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
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!
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.
As 2020 draws to a close–and never have I wanted more to see a year end–I am yet again awed by the publication prowess of our members, who have had work appear in numerous venues across all genres. Congratulations to the following WWS members who published work during the month of November!
After nine years of service to our community as Cofounder, Chapters Director, consultant, and mentor, Ashaki M. Jackson will be leaving her official leadership roles within Women Who Submit to focus on other endeavors.
A Note from Ashaki
I remember writing late nights in Santa Monica. Alyss and I were a decade younger and buoyed by The Writers Junction’s bottomless coffee and tea. It was a short era where poems and creative paths came easy. Women Who Submit was one of those paths that became an endless road of opportunity, artistic generation, friendship, and change. I’ve appreciated the long walk with this community and now look forward to following other paths with greater intention. It gives me great pleasure to have walked beside many inspired artists in Women Who Submit, and I hope your respective journeys are rich and productive. Safe travels to us all!
Ashaki leading a new member orientation at Art Share.
A leadership meeting at Blu Elephant Cafe.
AWP Los Angeles in 2015
Ashaki leading a new member orientation at the Exposition Library
A leadership meeting at Semi-Tropic.
In the summer of 2011, Ashaki invited me to partner with her and Alyss Dixson to establish what Alyss called, a submission party. I hosted our very first submission party at my parents’ house where I served homemade quiche. Ashaki brought a portable office of supplies and journals for our first lending library. So much of what has become standard within WWS is because of Ashaki’s vision and dedication.
It was Ashaki’s insistence to diminish any and all financial barriers to becoming a member of our community that established WWS as an organization that offers free workshops and support all year round. And thanks to her leadership as Chapters Director, a No Fee standard now exists with WWS communities across the continent.
We thank her for enriching our commitment to women and non-binary writers and the fight for gender parity and representation in literary publishing.
We honor Ashaki and her vision by renaming our submission fee regrant, The Ashaki M. Jackson No Barriers Grant. We congratulate her on moving forward into new and exciting path!
About the Grant
The Ashaki M. Jackson No Barriers Grant offers funding to our members on a quarterly basis to help offset submission fee costs. While much of the literary landscape supports “pay to play” models, Women Who Submit believes minimizing barriers, such as submission fees and other financial hardships, is central to the pursuit of gender parity and representation in literary publishing.
Funds are awarded in conjunction with our quarterly public workshops. Members are welcomed to request between $20-$100. During Covid, these fees may go towards writer relief. This grant is open to members of the Los Angeles headquarters. To become a member you can join a “New Member Orientation” on the second Saturday of February, May, August, or November.
The first official recipient of the Ashaki M. Jackson No Barriers Grant is Alix Pham. Co-lead of the West Los Angeles Chapter with Diana Love, Alix will be using her grant to submit poetry to chapbook contests.
To make a donation to this grant as well as our 2021 free workshop series, please go HERE. Your support makes our mission possible.
In Günter Grass’ Post WWII German novel, The Tin Drum, the chapter “The Onion Cellar” reveals the emotional struggle of an entire country grappling with the guilt of their most recent history. I imagine the cellar to be no larger than a dive bar with stairs leading to a dungeon-like space with round tables, where post-war Germans went daily to drink, peel onions, and cry. In my reading, the onion represents the layers of guilt the Germans had to work through to understand their role in the Holocaust even though in the bar they continue to see themselves as regular citizens, devout Christians who did not really know about the crimes committed by the Nazis.
It took several generations after WWII, for Germans to fully comprehend the slow erosion of democracy: the creation of paramilitary squads to intimidate any budding dissent among the general population; the effort to keep neighbors against neighbors creating divisions instead of dialogue; the role of propaganda to brainwash the population; the political maneuvers to perpetuate power in the hands of the Nazi party; the handout of favors, lavish parties, and gifts to collaborators and sympathizers; lucrative contracts for the industry favoring for the party. Some eventually understood that they had sold their soul to the devil to survive.
Post-war German art is heavy with guilt.
Venezuelans wrestle with guilt too. I recognized it when a friend told me, almost in a confessional tone that he regretted voting for Chavez, for believing in him. “He threw sand in my eyes,” my friend said.
The die-hard Chavistas who sworn to defend Chavez with their lives held onto their somehow privileged political positions until oil money ran out, and they, too, began to question the moral fabric of the “revolution.” By then it was too late to save the country, so they jumped ship and emigrated. The guilt and finger pointing runs rampant in the Venezuelan diaspora.
Like Post WWII Germans, and Venezuelans today, Americans will have to reckon with current history and our role in it.
We are witnessing a “regime-in-the-making.” A quick look at the history of any totalitarian regime is enough to find all the signs of a democracy in demise. Every absurdity has been carefully planned to make the followers laugh, the opposition cringe, and keep the megalomaniac omnipresent in the media. I dare to say, the goal is to produce enough political unrest to the point of chaos to justify the cancelation or postponement of elections in November.
The great majority of people in this country believe themselves good citizens, church going, good neighbors, hard-working individuals. Some who would have died with a knife in their throats for Sanders, but not for their nation. Some stopped believing in the system; others allowed robots to drive the conversation on social media; the great majority just joked about the demagogue’s enlarged ego. Never forget the devout Christians, bless their hearts, who voted against the possibility of an abortion, but didn’t care much about the death of democracy. Like Venezuelans twenty years ago, some thought this will never fly. And yet it did.
The worst are those who continued to give a demagogue starving for attention a platform on mass media because people were watching and numbers were more relevant than the future of the country.
Four years later, we are now at this point. We are rightfully worried and horrified at the outrageous efforts by the White House to undermine democratic process, repeatedly attempting to toss out votes . The peak of this anti-democracy campaign recorded on video when a group of domestic terrorist try to derail the campaign bus of his opponent.
The nation is swinging in the pendulum of cold war era ideologies, accusing each other of communist and imperialist while funeral homes run out of space for the bodies waiting for burial.
Have we sold our soul to the devil to keep our slice of privilege intact? As my friend Angela Franklin points out, “whiteness will not protect you.”
This is happening on our watch whether we were always aware or not. The history books are going to say 330 million Americans let this happen. Twenty years down the road, when the Canadians need to invade the USA to free us from a brutal dictator, we will all sit in dive bars called the Onion Cellar to peel our eight layers of guilt, and cry.
Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Spectrum, Cultural Weekly, Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.
Another round of incredible publications by our membership. Each month when I put together this post, I’m awed by the determination, talent, and perseverance of every one of us who gets our words out into the world. So congratulations to the following WWS members who published work during the month of October!
Three months have passed since I’ve written here, and this week the weather in LA turned cool. Back in March, I wore jeans and hoodies to teach my classes from the kitchen table, and this week I pulled on sweaters and socks and continued teaching from the kitchen table.
Fall sky in Los Angeles.
We are living through a pandemic. An election looms. The humidity has dropped tempting spark and smoke.
Despair rests around the edges. In the dregs of my coffee. In the nightmares that wake me. In the cough I hope is just a tickle in my throat and nothing more sinister.
I revisited an essay tonight as I watched the World Series with one eye, too afraid to hope for a Dodger victory. In the final essay of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, “On Become an American Writer,” Alexander Chee discusses many ideas, but one is how we must continue to create when writing feels pointless. He considers what to say to his writing students when overwhelmed with despair; when they wonder, “What’s the point?”
Over the past few months, I’ve often asked myself this same question. As I stare into digital rectangles, some fluid with life, others dark and revealing just names, I’m not sure what to say to my students as we hurl across our syllabus toward a month of novel-writing. I’m not sure what to say to myself, or to other writers when we meet to discuss our work. And still, I believe in telling stories, and I believe in the stories within each of us.
Chee says, “I turned my back on the idea that teaching writing means only teaching how to make sentences or stories. I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country.”
As the women and non-binary writers of Women Who Submit stare down this unfathomable stretch of time, I invite us to believe Chee when he reminds us that writing matters. “[I]t’s the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.”
Are you writing? Is it a poem, a phrase, a string of words waking you up at night? Are you staying up late or setting the alarm early? Do you log into a Zoom or steal a few moments while the kids watch tv? What are you writing?
Keep breathing into your work. Keep pushing your best work into the world. Otherwise, what’s the point?
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.
Join us Saturday, November 14th at 10am for our final workshop of 2020, “How To Boost Your Literary Citizenry By Writing and Placing Book Reviews” with Melissa Chadburn. Chadburn has placed book reviews in such prestigious publications as The LA Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, and the New York Review of Books. Help in our mission for gender parity in publishing by learning how to write and place book reviews and bring visibility to historically marginalized voices.
Women Who Submit is a supportive community for women and non-binary writers submitting work for publication. To become a member, you can register and participate in this month’s new member orientation. EDIT: NEW MEMBER REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED DUE TO BEING OVER CAPACITY. * There is no fee to join.
The Schedule for the Day:
10am-11am – “How To Boost Your Literary Citizenry By Writing and Placing Book Reviews” with Melissa Chadburn and hosted by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
11am-12pm – New Member Orientation with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
11am-12pm – Returning Members Checkin with TBD
12pm-1pm – WWS Submission Party
This workshop is over Zoom. Those admitted to the orientation will receive the Zoom link through email a week before. To participate, you’ll need a laptop or desktop computer, personal research on magazines, journals, and open calls, and crafted poems/essay/short story ready to submit.
* Orientation is limited to 20 participants and preference will be given to LA writers, BIPOC writers, LGBTQ writers, and writers who’ve tried to attend a previous orientation.
WWS is a grass-roots, volunteer organization. Though online workshops have made us more accessible to writers outside of Los Angeles, we do not have the funding or support to serve people beyond the LA area.
But don’t worry! We have chapters all across the country including three chapters in the greater Los Angeles area in Long Beach, West Los Angeles, and Pasadena. If you do not make it into our November orientation, you can connect with a chapter lead near you. And if you don’t have a chapter in your area, we can help you get one started!
Melissa Chadburn’s work has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYRB, Longreads, and dozens other places. Her essay on food insecurity was selected for Best American Food Writing 2019. She is the recipient of the Mildred Fox Hanson Award for Women in Creative Writing. She is an Atul Gawande mentee with the Solutions Journalism Network. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. She is a PhD candidate at USC’s Creative Writing Program. She loves your whole outfit right now.
Writing Alone Together is a community of writers who share the need of time dedicated exclusively to their craft. We are writers needing accountability in the long hours of a pandemic, when days melt into each other like a plastic spoon left unattended sticking to the metal edges of a hot grill.
By the end of March 2020, I couldn’t tell night from day anymore, the constant rain in those early days of the lockdown, and the grey sky, thick like a sun-blocking curtain, added despair to the two weeks of silence and solitude inside my apartment in Inglewood.
As usual, I reached for structure, the backbone of my sanity, blocking time for exercise, nourishment, chores, and work. But the lack of accountability to meet my writing goals put in jeopardy my ambitious plan to complete a bilingual collection of poetry before summer. Without the pressure of a concrete deadline, or the constraints of time spent on traffic and work, I ran the risk of retreating into my mind and surrendering to the overwhelming weight of the pandemic anxiety.
As a desperate selfish act of reconnecting with people who share my interests, I threw the idea of meeting daily for three hours in the morning in the abstraction of Zoom meetings to write in silence with fellow women writers. And just like that a community was born: Writing Alone Together (WAT). Initially four women joined me. WAT has now 40 members, and keeps growing slowly, with several small independent groups stemming from the idea.
A simple concept, WAT offers a safe cyberspace, structure, and a maximum of 15 minutes to chat before we silence our mics and write our souls out.
WAT is dependent of Women Who Submit, and accepts only WWS members who are committed to write. We meet now twice daily from 10 to 12 pm and from 4 to 6 p.m. That’s four hours of uninterrupted writing for women who are used to steal time from domestic and professional duties. We have already learned from the constrains of life outside cyberspace to optimize time, and therefore, have become incredibly productive with these extra hours of work. Regular attendees have shared their success stories and make us all proud of what we can collectively achieve when we join forces.
WAT is building a community of women and non-binary writers exposed to the overwhelming conditions of 2020. We support and hold space for each other. We sometimes shed tears and try to reassure those who seem to be given in to the weight of our current common circumstances. And we write, silently in 2 hour segments, daily from Monday to Friday.
The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic with its potential of killing so many of us, together with racial tensions stemming for the contemporary lynching of people of color, protests, the threat of our country turning to totalitarianism, the effects of global warming destroying our landscape, homelessness, unemployment, all post a high risk to our physical and mental health, to democracy and way of life. But 2020 has also been a year of relearning life, learning to live, study, teach, communicate, and perform in cyberspace. Thus, we survive.
This is not the time to judge ourselves for selfish attempts of survival. Not all selfish acts are altruistic, but true altruism is in itself a selfish act, especially when in doing so, we reach for the nearest hand to survive with us. Selfishness knows no moral. It only turns bad if it causes the destruction of others. It turns good when a selfish act benefits those around us. Today, I am proud of the community created from my desperate attempt to survive writing during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020.
Thank you to those who co-host when I cannot open the room: Colette Sartor, Cybele Garcia Cohel, Thea Pueschel, Deborah Elder Brown, Sakae Manning, and of course to the 40 other female writers who have come regularly or occasionally to join us in our adventure. Thank you to all who continue to hold each other in this cyber space.
Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.
