Posts

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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”
Posted on

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”
Posted on

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. 

Posted on

A Farewell to Our Gracious Leader, Ashaki M. Jackson

Women standing in line holding the Accolades anthology in their hands. A WWS is behind them.

Dear writers,

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!

  • A woman presents a talk in front of a group of women seated at tables with laptops.
    Ashaki leading a new member orientation at Art Share.
  • A group of women sitting on couches around a coffee table.
    A leadership meeting at Blu Elephant Cafe.
  • A group of women standing together in a conference booth. WWS banner is hanging in front of them.
    AWP Los Angeles in 2015
  • One woman stands in front of a group of other women gathered around laptops.
    Ashaki leading a new member orientation at the Exposition Library
  • A group of women siting on couches around a coffee table.
    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.

With respect,

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, WWS Director