WWS organizer Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera recently introduced me to Jennifer Acker, Editor in Chief of The Common. So much more than a literary journal, “The Common is a literary organization whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place.” Besides their online publishing and two annual print issues, The Common also hosts readings and conversations, and partners with schools, libraries and museums to promote literary engagement and create community. We are obviously all about that here at Women Who Submit. They also do leadership development with the next generation by hosting a literary publishing internship and participating in classroom programs.
A WWS Publication Roundup for October
October has shaped up to be one of the busiest months for WWS publications! Congratulations to all the women who were published in October.
From Ryane Nicole Granados‘ “Home-Schooling Away from Home” at LA Parent:
Picture a child working on lessons at the kitchen table and you’ve pictured just a tiny sliver of the home-schooling landscape in SoCal.
From “Mimesis” by Maylin Tu at Exposition Review:
I have decided to become my father, to put on his body like a second skin.
I practice rolling my head back and forth around on my neck, like a bobblehead. I put my hands on my hips and shake one finger up and down in front of me. My face tightens into an exaggerated grimace as my finger picks up speed.
From Laura Warrell‘s “I Gave Up on Love, and It Was One of the Best Decisions I Ever Made” at Huffington Post:
At the end of our date in August 2018, Justin escorted me to my car, where he nervously kissed me. When I kissed him back, he cheered, pumping his fists in the air like he’d won something. I walked from the curb to my car, and when I turned around, he was watching me, beaming.
From “documents of light” by Helena Lipstadt at About Place Journal:
when the knock comes on the door
what do we take with us?
do we carry everything in one thin suitcase?
are we walking are we running?
From “The Coyotes of India Street” by Whitney Easton at Animal:
I wake to the sound of yipping in the night. Yipping turns to howling and a chorus of coyote song ensues, echoing throughout the ravine below. My chihuahua perks his ears to stand guard. The pitch and frequency intensify as more join in.
From Mia Nakaji Monnier “What My Name Says about Who I Am” at Zora:
I became Mia Nakaji Monnier in college. I didn’t change my name so much as reveal more of it. While I’d always gone by Mia Monnier before then, the rest of my name appeared on all of my official documents: Mia Gabrielle Nakaji Monnier, a combination of Japanese and French, reflecting both of my parents. In college, I learned that my face alone rarely said enough about who I was.
From Lisbeth Coiman‘s “De Mujer a Mujer” at Lady/Liberty/Lit:
To Venezuela.
Mujer, I talk to you without hair on my tongue
As clear as this blue sky over our heads
Here is a mojito
Take a sip
I don’t have a drawer inside to hold unspoken truths
From “Prayer for a Sunday Morning” by Deborah Edler Brown at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Divine wisdom,
Please show me how
To breathe
When the smell of hatred
Is hot and dank against my cheek
From Lindsey Skillen‘s “Labor Day” at Cosmonauts Avenue:
I’m not the kind of woman who would participate in a threesome, which is exactly why I went. I’m lately trying to be a different sort of woman—one who can pull off an edgy haircut. A sort of Brooklyn-blonde pageboy kind of haircut. I’m Jean Seberg from Breathless in my mind.
From “We are our own Multitude: Los Angeles’ Black Panamanian Community” by Jenise Miller at Boom California:
On a Saturday morning in late October, public workers in downtown Los Angeles block off the stretch of Broadway from Olympic Boulevard to Hill Street. Around 10 am, a crowd gathers, donned in blue and red garments, shirts embroidered with mola, white polleras with bright-colored pom-poms, or Panama flags draped across their backs, to celebrate the Annual Panamanian Independence Day Parade.
From “An Immigrant Mom’s Push for Understanding” by Tanya Ko Hong at LA Parent:
My children bring magic into my life. However, there is no map to navigate being a parent in a multicultural society, especially when you are an immigrant parent.
Congratulations to Diana Love for having two poems published at Kelp Journal! From “Thrown Back in the Surf:”
Before the sense of self
there must be some surroundings.
In my green blue days of youth
the Valley was a smog-wrapped bubble,
a satellite apart, a cushion-edged suburban haze
Congratulations to Peggy Dobreer for having her poetry published in Aeolian Harp Series, Vo. 5!
Congratulations to Désirée Zamorano whose story “Bobby’s Leave 1968” was published in ¡PA’QUE TU LO SEPAS! edited by Angel Luis Colón!
Congratulations to Liz Harmer whose story, “Decisive Action,” was published at PRISM International!
Breathe and Push: Taking Attendance
The sky held smoke from a brush fire burning in the valley, even though our submission party was being held in a business park transformed into a college campus in Culver City. As hard as it was to show up on this Saturday morning, we were there.
It was hot, even for October in Southern California, so the title of Rocio Carlos and Rachel McLeod’s workshop, “Pay Attention: Attending and Collaborating at the End Slash Beginning of the World” pulsed with urgency.
We walked through glass doors, down carpeted hallways, and into an air conditioned classroom. We brought life with us. Writers breathed into the space, offered snacks, hauled metal water bottles, laptops, notebooks, and pens. Rocio and Rachel scattered pieces of greenery across tables. Cuttings of sage, lavender, rosemary, and citrus welcomed us. We pressed leaves between fingers, brought the outside in, and as more writers filtered in, the smoke of the weekend lifted.
Rocio and Rachel, the collaborative authors of Attendance, shared their process with us: their attending to the world; Rocio to flora, Rachel to fauna, and to all of the overlapping spaces. They paid attention. That Saturday morning, for a collection of moments, we collaborated with them. We shared their process, by attending together, paying attention, breathing in air, and taking care. It was not the kind of self-care Rachel described as being important so we can be more effective workers, but a mindfulness that connects us with one another, that helps us create connection even if the world is ending slash beginning.
We wrote together. We shared our names, and some flora and fauna. We wrote. We walked and breathed in one another’s work, and then we wrote again. We took attendance. Rocio and Rachel illuminated a bit of their process, and then sold all of their copies of Attendance.
As we stand at the end slash beginning of the world, it can be tempting to bury our heads in the ground, but this workshop reminded us to look, to lift our heads to the weather and take the pulse of everything around us: to take attendance and take care. It was exactly the way we all needed to spent a few moments on a hot fall day before getting to the business of submitting.
You can view this workshop stream on the WWS Facebook page. You can support Rocio and Rachel’s collaborative work by purchasing Attendance.
Noriko Nakada is the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.
Behind the Editor’s Desk: Erin Elizabeth Smith
This is a reprint from an interview we did three years ago with Sundress Publications editor in chief Erin Elizabeth Smith. Sundress Publications donated two book bundles to our current Indiegogo campaign!
For the past sixteen years, Sundress Publications has been publishing chapbooks and full-length collections (including WWS co-founder Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s debut collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge), as well as hosting online journals and the Best of the Net Anthology. Managing Editor Erin Elizabeth Smith answered a few WWS questions about being an editor, and what makes Sundress unique.
How did you get started with Sundress?
I founded Sundress in 2000 to serve as an umbrella site for a number of online journals, including Stirring, Samsara, and several others. We still maintain this sisterhood of lit journals by hosting or promoting journals including Stirring (under new management) Rogue Agent, Pretty Owl Poetry, Wicked Alice, and cahoodaloodaling. In 2006, we began the Best of the Net anthology in order to promote the work publishing in online venues.
We began publishing chapbooks in 2003, but after our first three, we realized that we weren’t ready to give the time and finances needed to properly publish and promote books. It wasn’t until 2011 that we really decided to jump into print publishing. We started slowly, understanding that it was going to be a learning process and also understanding that we needed to build our reputation as a consistent and engaged publisher. We now publish seven print books a year along with our e-chapbook series. We also have three imprints, our journals, the Best of the Net, the Gone Dark Archives, and much more! Continue reading “Behind the Editor’s Desk: Erin Elizabeth Smith”
How is Women Who Submit Intentional About Intersectionality?
When I first received an invitation to speak on a panel at a Lambda Litfest event called “Intentional Intersectionality,” I passed the invitation on to the rest of the Women Who Submit leadership team. These type of invitations often pay, and they’re an opportunity to not only raise WWS’s visibility but also the visibility whomever is speaking on behalf of the org, so opening them to the whole team is our regular practice. Plus, we don’t ever want one person to appear as the sole voice of Women Who Submit.
With no one else available, I almost passed because as someone who identifies as a straight, cis woman I didn’t want to take up space meant for another, but the organizers felt strongly about having Women Who Submit represented as a space for change, so I said yes.
Before the event organizers Cody Sisco, Rachelle Yousuf, and Sakae Manning, invited the readers and panelists to a planning meeting where we saw the space, a presentation room at The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and then walked to a cafe to discuss logistics, intentions, and possible panel questions. In this planning meeting, Sakae looked over at me and asked, “How does Women Who Submit create intersectional spaces?”
It was a question I should have been prepared for since intersectional was in the name, and I’d been invited to be on the panel as a creator of such spaces, but suddenly sitting with the other talented and passionate readers and organizers, still figuring out how I could best serve this event, I was stumped.
It wasn’t until an hour later, on the walk back to my car, that I started to formulate a reply. I let Sakae know I now had an answer, and she let me know such was the purpose of the pre-panel meet up. I was relieved, but on the night of the event the question never came up. So now, I share it here with you.
Every Person is a Resource
At our bi-monthly meet ups, we invite local, professional writers to share their expertise with our community in one-hour workshops. We seek to curate speakers that reflect the marginalized communities we want to empower such as women of color, queer writers, non-binary and trans writers, disabled writers, mothers and caretakers, and working class writers. Speakers have presented on topics such as building an author website, finding an agent, and strategies for submitting to contests and tier one journals.
Six times a year, we invite a person to speak on a subject of their expertise, but at each of these workshops, we believe all people in the room are a resource. Often when someone asks a question at our workshops, the answer is group sourced. By honoring the worth of each writer’s knowledge and experience, we raise each other up.
Over the summer, I attended a week-long writers’ workshop where in one session a big, fancy east coast book editor asked a small group of us if we had questions for him. The way he conducted this Q&A made me feel like a child forced to listen to her adult teacher. But I wasn’t a child, and he wasn’t a teacher, but an editor with a capitalistic agenda.
When the discussion got to the difference between self-publishing, indie, and big business publishing, I didn’t agree with his response, and thought back to the writers I’d met in WWS who had found success in these varying spaces. I remembered our WWS workshops too and wished to speak, but instead I stood up and walked out on the conversation because it wasn’t a space that cared for my voice.
My hope is that since we’ve done away with this kind of elitism people will feel welcomed to stay and be apart of the conversation.
Accessibility
Some barriers we consider when planning our meetings are physical capacity, mental health, financial ability, and family obligations. To ensure that people facing such barriers can still reach our resources, we hold our public meet-ups at the Exposition Park Regional Public Library (when space allows). This location is central, close to the train and major bus lines, has handicapped and free parking, and is wheelchair accessible. We also Facebook Live our one-hour workshops for those who find themselves homebound, and all workshops and resources are FREE!
Failures are Accomplishments
Every month we have a “Rejection Brag,” a closed forum for our members, where writers can post the journals, contests, and other opportunities that chose to pass on their work. In this brag we celebrate each NO as a proof of the work each of writer is doing to advocate for her/their work. In a capitalist society, we’re taught that failure is shameful and a sign of not being able to cut it, but at WWS we’ve flipped that narrative, and use failure as a tool for advancement and community building.
Culture of Sharing
WWS shares everything: journals, spreadsheet templates, cover letter samples, snacks, submission calls, and even chisme (insider knowledge of literary markets, institutions, and orgs). Any resource we have is for the greater community. As I said at the beginning, even speaking engagements are shared. In a capitalistic society, it’s believed that only a few can succeed, but we reject this scarcity model. There are enough opportunities for all, and one person’s win is everyone’s win.
In the end, these are a few strategies we use for building spaces with intentionality, but we have areas for growth. And if you see a way WWS can be more intersectional, please share. We’re listening!
Our next free, public workshop is this Saturday, October 12th at Antioch University Los Angeles. “Pay attention: attending and collaborating at the end slash beginning of the world” with Rachel McLeod Kaminer and Rocío Carlos begins at 10am.
A WWS Publication Roundup for September
The leaves are turning as the writers from Women Who Submit continue to get their words into the world. Congratulations to all the women who were published in September!
From Erika Schikel‘s review of Patti Smith’s memoir Year of the Monkey at Book & Film Globe:
It begins on the first morning of 2016, at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz. Patti has just played a gig at the Fillmore, celebrated her birthday, and visited Sandy, a lifelong friend who has suffered a brain aneurysm and lies unconscious in the hospital. She wanders outside the motel and takes a Polaroid of its googie sign and says to it, “Thanks, Dream Motel.”
From Ja’net Danielo‘s “The Fact of Things” at Frontier Poetry:
I am staring out the bus
window, watching
trees spin green
down a suburban
street. I am looking
for poetry in the blur
of leaves, in the lavender-
blue smear of jacarandas,
which is to say, I am
trying to hold something
without touching it
From “Venus” by Lituo Huang at goodbaad:
I am hungry for you, brown girl.
Spider-like you crawl,
your eyes are milk.
Do not gaze upward with your mouth
open, red.
Also from Lituo, “I Knew a Cat Once” at Recenter Press:
I knew a cat once.
Kitten-yellow
eyes it had.
Egg yolks against the edge of its tongue
purled with hooks
split and released daylight
onto a cooling plate.
From “I Do Not Know Where the Children Are” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
I do not know where the children are. I do not know where their parents are. I do not know how our government supports this horror. I do not know what I can do.
Also from Désirée , “Angel Luis Colon: On Writing Violence” at CrimeReads:
My first loves were horror and literary fiction. Being a kid from the Bronx it never really struck me that you could write about the Bronx. I don’t know why; I imagine because when things are too close to home you just don’t see them from that perspective. When I really discovered the newer wave of crime fiction in the last ten years, I got exposed to that from places like Beat to a Pulp, Needle Magazine. So it’s kind of funny to realize, oh, people like this? I can write stories about this?
From Margo McCall‘s “Riverbed” at Pomona Valley Review:
Carrie’s last client of the day was a surprise, although she already sensed that
after a few more weeks in this job, nothing would surprise her. As she viewed the
latest personification of human need slumped in the worn chair beyond her desk,
she saw a guy her own age—and not bad looking either.
Congratulations to Jenise Miller who had two poems published at Cultural Weekly! From “Dolphins:”
Yolanda “Yo-Yo”
Whitaker whipped crimped,
blonde braids and bragged
the earrings I wear are called dolphins
and I became bigger
From Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera‘s “Swirling Debris” at Citron Review:
She stands on the corner, only one young man next to her.
His headphone bass vibrates the air.
The signal changes to walk.
Congratulations to Helena Lipstadt whose poem, “Everybody Knows” was published at Free State Review!
Congratulations to Lindsey Skillen whose story, “Labor Day,” was published at Cosmonauts Review!
Congratulations to Colette Sartor whose story collection, Once Removed, debuted this season!
Congratulations to Desiree Kannel whose story, “Running Man” was published in Running Wild Press’ Anthology of Stories!
Breathe and Push: When Just Breathing Is Enough
By Noriko Nakada
I’m showing up today, y’all, but I’m exhausted. From working my own day job. From parenting my two kids. From breathing on the flames of a writing career I’m hoping will someday generate more than a couple of flickers from hot coals. I’m exhausted from the news. The devastating bad news. The possibly good news. The potential for what might come soon, might come later, might not come at all.
Knock on wood if you’re with me.
I’ve been watching lots of tv to escape and see the world right now. One of my late-summer guilty pleasures is Hard Knocks. It’s an HBO Sports production following an NFL camp throughout the preseason. I’ve been watching for years, even though I’ve written off the NFL #IStandWithKap. This season, Coach Gruden of the Raiders does this thing where he says, “Knock on wood if you’re with me.” When he says this, the players rap on the tables around them and it’s a cosign for whatever he’s said.
I started using this in my classes. “So, the author here is clearly unreliable. Knock on wood if you’re with me.” It works. My middle school students knock on wood. Or they don’t, but at least a few do and it always wakes up the room for a few seconds.
Knock on wood if you’re with me.
So, tonight I’m going to breathe. On this warm fall night that still feels like summer, I’ll put a few words on the page, close my eyes to the news cycles spinning, kiss my kids goodnight, and breathe. In the morning there will be a fresh day, a new page to write, new headlines to unpack, another school day for my students and my children, and sometimes it is enough to just breathe. And the next day, the next week, the next month there will be endless opportunities to push, but tonight, breathing is all I’ve got.
Knock on wood if you’re with me.
Noriko Nakada is the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.
Reportback from the sixth annual Submission Blitz
The Blitz is a nationwide virtual celebration of Women Who Submit’s work. It’s a day when we invite women and non-binary writers to submit to at least one Tier 1 journal. The idea is to have a coordinated effort on one day in which the slush piles of Tier 1 journals get flooded with submission by underrepresented writers. Anyone can join from anywhere!
What is a Tier 1 journal, you may ask? While the title *can* be a little subjective, and the definitions can be slippery, in general, Tier 1 means the journal pays its contributors, has a wide distribution, often features writing that gets nominated for awards, holds contests, and is widely known. We have more information about submitting to Tier 1 here in this blog post written by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo.
Continue reading “Reportback from the sixth annual Submission Blitz”
Building Our Community
By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Let me begin by saying that we currently have an IndieGoGo Campaign to raise funds for our 2020 programming. Please consider donating and help us fight for gender parity in publishing. For those new to WWS, allow me to share some of our history and how we’ve arrived at our first ever fundraising drive.
In June 2011, Alyss Dixson and Ashaki M. Jackson invited me to help plan and host our first submission party. Our mission was to empower women writers to submit to journals in hopes of changing the gender disparity recorded by the first Vida Count. At this first party, I made quiche to share, we created a lending library of journals, and we set up a moving office with printer, paper, envelopes, and stamps. About six women met that day to set goals and submit work. Every time a person submitted the room cheered. With the exception of the moving office (since most journals now accept online submissions), these details have become the essential characteristics of any Women Who Submit event.
Over the years we continued to meet. One year we met about an average of once a season, and at one meeting we only had three participants, but we never stopped meeting.
In the summer of 2014, Writ Large Press launched their first #90for90 series, where they hosted 90 literary events in 90 days. Excited by the series, I reached out to then WLP partner, Jessica Ceballos and asked if there was room for a Women Who Submit event. She said yes, and we decided to host a panel on publishing a first book called “It’s a Book!” with author of Remedy for a Broken Angel, Toni Ann Johnson, author of Codeswitch: Fires from Mi Corazón, Iris de Anda, author of Harrowgate, Kate Maruyama, author of Spent, Antonia Crane, and hosted by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera. This was our first official public event.
That same summer Tisha, Ashaki, Ramona Gonzales, and myself got together to write our first grant proposal. We had several meetings where we parsed out duties and fined-tuned our narrative. In that grant we proposed a professional development workshop series. We weren’t awarded the grant, but since we’d done the work to create the program, we decided to move forward with implementing it.
In 2016 I invited small group of writers to create a leadership team, along with those already involved to help manage our growing community.
Over the last few years we’ve had workshops on contest strategies, mothering and writing, building a website, finding an agent, self-care, applying to workshops, residencies and fellowships, writing an essay, and so forth. We went from hosting events at different literary and cultural spaces around Los Angeles to now having an ongoing residency at the Exposition Park Regional Library, thanks to literary community advocate and librarian Eugene Owens. And we’ve presented at AWP, Binder Con, Lambda Lit Fest, Macondo Writers Workshop, among others.
In 2017 we were awarded our first programming grant from CCI Arts, which allowed us to make our workshops a regular bimonthly event, pay our guest speakers, gift small grants to our members to offset submission fees, livestream workshops for accessibility, and publish our first anthology (to be released at AWP 2020).
In 2019, thanks to a generous donation from Kit Reed’s family, we were able to offer three writers travel grants to attend writing workshops out of state, and we were awarded our second grant, a matching Local Impact grant from the California Arts Council.
To have this community continue we need your help! All this programming is offered for free, and it’s part of our mission to continue to offer impactful resources to women and non-binary writers for free, but it’s not free to build and manage.
Check out our IndieGoGo campaign, and help us empower writers submit and fight for gender parity in publishing.
Writing on a Budget: Compensating Circumstances Letter
By Lisbeth Coiman
There have been times in my life when I have gone through more than my heart could take. So much has happened to me. But I chose to brag about what saves me. In times of difficulties, I rely only on the moral support of friends and acquaintances who have expressed their encouragement to me. I take their words of wisdom, even a sympathetic smile, as the driving force to continue moving forward.
Continue reading “Writing on a Budget: Compensating Circumstances Letter”