Posts

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

Posted on

Writing on a Budget: On Our Watch

By Lisbeth Coiman

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.

Posted on

Breathe and Push: Writing Through Despair

By Noriko Nakada

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.

A fall dawn sky with silhouetted with trees.
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?

headshot of racially ambiguous writer Noriko Nakada

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

Final Workshop of 2020

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!

Connect with chapters here.

About our workshop facilitator:

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.

Posted on

Writing on a Budget: Writing Alone Together

by Lisbeth Coiman

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.

Writer Lisbeth Coiman from the shoulders up, standing in front of a flower bush

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.

Posted on

WWS Publication Roundup for September

It’s time for WWS’s publication roundup to celebrate all of our fantastic members who published in September. I’m awed by the talent in this group and the number of people who are consistently–and persistently–submitting and publishing their writing.

Congratulations to these WWS members who worked so hard to have their words heard and let’s celebrate them for their publication achievements!

Congratulations, Maylin Tu, on publishing the article “Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Taught Me How to Surrender to My Anxiety” in EQ Magazine.

My coronavirus meltdown happened Memorial Day weekend when my roommate was out of town. Overwhelmed by the knowledge that no one would be coming home, I felt trapped and desperate.

Sometimes you have a good pandemic day and other times you just want to cry and listen to Taylor Swift’s new album.

Maylin Tu also published the article “If a Famous Model Can’t Control Her Own Image, How Can I?” in EQ this month.

In a groundbreaking movie of my youth, A Walk to Remember, high school bullies paste Jamie Sullivan’s face onto the body of a bikini-clad supermodel with the words “Virgin Mary?” and distribute the image on flyers all over school. Humiliated, she runs into the arms of popular rebel, Landon Carter. The message is clear: No matter how many ugly sweaters or buttoned-up flannels you wear, you can be sexualized and shamed without your consent.

A congratulatory shout out to Thea Pueschel for publishing her essay “Frankincense and Myrrh: A Promise to Live Fully” in Abstract Elephant.

My apartment in Northridge was still warm from the heat of the day, as it often was in September in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. I was a fresh film school graduate up late writing a screenplay taking the occasional internet chess break when a friend in Sweden messaged me on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) to ask if I was okay. It was three in the afternoon in Sweden, nine in the morning in New York, and three hours earlier in Los Angeles. I was confused about what danger might be lurking. I did a quick internet search (as quickly as one could on dialup) to see if I missed an earthquake. I hadn’t. My apartment was on stilts above the communal carport. Even a small quake felt like a big one in that place.

Also check out Sybilla Nash’s article “MC Lyte Made Hip-Hop Take Notice” published by The Gumbo.

Before there was Megan, Nicki, or Lil’ Kim, there was MC Lyte. 

It was 1988 when Lyte, born Lana Moorer, made Hip-Hop take notice with her debut album Lyte as a Rock. At the time you could count the number of solo women emcees on one hand, and when she came on the scene, she kicked down doors and paved the way as the first woman rapper to drop a solo album. Lyte accomplished a lot of firsts. She was the first Hip-Hop artist to perform at Carnegie Hall, first woman Hip-Hop artist to have a gold single and solo Grammy nomination for her 1993 track “Ruffneck,” and first solo woman rapper to be honored/inducted on VH1’s Hip Hop Honors.

From Désirée Zamorano, the interview “Now Is the Time: An Interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden” published by LA Review of Books.

DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is set to break out this fall with his stunning debut novel, Winter Counts. Weiden, a former lawyer and current professor at Metropolitan State University at Denver, is poised for a powerful second act as a writer. In his novel, we meet Virgil Wounded Horse, a paid vigilante. Along this swift and thrilling ride, we also get insights into some ugly realities about reservation life and politics.

Kudos to librecht baker, who published the poem “You Are Who I Love: Number Two or You Are Who Makes My Heart Rebel (Part 1)” in Cultural Weekly.

after Aracelis Girmay

You, Black people, Black Queer people, Black global people pulsating this struggle’s fulcrum
You are who I love
You are who makes my heart rebel

Congrats to Li Yun Alvarado, who published the op-ed “Please Help Today’s Welfare Babies” in the New York Daily News.

Papi used to call me his “welfare baby.” The nickname was never an insult in his mouth. Instead, it was a nostalgic memory, a sign of how far they’d come, a fact of life. I was their “welfare baby” because welfare paid the medical bills for my delivery. My brother was their “housing baby” because health insurance from Papi’s job with the NYC Housing Authority paid their medical bills for his delivery.

Please celebrate Jessica Ceballos y Campbell’s poem “Tonight, I’m both at home, and far from it. or We leave and we stay, all at once, or not at all or The seven things I learned from my father.” It appears in the 5th anniversary print edition of Dryland.

Let’s also celebrate Lituo Huang’s poem Contrapuntal Divine, which also appears in the 5th anniversary print edition of Dryland.

Also from Lituo, the poem “Leftovers” appeared in Middle House Review.

Watch these Americans, my father says to me.
How wasteful they are. We are Chinese.
We use everything.

Kudos to Mary Camarillo for her poem “How to Write” ( a book spine poem), which appears in Tab Journal.

How to write an autobiographical novel:
First, catch
the mirror and the light,
night blooming jasmin(n)e,
lost in the city.

Check out Amy Ma’s humor piece “Warner Media Job Openings at The Ellen Show” that appears in How Pants Work.

E-commerce Customer Service Rep

  • Process a high volume of “Be Kind” merchandise returns.
  • Ability to defuse angry customers.
  • Must be willing to work overtime.

Congratulations to Amanda L. Andrei who published the short story “Lolo’s Diner” in Hip Mama.

It’s hard to make loco moco, even now, because I’ll be pouring gravy over the burger patty and rice and suddenly, I start thinking of the blood.

The caution tape, the silent red and blue lights, the white cop in my face and the black cop standing outside the door. I don’t want to include loco moco on our delivery menu, but Rita says it’s one of our best sellers, since no one out here really knows what it is and it’s so simple to make.

There’s also Norma Mendoza-Denton, whose book Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies was published by Cambridge University Press. Says the book’s description:

Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that ‘I know words. I have the best words’, yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump’s rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality. From Trump’s relationship to the truth, to his use of gesture, to the anti-immigrant tenor of his language, it illuminates the less obvious mechanisms by which language in the Trump era has widened divisions along lines of class, gender, race, international relations, and even the sense of truth itself.

And to Arlene Schindler, congratulations on publishing her review of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” with Watercooler Picks.

In an era (approx. 1958-1962) when women were expected to marry up and shut up and definitely not be funny (especially not funnier than men), Midge Maisel defies cultural norms, big time, by trying to be a stand-up comic. Recently divorced, she juggles being a good mother with working nights in smoky clubs trying to hone her comedy act, where she talks about her struggles as a single mother.

And another review by Arlene, this time of “Drunk Parents,” also published by Watercooler Picks.

On a night when I’d felt as though I’d seen everything on my streaming services, I came across a film that I knew absolutely nothing about: Drunk Parents. I looked at the stellar cast, and thought I’d give it a try, because, I said to myself, “Alec Baldwin always delivers.”  It turned out to be a gem of very dark humor, political incorrectness and imaginative situations.

Be a lookout for an online discussion with the Deschutes Public Library and Noriko Nakada on September 28th from 6 pm – 7 pm PT entitled “Know Us: Through Eyes Like Mine,” during which Noriko will discuss growing up multiracial in Bend in the 80s.

Kudos to Carla Sameth whose poem “Pandemic Pacing: 20 Steps in the Early Days and Each Day” appears in Mutha Magazine.

asking myself is it
Happy Hour yet? Today, only 3:50 pm
and I couldn’t quite get those 16th notes right.
Take it to the ninth* my trumpet teacher tells me
and when you don’t know if you’ll be wearing a mask
or hoping for a spare ventilator or simply scrounging for the right
ingredients, faring much better than those folks living
in the tent cities your wife steps around each day on the way
to work to her shit job–it seems we might all take
it to the ninth. And yet the lips tire out and the breath
gets short too short to hit the high notes, anything above an E,
really, let’s be honest.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong, who was interviewed about winning the 10th Ko Won’s Literary Award ( Article in Korean). In addition, she was also interviewed by The Lunch Ticket in “The War Is Still Within: An Interview with Tanya Ko Hong.”

What is your approach to writing multilingual poetry? How do you choose the exact words?

I work hard to find equivalent words. I started writing in Korea. After immigrating to America, I continued to write in Korean. Poetry was an intimate language for me, and my American friends wanted to know what I was writing about, but I thought poetry could not be translated, because it has rhythm, sound, emotion. How do you deliver that in another language? I thought it was impossible. My friends wanted to read my poems, so I felt compelled to translate them, but the words could not be translated exactly. I had to find emotional equivalents and use sensory words, the six senses. Finding the right word is like a treasure hunt, an experiment. Sometimes, I have to think in two minds, Korean and English, but one at a time. And sometimes the two languages are melded in my mind. It’s a paradox.

Congrats also to Gerda Govine Ituarte, whose poems “Bloom,” “Crows,” “Early Morning in Jamul,” “Grit & Grief,” and “Momma Momma” appear in the anthology When the Virus Came Calling: COVID-19 Strikes America, edited by Thelma T. Reya and published by Golden Hills Press.

And to Valerie Anne Burns, congratulations on publishing her personal essay “Venice Vision” on HerStry.

All the colors I most cherish drifted by as I floated down the Grand Canal. Rich but worn shades of orange, pink, golden yellow and blues meandered by, one after another. The water I floated on was a Caribbean aqua. It wrapped me in moist, balmy warmth. I viewed beautiful architecture while swimming beneath a vivid sapphire Italian sky. I felt released from struggle, free to spread myself far and wide. All my senses filled with wonder.

Admiring the city, suspended atop the Laguna Veneta, swimming in its resplendency, I reached my arms out wide in front of me, graceful as a sleek mermaid. Unaware of my body being ravaged, I was shapely and confident in my swim attire. I could feel the ripples of the sea swirling as I pushed forward in a breaststroke.

Congrats to Crystal AC Salas, whose poems, “Nieta Heaven,” “triolet for bad news,” & “Clarita speaks to Serafin while pacing the house alone” appear in PANK.

Nieta Heaven

after “Pocha Heaven” by Sara Borjas

In Nieta Heaven, no one goes hungry because there is always some rice on the stove that perpetually refills itself so abuelita doesn’t have to break her relaxing to get up to feed everyone who walks in. She says mija, I love it and this is the truth but sometimes this is also bullshit because Love is a panza stuffed with mole but it is also exhausting and in Nieta Heaven, we don’t have to pretend like it isn’t anymore, that it costs nothing because it does.…

Also, to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, congratulations on publishing the article “Not Quarantine Food” in Gastronomica.

On April 1, I texted Becca a photo of roasted pasilla chiles stuffed with quinoa, carrot, onion, and Queso Oaxaca.

“That doesn’t look like quarantine food!” she responded. Maybe she thought I was foolin’.

“Why not?” I texted back.

She recounted our conversation two weeks prior about people stocking up on canned goods, frozen food, and things we ate in college like peanut butter and jelly and Cup o’ Noodles.

I haven’t eaten those foods in more than 20 years. Why would I start now? Even on a grad student budget, I have standards. And I’m using this time to get creative in the kitchen.

Check out Stephanie Yu’s short story “Steak Diane,” which appeared in Carte Blanche.

She knew what they called her when she wasn’t there: Steak Diane. They were calling her that right now, as Diane imagined they had done countless times before. The barmaid began in a low whisper directly into the bartender’s ear, as if to a lover in a shared bed. “Steak Diaaaaaane.” Suddenly called to duty, the bartender tied a mottled bar rag around his head and began to limp theatrically around the bar. As if she actually looked like that, thought Diane, as she readjusted the knot of her scarf, which rested—tight as a noose—at the base of her chin.

And let’s celebrate for Jenise Miller, whose the essay “Hermana, Tu Nombre Lo Llevo Grabado” appeared in Dryland.

I landed in Panama’s Tocumen International Airport, not sure I would recognize my sister’s face. She was fourteen years older than me and we had only met and learned about each other three years earlier. That year, Panama celebrated one hundred years of independence and Panamanians who lived abroad journeyed back to the beloved country they had not seen in decades. For my parents, it meant reuniting with distant relatives and loved ones, hair full of “las hojas blancas” El Gran Combo and Rubén Blades sang about. For me, it meant visiting their home country for the first time and meeting the sister and brother I didn’t know I had. It felt strange, being introduced as adults, by our father who left Panama and didn’t return for thirty years. That short meeting would be the only time I saw them. 

A shout out to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, whose poem “Battlegrounds” appeared on poets.org.

Motorcycles and white tour vans speed 
between behemoth granite shafts, shove
my body by their force, leave me roadside
and wandering fields. Little is funny
when you’re Chicana and walking 
a Civil War site not meant for walking.
Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides 
for stories on Mexicans soldiers,

receive shrugs. No evidence in statues 
or statistics. In the cemetery, not one 
Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop. 
It’s the same in the post office, the market, 
the antique shop with KKK books on display.
In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance,
sit cross-legged in grass, and hold
a smoky quartz to the setting sun.  

Posted on

7 Steps to Submitting

Our 7th Annual Submission Blitz is coming Saturday, September 12th. This online event is our annual drive to submit to tier one journals as an action for gender parity in publishing.

In the summer of 2011 a group of women met together in a kitchen to share food, literary journals, and submission goals to encourage each other to submit work for publication. The idea for this first submission party came from WWS cofounder, Alyss Dixson as a response to the Vida Count. We began the Submission Blitz in the summer of 2014 to honor our beginnings and continue to push for gender parity in top tier publishing.

We’ve come to understand that submitting to tier one journals is no easy ask, so to help, check out the 7 Steps to Submitting below. And consider joining us on September 12th. It’s as easy as marking yourself going to the event, submitting to a journal, notifying us know on FB, Twitter, or IG, and letting us shower you in claps and cheers.

Images from our 2019 Submission Blitz LA meet-up at the Faculty Bar in East Hollywood.

7 Steps to Submitting:

by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

1. Select a Manuscript – When selecting a piece (for poetry this may be 5-7 poems) to submit, be sure sure to choose a story, essay, or poems you absolutely love or need to see in the world. These are top tier magazines, so if you don’t love the work and need to see it published, why would you expect the editors to?

2. Research & Pick a Journal – Begin by looking through this list of tier one journals with links to guidelines curated by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera. Some things to look into: Who’s on the editorial team? Who’s been published? What’s their mission statement? Do you like what’s been published? Does your work fit within their guidelines?

3. Read & Follow the Guidelines – the fastest way to get your work rejected is to not follow guidelines. Don’t make it easy for an editor to say no to you. 

4. Prepare your Manuscript – be sure to adjust your manuscript according to the guidelines, give it to a friend read through for any last minute notes, and read through it out loud before sending to catch any typos. 

5. Write a cover letter – be sure to personalize a cover letter with the name of the editor and a sentence about why you’ve chosen to send your work to them. Though it’s up for debate if cover letters are even read, this is a good practice for keeping open communications with editors you hope to create a working relationship with. See more about cover letters here.

6. Submit – once you’re ready, HIT SEND! And then be sure to let us know on our social media accounts so we can clap and cheer for you!

7. Record your Submission – a submission tracker is a spreadsheet and a great tool for keeping your submissions in order. What you put on the tracker is up to you, but the name of journal, name of submission, and date it was submitted is a good place to start. This is helpful for checking back on submissions that have been out for three, six, or more months, as well as keeping up communications when practicing simultaneous submissions (see the link in point 5 for more information on this). 

This is image represents the first six months of my personal 2019 submission tracker.