pivot

by Thea Pueschel

I know we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, but I am pulling my mask down, letting everyone see my fine lines. I am here to confess. My heart is beating fast, my breath shallow because what I am going to say breaks the two cardinal rules of my house growing up. Don’t let people know your business. Don’t let people know your struggle. I take a deep breath. I doom scroll, to hide. I know it’s pointless; I breathe to pivot and share.

The pandemic has hit all of us hard. It has peeled back several layers of national delusion reminding us that the only exceptional aspects of America are our crumbling infrastructure, racism and the corporate profit over people ethos.

My story is like others and admitting it fills me with a bit of shame. I am one of the 2.2 million women that fell out of the workforce this past year. Writing this makes it feel more real, and from firsthand experience, I have to say it feels gross. In 2020, I made less money than I did when I was in my mid-teens. The least amount I have ever made as an adult. 

I have/had a wellness practice for over a decade. When the pandemic hit, I canceled my corporate yoga teaching gigs for safety. When the CDC announced in-person sessions were no longer safe, I canceled those too. After a few weeks, and the realization that the pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, I attempted to move my private yoga and hypnotherapy clients online. Only a few were willing, the rest wanted to wait the pandemic out. I had to cancel a meditation teacher training and issue refunds. My income slowly dwindled to near nothing.

Relief filled me when the state of California stated that there would be Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for sole proprietors. The EDD granted me PUA. However, when I received my paperwork, something was amiss; it said that I made zero dollars in 2019, and I would start receiving my payment of zero dollars by a specified date. I spent several months attempting to get through to fix it and called over twelve hundred times just to be subjected to a constant loop of messages moving me from one area to another. I never broke through not even to leave a message and gave up.

Luckily, my overhead and costs of operating a business dissolved too. Unlike many of my friends with small businesses, I wasn’t stuck in a lease or needing to figure out if I could keep employees on. My practice was mobile. I don’t have children and my mortgage payment is low. Even though it has been a struggle, my husband still had a career, and we could tighten our budget and breathe to pivot. I know even though I’ve experienced hardship, I also have privilege. 

Even with fewer responsibilities, I was caught in the maelstrom. The world was out of control, people were dying, businesses shuttered, and work dried up. I applied for essential worker jobs, but my lack of experience in that sector and educational overqualification blocked me from positions. I sat and thought about what I could do. I couldn’t fight the tide so I yield and write. I breathe and pivot.

I had dreamt of writing a novel or creating a collection of short stories, but that was a fantasy filled with false starts and stops. As Paulo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, “People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel they don’t deserve them, or they’ll be unable to achieve them.” For me it was the latter. I wanted to, but I didn’t think I could write that much. Being able to create a substantive body of work seemed outside my reach and capacity. This past year, I leaned into the writing community.

The pandemic taught me humility and how to ask for help. It also taught me I can be a prolific writer. Currently, my historical novel is four chapters away from completion; I have over 100 short stories, fifty poems, and ten personal essays all created within the past twelve months. I also received a contract to write ESL readers in November, of which I have had twenty published. I applied to an MFA program, because if not now, when? It surprises me that my fingers are attached to my hands at this point. 

Though I have generated a large body of work this past year, it was primarily possible because of the literary citizenship of others and opportunities that arose out of crisis. Women Who Submit, my writing buddies, my accountability partners, and my critique circle have all been instrumental in this time. I have applied for scholarships for writing programs, grants and fellowships. I won an award, was paid to write, and received funding. The writing community, especially the members of WWS, have been an invaluable resource with feedback, advice, and moral support. 

 In the words of Maya Angelou, “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” With gratitude, hope, and determination, I have been able to breathe, to pivot fully into my writing practice.

Thea Pueschel is a writer, multi-media artist, and the winner of the TAEM 2020 Flash Fiction Summer Contest. Thea enjoys exploring the dark with light and the light with dark and a firm believer that without the shadow art and literature has less soul. 

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Writing On a Budget: Artists Do Not Work in Isolation

By Lisbeth Coiman

How do you grieve for a homeland that no longer exists? 

Uprising / Alzamiento, my upcoming bilingual collection with Finishing Line Press,  is my answer to that question. It’s a vehicle to process the pain of watching the land of my birth transform into something for which I don’t even have a passport for a safe return. 

As a teacher and poet, I asked myself what words should I write to inform about the tragedy in my homeland. How could I paint a clear picture of the conflict to inspire a shift in perspective in those who oversimplify this humanitarian crisis with memes on social media? 

Original art depicting a bird and butterflies
Apuntes Para Una Pesadilla by Francisco Itriago

The English language has a name for this kind of writing: Poetry for Social Justice. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo was the first to point that out to me: “Detach from the subject to convey the tragedy you are experiencing.” 

In her class, Poetry as Survival, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo taught me to create symbols and to change the point of view in order to separate myself from my pain. Thus, Uprising / Alzamiento began. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo inspired me to transform my emotions into images, to show my working class neighborhood in its splendor so that others could see what was lost.

A year ago this week, I started collaborating with a poet I admire and respect, who lent me his wisdom to weed out the unnecessary language and move my craft  away from ideological dialectics. He also encouraged me to focus on the faces of the Venezuelan crisis to bring to life the images of the struggle on the streets of the once wealthy nation. During the first few months of the pandemic, between March and May 2020, Peter J. Harris and I became conversation partners over long hours on the telephone to polish the English manuscript.

By then, the book included several brief poems by a young Venezuelan artist, Felipe Itriago. When it was ready, I translated each poem into Spanish because I wanted my siblings and childhood neighbors to understand what I wrote for them. Another poet, Mariano Zaro, helped me edit the Spanish version. And so the book was finished and ready to submit. Then the Women Who Submit did what they do so well: showed me the discipline of the submission process.

When I read the acceptance letter sent by Finishing Line Press, I announced my joy to the world in social media and private messages to my family. Francisco Itriago, donated the art for the cover. I am beyond thankful to all those who held my hand all the way through. 

The whole process reminds us that artists do not work in isolation. Uprising / Alzamiento is the product of intense collaboration with artists who believe in my ability to relate emotions into images and for my art to become a vehicle for change. What matters is that my poems inspire others to take action.


Uprising / Alzamiento will be published by Finishing Line Press in early June 2021. I am happy to announce that it is now on pre-sales on their website at Finishing Line Press .

Order today and help me call attention to the faces of the Venezuelan crisis and pay tribute to those who have given their lives to restore democracy to my homeland.

headshot of Lisbeth CoimanLisbeth 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). She dedicated her bilingual poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento, Finishing Line Press( Sept. 2021) to her homeland, Venezuela. An avid hiker, and teacher of English as a Second Language, Coiman lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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How Do We Breathe and Push in 2021?

By Noriko Nakada

The weekend after the inauguration, I woke up to flat Los Angeles light. I heaved a deep sigh into the fog that had settled in, and then urged myself from bed. Month nine of the pandemic meant getting up in the morning required a different sort of motivation. Still, I placed soles on cold floor, brewed some coffee, and settled in to write before the rest of the household was up. There was a new president now and a woman of color as vice president. No threatening tweets had been launched overnight. Still, a different sort of urgency settled in around me, like the gray that clung heavily to the world outside.

flat LA Light: watercolor on paper by Noriko Nakada

In February of 2018, we launched Breathe and Push. In that first column, I described listening to Valarie Kaur’s “Breathe and Push” speech as my family drove through the night from Oregon to Los Angeles. In the midst of so much political trauma, I wept as I stared up at a starless sky.

In that speech, Kaur suggested: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?”

Over the past three years, Women Who Submit has played midwife to the labor of so many women and nonbinary writers. With the support of this community, we have written and published and shared our words. Many of you joined me when I asked you to breathe and push toward a better America.

But after these long, hard years of labor, how do we breathe and push differently in 2021? After taking to the streets, and writing letters, editorials, to push against gun violence, family separation, child abuse, racial violence, and a hostile publishing world, we have continued to feed our creative work. Now, after hunkering down for almost a year to keep our communities safe, the losses from COVID 19 continue to mount, revealing and exacerbating so many of the inequities we’ve pushed against. The world has changed, but much remains the same.

I stared out into the gray light that morning in a country under new leadership, but still in the midst of a global pandemic, and as the fog burned off, I was tempted to step outside, to walk with relief through a world restored to what it was before. But I didn’t urge myself from sleep and will myself to the page just for things to be the same. There is still so much to do, both in the world and with my creative projects.

Let our words set us on a path toward something different because our stories can heal us and heal those around us. From the isolation of what has been nearly a year of quarantining, let’s write the story of our America. Write it and then demand that it to be told.

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian, and Hippocampus. She spends her hours at home with her two kids answering approximately three thousand questions per day.

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Breathe and Push: I Ain’t Mad at 2020

 by S. Pearl Sharp

 “Somebody got to step up and 
testify for blessed lives
just so you remember the 
possible is real . . .”

The public rage against 2020 is so strong, so virulent, that I almost feel like I’m committing a sacrilege to say that in 2020 I had a good year. 

As COVID became hourly breaking news, I recognized that I was safe in so many ways. I was not home schooling, not a family caregiver, not a front-line essential worker. I already work mostly from home and could keep running my business. Financially I was spared the blood pressure raising hours that millions experienced while trying to get unemployment benefits.  

A still life of shoes left outside a door and resting in both sunlight and shade.
“All Here”  S. Pearl Sharp 2020

 “Surreal” is the word I’ve heard most to describe 2020. What the pandemic asked of me was to become useful within my means to do so. That included the pleasure of shopping for a 98-year-old friend and finding books she might find interesting. Once she learned how to use Zoom, we were on a social roll. Sharing that $1200 stimulus check with those who were not going to get any check introduced me to activists organizations I had not been aware of, like a group founded by Latino bartenders here in Los Angeles who support the mostly undocumented back-of-kitchen help, and two groups with showers-on-wheels who roll into different sites each day providing full shower services to houseless individuals. In the presence of such a staggering loss of lives and multiplying crisis I thought it was important, among friends, to skip the complaint and to keep sharing a “We are still standing” message.  

2020 gave us a new Book of Revelations: white Americans on TV shows looking quite amazed as they declared that the pandemic had revealed to them — as if the news was new — the full scope of disparities in health and housing, life and death, between the really rich and the every day poor. Then look at all the corporations, media and business heads who suddenly realized how mono-colored their boards and executive offices are with few or no Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. Now if all these entities who publicly promised to fix their part of the problem actually keep that promise then that alone might make 2020 significant.

Early in the year, I was part of the hospice team of a friend and co-creator who was  making her transition after a long struggle with lung cancer. Yes, watching her die was heart  wrenching, yet it also brought some new artistic friends into my life. For the rest of the year  each phone call, each e-mail announcing the loss of another friend or hero took my breath away.  In between these moments I was inspired by those who dared to say “There’s another way to do this.” For example, as thousands were denied access to their loved ones, even while watching them die, at a hospital in Illinois someone made sense out of the abnormal. They put the son of a dying patient in full protective gear. The son was then able to hold his father’s hand until he passed. Compassion often requires courage.  

I’m a creative, by choice and profession, so I’m thankful that 2020 brought out people’s most magical and useful creative efforts all around the world, with technology allowing us to witness it. From the cellist who fingered the notes using a roll of toilet paper and played perfectly, to the father who built a full graduation stage in his front yard for his daughter to walk across, to the year-end release of Boston Dynamic’s smooth dancing robots, this embrace of creating alternate possibilities in a time of lock down has its own healing affect. 

So, thank-you 2020! Because of you “normal” has gained full permission to become something new and, if we focus on it, the possibility of becoming something better.  

poem excerpt: “A Blessed Life” available on S. Pearl’s poetry w/jazz CD Higher Ground  c.2020 S. Pearl Sharp/ Poets Pay Rent, Too

Headshot of the author, S. Pearl Sharp standing against a colorful mural wearing a bright smile and cloud-gray sweater.

S. Pearl Sharp is a writer, filmmaker, actor, creativity coach, broadcast producer & host, and artivist. Learn about her work at http://spearlsharp.com/ and her YouTube channel asharpshow.