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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.

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Writing on a Budget: Candles & Sage

By Lisbeth Coiman

Happy New Year!

I believe in the power of intentions. When we decide the path we are going to take, the length of the stride, the weight of each step, we commit ourselves to follow that path. So often we get lost in the minutiae of our lives that we tend to step out of the trail even when we have spoken to the universe what we want to do.

During the past years, I have understood that writing down those intentions, in whatever form an artistic or analytic mind can find, sets a visual reminder of where we want to go and how we plan to get there. The more artistically inclined will create vision boards. Others write their goals in terms of projects, with  specific deliverables, time lines, and a break-down of costs. Whatever form it takes, the vision is the starting point of the upcoming year’s journey: growth, value, recognition, promotion, or survival. Meditation is usually necessary to express this vision in a single word and define the path to take. Some writers I know burn candles and sage at this stage of the planning process

Continue reading “Writing on a Budget: Candles & Sage”
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December Publication Roundup

During this ridiculously difficult year, Women Who Submit has offered hope. Our members have supported each other during accountability sessions and publication parties and virtual community readings. We have extended a warm, virtual hand to people when they receive rejections—“motivation letters” as our wonderful member, Hannah Sward, has encouraged us to dub them. And we cheer loud and hard when our members publish their work.

So three cheers for the following WWS members who published across all genres and venues during December, the final month of this long year!

Continue reading “December Publication Roundup”
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Breathe and Push: The Dying Days of 2020

by Noriko Nakada

Sitting here at home with a dying tree as the focal point of our holiday seems an appropriate way to end 2020. In these waning days and long winter nights of December, the year is dying. Los Angeles struggles for breath, symptomatic of a city where too many have refused to make decisions for the common good. Still, even this year holds beauty and light.

As I look back at my notes from the year, I’m filled with so much gratitude for Women Who Submit, for the spaces that emerged in this community across the days and nights of this pandemic.

We launched our first anthology, Accolades, and many of us made our way to AWP just before everything shut down. We held space for weekly check-ins on Saturdays where we danced and wept, shared and listened. We acknowledged accomplishments, set goals, and learned to ask for help.

We closed our eyes in grounding exercises and reflected on the houses of our work with Allison Hedge Coke.

We wrote alone together.

We participated in an all-day conference and a top-tier submission blitz. We supported and buoyed one another. We greeted one another, “Ahoy, girls!” and we published books, chapbooks, essays, stories, poems, and articles. We shared and listened in regular open mic readings. We submitted work in acts of hope and resistance, and we created a network for book reviews.

During a time when it was often difficult to gauge the right things to do, but also a time when the right things to do were obvious, Women Who Submit refused to cancel. We held one another accountable and shared resources. We read and celebrated and lifted up one another’s work because that is the kind of community we have created.

We held space and understood how both presence and absence were forms of grace.

Thank you all for making this community a place where we breathe and push and remind one another to keep going. Where a comment, a mention in the chat, a book recommendation, a call for a submission can become a thread that connects and sustains us through a web stretches across days and miles.

In a few days, I’ll take down this tree. It will be recycled into mulch and returned back to earth and soil. Women Who Submit will check in both before and after the calendar year shifts from 2020 to 2021. Women and non-binary writers across time zones will find ourselves at the hand-written page, or in the glow of our screens. We will write the first words of the new year, and then we will write the next words until we fill a page and then another. We will show up in our new spaces when we can, and they will provide what we need until we find safe ways to lift one another up in person again. Together, we will bury this year and use it to make something new. 

Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches eighth grade English at Emerson 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, Compose, and Hippocampus. She is spending her time in quarantine perfecting sourdough, biscuits, and pie crust. She has two kids and answers approximately three thousand questions a day.