Women Who Submit

The summer has come to an end but that hasn’t stopped Women Who Submit writers from getting their words into the world! Congrats to everyone who had work published in August.

From Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo‘s “Ghost Interview with a Soldier in the Peach Orchard” at Rivard Report:

Gettysburg National Military Park

In your final moments, whom did you think of?
Was this someone waiting for you to return? 
I worry I will never find that someone waiting

behind a thick front door of a home we made together. 

From Désirée Zamorano‘s “Memento Mori: On Angel Luis Colón’s ‘Hell Chose Me‘” at Los Angeles Review of Books:

Set in contemporary Bronx, moving between the past and the present, it’s a tense and intriguing thrill ride. Sure, we’ve met mordant, conflicted assassins before, like Lawrence Block’s Keller, Barry Eisler’s John Rain, or Bill Hader’s Barry. In Colón’s hands, Walsh hits familiar notes, but in a key all his own…

From Kate Maruyama‘s “Traces” at Magnolia Review:

Seven months after we lost our father to cancer, we were meeting again, Roger, Janey and I, to sort through the arrangements for our mother’s funeral. Who loses both of their parents so close together? Who loses both of their parents so young? I thought they’d at least be around to see a grandkid or two.

From an interview with Carla Sameth about her debut memoir One Day on the Gold Line at Points:

I think that writing as a family member of those struggling with drug and alcohol addiction (both my wife and son are in recovery) provides a unique perspective. I write a lot about the process I went through understanding addiction as a disease, and looking at my own shit (including addictive behavior) and how I interacted with my son who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction in his teens.

Read an excerpt of Carla‘s memoir at Angels Flight Literary West!

From Danielle Mitchell‘s “Not Wolf” at Poets Reading the News:

Not red, not Mexican, not lowland.
                      No bonnet, no white-tailed, bighorn.

Forget black foot, leave the beach
                      the brow-antlered, San Joaquin, San

Miguel, no woodland, no salt marsh.

From “Visit to Makon” by Bo Hwang at wildness:

After a winter of droughts, my childhood friend—my only kind of sweetheart—moves back to Makon. The city we grew up in; the city we all left. She’s there now, in a house with twelve women, only one her age, a high school teacher from another island, the rest are medical students.

“Seven balconies,” she boasts. “You can see the hospital.”

From Liz Harmer‘s “Right to Grapple” at the Malahat Review:

Let me give you an idea of the sorts of discussions we get into here. On the first Sunday afternoon, just after the little blue VW bug scraped out of here on the gravel road with my mom inside it, I managed to get into an argument about rocks. I was standing near this old tetherball post with my three sacks—my backpack, my rolled-up sleeping bag, and my garbage bag full of clothes—waiting for one of the H______s to escort me to my cabin and halfheartedly hitting the ball. Blam. Blam. Blam in one direction, blam in the other. Then this guy whose real name I cannot reveal comes up to me. 

From Cori Bratby-Rudd‘s “Puppyelectric” at Nailed:

I want Indian food, urgently, intensely, the cream of the tikka masala, the flaked fluffed naan, and so I order it because I remember desperation and I refuse to feel it again. I don’t just order it, I order it delivered and I feel something like royalty, for wanting something and then for having it. Strange to want and then get, as though desires can actually happen for someone like me.

From Li Yun Alvarado‘s “Poe Park” at Aster(ix) Journal:

From this cottage,
where he heard
his young cousin
bride, Virginia

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong whose poem, “The Crying Game” was published at Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea!

Congratulations to Amanda L. Andrei whose script, Waiting for a Birthday, was published in The First Five Years Anthology from Thinking in Full Color!

July has been one of the most prolific months for WWS writers with a long list of publications. Congrats to all!

Congratulations to Carla Sameth whose memoir, One Day on the Gold Line, was released this July! Check out this interview of Carla in LitFest Pasadena!

From “I Bow to the Lessor Teacher” by Thea Pueschel at Medium:

I’ve noticed a tendency in life at studios and online of this idea that some teachers are more worthy of students, of classes or calling themselves a teacher. This little box has been around since I can remember. We’ve all heard the dismissive tone “oh, that’s not yoga” or “they’re not a real teacher.”

From “A Quarrel with the Village of My Birth” by Helena Lipstadt at Porter House Review:

which is not a village but
a shivering capital
of Europe, may she rot and be
reborn with heart. Even her
birthday song is martial. Even
her avenues are lined with
pikes. 

From Jacquelyn Stolos‘ “Wide-Shot” at Bodega:

There’s been something going on with the cat’s left eye for about a week now, this cloudy gray ooze leaking out of her tear duct. I’ve been swabbing it away with a cotton ball, once in the morning before I leave for work and once in the evening when I get home. She doesn’t let Owen do it. We’ve been trying to hold off on another trip to the vet. Poor thing is already on five daily medications, and at some point you’ve just got to consider quality of life.

From Noriko Nakada‘s “Threatened Abortion” at SFWP:

I didn’t realize I was pregnant until we were moving out of the duplex and into our new condo. After a long day of hauling boxes, I collapsed on the new hardwood floors and tried to understand my exhaustion. It was a new kind of tired—like I couldn’t get up off the floor—and I tried to remember the last time I had my period. That was when I asked my partner to pick up a test. It was New Year’s Eve. The test came up positive.

From Lituo Huang‘s “Lemonade” at Bethlehem Writers Roundtable:

Lanie looked over the table at her little sister. Cherie was having a fit, ripping her pink sundress, stomping her bare feet on the grass, pulling her frizzy braid. “I hate chocolate cake!”

From Deirdre Hennings‘ “Making Her Night” at Pulse:

In Central Park twilight,
we drop our holiday mood
like a heavy sweater in the heat
when that call sends us reeling
as leukemia sucks us
into its bell jar, rings
    our ears, jangles
          minds, reverberates 
              into bone.

Congratulations to Natalie Smith Parra whose essay “Eviction Blues,” Sakae Manning whose poem “Oakland” and Jenise Miller whose poem “Ode to the Mamas Who Make Language Beautiful” were all published in Dryland!

Congratulations to Sabrina Im who had 3 poems – “Love Letter for a Lotus,” Body Memory,” and “An August Musing” – published in Angel City Review!

Congratulations to Victoria Lynne McCoy whose poem “Dispatched from Home” was published in Tahoma Literary Review!

Congratulations to Gerda Govine Ituarte whose poem “Temple of Courage Chance Change” was featured in the Bahvna Mehta exhibit catalog!

And, finally, congratulations to Arielle Silver who launched Tidal Journal!

What an amazingly long list of publications! Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit published in June.

Congratulations to Elline Lipkin, who published two poems, “Fingernail Moon” and “Pleine Lune” at Apricity Press! From “Fingernail Moon“:

This moon is a thin cusp that cups the vast black,
a silver rim thimbling stars into strewn seams.

From “What I Learned When I Visited Adelanto” by Lisa Cheby at Writers Resist:

the high desert stretches     hours west of airbnbs and selfie backdrops    here Joshua Trees weep

Congratulations to Cherisse Yanit Nadal who had two poems, “It hurts less when I case us in history” and “Benevolent Assimilation,” published at Marías at Sampaguitas. From “It hurts less when I cast us in history“:

1898
You are America; She: Paris;
All of my white boyfriends: Spain.
The difference, you said, Was liberty,
Was protection, Was solidarity,
A common enemy. A common bed.

Congratulations to Mia Nakaji Monnier, who had three pieces published in the Washington Post‘s local guide columns about Los Angeles, Atwater Village and Little Tokyo. From “A Local’s Guide to Los Angeles“:

Ask any Angeleno to describe the city to you and they’ll do it in a different way. There’s beach city L.A., literary L.A., the L.A. of ethnic enclaves and public art and serious sports fans and amateur foodies.

From Karin Aurino‘s “Daisy” at 50-Word Stories:

She loves me… She loves me not.
I visited her at the cemetery, laid daisies at the base of her headstone.

From “Pleated Skirt (Tante Fela)” by Helena Lipstadt at Visitant:

I am not as tall as I was
when I looked like Polly Bergen
and strolled down the shady
Warsaw sidewalk, a leather bag
in the crook of my arm.

From “Amsterdam Long Window” by Donna Sprujit-Metz at The Los Angeles Review:

What does it mean
to owe someone? A cocoon
a small blue egg, a chrysalis?

From “Chicana in New York: Gloria Anzaldúa on Spirituality and the City” by Li Yun Alvarado in MELUS:

Born on 26 September 1942, Anzaldúa became a leading Chicana feminist poet, writer, and theorist before her death in 2004. Raised near the Texas-US Southwest / Mexico border, Anzaldúa features the region prominently throughout her groundbreaking mixed-genre book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza(1987). In the preface to Borderlands, she notes, “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border.” 

From “Andy’s Alliance” by Noriko Nakada at *82 Review:

The absence of the Japanese Americans from Emerson Junior High leaves a massive void. Once the winter ends and the weather grows warm again, nearly a third of their classmates are gone. That is when Andy forms the alliance, to stand guard over friendships and memories until their Japanese classmates return. 

From Tammy Delatorre‘s “I Am Coming for You” at Winning Writers:

I am coming for you. My mother might have said those words the night she went after him—the bearded man, the one she took to her room all those nights. He would come over after I’d gone to bed. She carried me from her room—the only place I could fall asleep—to the room across the hall. In the sticky Hawaiian heat, I’d wake to their loud moans and groans in the middle of the night and sit straight up in bed. At six years old, the only thing I knew of sex was a glimpse I got on TV: two bodies moving under a white sheet.

Congratulations to Flint whose poem, “This Is (Not) A Love Letter: A Poem for Two Voices & M/any Ears,” was published in Our Poetica: An Anthology of Ars Poetica by Cathexis Northwest Press!

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong (고현혜) who published her Mini-E-Book, 유월의 눈 June Snow, this month!

April showers bring May flowers…and WWS publications! Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit who had work published in May.

From Anita Gill‘s review of Debra Gwartney’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself at Brevity:

Gwartney’s second book veers from the traditional structure of memoir, using a lesser-known historical event as a springboard for her own personal narrative. In I Am a Stranger Here Myself, Gwartney juxtaposes her memories with the story of Narcissa Whitman, one of the first white women settlers to journey westward. This genre-bending manuscript won the 2018 River Teeth Nonfiction Prize and publication this past March.

From “Marvels of Representation” by Ryane Nicole Granados at LA Parent:

While they are 5 1/2 years apart in age and are opposites in many ways, one thing my sons have in common is that they have struggled to find toys – in particular, superheroes – that look like them.

From “The Quiet on the Other Side” by Hazel Kight Witham at Mutha Magazine:

The quiet stops when they call my name from the waiting room at Labor and Delivery. I open my eyes, balance my six-month baby belly in my arms as I shift to standing. I need a quick check in, a blood pressure reading, some reassurance. I am not here to labor or deliver.

From Mia Nakaji Monnier‘s “Kokoro Yasume” at Longreads:

I inherited the porcelain ghosts from my neighbor Amy, whose parents’ house was filled to capacity with everything from shrimp figurines to polished-wood Noh masks. After her mother died and before the estate sale crew swept through the house, I walked the rooms with Amy, cataloging the contents of cabinets, sorting documents from recyclables. “If something like that catches your eye, take it,” she said about the ghost dolls. “I don’t want to see them becoming someone’s Oriental tchotchkes.”

From Carla Sameth‘s “Mother’s Day Triptych” at Mutha Magazine:

The picture is of my son, Raphael, as a newborn. The bright royal blue color of the onesie complements his looks. Like now, his look is racially and culturally ambiguous, similar to the rest of our family. His eyes dark-dark almost black, his hair barely curly, brownish, which will get darker and thicker and curlier as he grows. At birth, there is a bit of blond. Like me. For a second. Family lore has it that my mom called out when I was born, “Oh my God, the Milkman, a blond” in a family of dark haired olive skinned people.

From Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo‘s “Invisible No More: How ‘Fade Into You’ Reflects the L.A. Chicanx Experience” at Los Angeles Review of Books:

In an interview with the popular feminist podcast Call Your Girlfriend, Darling said she named her character Nikki because “being in the interiority of a teenage girl is not something readers are always familiar with.” InFade Into You, Darling gives us more than an intimate view of a teenage girl; she gives us an intimate view of a young, mixed-race Chicana living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the kind of portrait that is nearly nonexistent in L.A. letters.

Also from Xochitl, “Kenji Liu Is Using Frankenstein as a Metaphor for Toxic Masculinity” at bitch:

Much of the work in Monsters I Have Been is what Liu calls “Frankenpo,” a style of his own creation that chops and mixes multiple texts into one body. The poem “Stomach me, delicious world” is a Frankenpo, and according to Liu’s notes at the back of the book, combines “the screenplay of Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together (1997) + screenplay of Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) + article ‘Confucius on Gay Marriage’ in the Diplomat + New York Times article ‘Court in Hong Kong Invalidates Antisodomy Law from British Era.’”

From Désirée Zamorano‘s “Much More to Investigate” at Los Angeles Review of Books:

From the opening pages of Miracle Creek, Angie Kim creates an intense atmosphere of foreboding and suspense, building swiftly to the event that triggers the rest of her debut novel, unraveling so many lives and lies.

From Rachael Rifkin‘s “How to Honor a Loved One’s Memory” at nextavenue:

When my mom passed away, having established guidelines for my early grieving process was a relief, giving me concrete steps to take and tasks to do. Several years on, my grief is different — less sharp, but still punctuated with unexpected moments and feelings that catch me off guard. I’ve found myself wishing for more traditions and rituals for this stage, and more opportunities to remember and celebrate her life.

Also from Rachael, “29 Siblings and Counting” at 23andMe:

Shauna tested to learn more about her health history, and found herself instead in the middle of the plot of a movie (The Delivery Man, to be exact). Thoughts about potential susceptibilities to diseases receded as she discovered first one, then eight, and now at least 29 donor siblings.

As someone who grew up as an only child and really owned that identity, receiving an email that began “It looks like we are related” was pretty disorienting.

Congratulations to Minal Hajratwala whose poem, “new world literature, or, we’ll be together in the end,” was published in WSQ: Asian Diasporas! Minal also won residencies at Pond Farm and Clarion West workshops.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong whose poems, “The Cost of Breath,” “Confronting My Father’s Mistress,” and “Journey” were published in Women’s Studies Quarterly! From “The Cost of Breath:”

Talk about the wood
stacked high in the living room
what it costs
to breathe in my home—
raw wood, oak
so long and thick—
a dead elephant stretched wall to wall