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Breathe and Push: When Survivors Speak, Who Will Listen?

This week in my eighth grade classroom, five different holocaust survivors shared their stories with my English classes.

diverse groups of young people with a survivor

Two of the five survivors made it out of the death camps as young people. The other three were babies, hidden during the war. It took years of research for them to learn their own stories of survival so they could share them with us.

Those three babies were separated from their families. One, became an orphan, and was then adopted by family who had survived by fleeing Europe. Another had been hidden, along with her mother, by an entire village. The third hid with her mother until the end of the war, and then, because of American immigration laws, she was separated from her mother. Her mother immigrated to the United States, and the family this small child was left with kidnapped her. It took over several months for her mother to locate her daughter and reunite with her in America.

Leaving my classroom that day, my heart was burdened by these stories, but I was also buoyed by hope and perspective. Each of these survivors carried endless gratitude for those who helped them: for their rescuers, or the upstanders. They spoke of kindnesses, large and small, and they helped provide much needed perspective about how we treat one another today.

Maybe it was because I had read this editorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Ripping children from parents will shatter America’s soul” the night before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the survivors’ stories and of the babies and children and their families being torn apart at our borders. I couldn’t stop thinking about the most vulnerable among us. What could I do about the unforgivable lack of humanity our country is showing them?

And then we hear about lost children. Nearly 1,500. This number is unfathomable.

We lose keys.
We lose nickles.
We lose pens.
We do not lose children.

These unconscionable losses, children with mothers who are mourning, siblings still searching, families with so many questions. What do we do?

The president refers to immigrants as animals, and people go crazy.

Nearly 1,500 children are lost. These are not puppies or kittens. These are children. These are daughter and sons, brothers and sisters. What stories will they tell as adults? What will these survivors tell our children of this America?

And the rest of us?
Are we rescuers?
Are we upstanders?
Or have we become the animals?

For opportunities to help immigrant and refugee families, here are seven ways you can help. 

Noriko Nakada headshot in black and whiteNoriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Lady Liberty Lit, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Linden Avenue.

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My 12-Year Love Affair

Brunette woman sitting at a white table signing a book. Vase with oranges and orange flowers.

It began 12 years ago, the concept for my poetry collection Orange Lady. It was 2006, that summer I had gone to VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) in San Francisco, where I had taken a writing workshop with Chris Abani. At VONA, I connected with writers who also lived in Los Angeles, and upon my return, through them, I learned about Ruth Forman’s poetry workshops. It was in these workshops held at Ruth’s home in Los Angeles surrounded by willow trees and included Tai Chi lessons taught by her that the poetry collection came to me. Ruth always showed immense compassion toward our writing process and lovingly gave us permission to just write. That permission to just write sparked this emotional surge in me, and I wrote without care or judgment, with pure reckless abandonment. It was in these workshops that I began compiling the poems that would ultimately become part of my first poetry collection Orange Lady. Continue reading “My 12-Year Love Affair”

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A WWS Publication Roundup for April

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

Spring has sprung and with it comes a new batch of publications from the writers at Women Who Submit. Congratulations to all!

From “What Is the Value of Chloe Kim’s Gold Medal” by Julayne Lee at Cultural Weekly:

2018 marks the 30th anniversary of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics at which time South Korea’s baby export business was exposed to the world. After the 1988 Olympics, Korea greatly reduced the number of children being sent abroad. How far has Korea advanced since 1988, in particular from a social welfare perspective? Isn’t this what the Olympics are all about? “Putting human beings first. To build a better world through sport.” While the number of children being sent abroad is now less than 5% what it was during the Seoul Summer Olympics, it seems in contradiction with the Olympic charter and spirit to allow a country that exports and sells its people to host the Olympics.

Congratulations to Julayne whose book, Not My White Savior, was published in April!

From Sara Finnerty‘s “The Consuming Power of Hunger and Desire” at Catapult:

As a young woman, I was rarely in control of my body or my mind. I had hungers like snakes wildly contorting from my head. I hunger for food, for sex, first for my stomach to be full of a baby, then for my baby to be merged back into my body; I hunger for alcohol and pot, for obliteration; I hunger for my family: I want to hold them close and breathe them in but they are like holding a grenade. I hunger to change my story…

Also from Sara, “Dear Baby Witch,” at r.k.v.r.y:

We, the women in our family, have a problem with love, little girl. Love inside of us is a hard black hole, baseless, bottomless, always threatening to suck the rest of our bodies through its borders and to consume us until we no longer exist. Love is something too heavy to hold. Love isn’t something we think we deserve. We have been taught love means to clutch, to drag down into the dirt. Love is something to bear. But that is not what love is.

From “Rose McGowan Is You, Too” by Marnie Goodfriend at LA Weekly:

Brave. Unapologetic. Determined. Artist and actor Rose McGowan is a force in the fight against the pervasive sexism, harassment and assaults against women in Hollywood. She is angry, and rightly so.

Also from Marnie, “The First Girl: On the Loss of Friendship” at ravishly:

The first girl I fell in love with had broken toenails and hazel eyes the size of silver dollars. Ivy was a ballerina who grew up on a street named after a flower. We met as freshmen in college; our firefly bellies lit up with freedom and a sense of belonging to the world and each other. I’d wait for her outside of Bobst library where she had a work study binding the spines of ancient books too fragile to sit on a shelf without restitching their covers back together, even on the rainy days when wind swept my umbrella into a black crown above my head.

Congratulations to Marnie who won a scholarship for a retreat at the Vermont College of Fine Arts!

From Tina Rubin‘s “How a Woman Who Lived in a Windmill Taught Me that I Mattered” at The Coachella Review:

“Come,” she said, extending an arm, and walked me briskly around her “yard,” a grassy spit of land next to the canal. “Holland is below sea level,” she said in lilting English, “so we have the windmills! They pump water from the canals. Without them, the North Sea”—she pointed northwest—“would submerge us.” I looked in the direction of her finger, but all I could see were repeating rows of canals and windmills stretching across the landscape like an infinity mirror.

From Rachael Rifkin‘s “Here’s What Works Better than Forcing Your Kid to Say Sorry” at Today’s Parent:

“Say you’re sorry,” we say to our kids when they grab someone’s toy, hit their sibling, or do the many other undesirable things they do as they’re learning to respect other people’s possessions and bodies.

And that’s often where the conversation ends, with little if any discussion of what happened, why it was hurtful to the person they’re apologizing to, how they can address the hurt they caused, and what they can do to change their behaviour.

Check out Rachael‘s piece, “Forgotten Letters” featured on the podcast, Reservation Row.

From Noriko Nakada‘s “Education in Resistance” at Entropy:

I sat, my ass baking on the hot asphalt, staring up at the skyscraper that housed the bureaucracy I protested. Shadows of faces pressed up against the glass, faces attached to bodies who claimed to work for students, but went weeks, months, before seeing students or setting foot on a school site. I wondered what they did in that building all day.

From Arielle Silver‘s “5 Reasons Why a Writer Should Move to Tampa” at LitHub:

We writers need long moments when we can look away from the black and white of our stories and let our minds wander. Florida’s wild and strange beauty feels like another world, and Tampa’s unique flora and fauna can reunite a heady mind of words with sensual experiences.

From “Reverberations” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

A tony high school for teenaged girls is the setting for a predator in inspirational English teacher clothing. Victoria Namkung’s These Violent Delights mines a subject that is tragically, outrageously, maddeningly evergreen.

From Romaine Washington‘s “at the end of the devil’s breath” at voicemail poems:

…july.
wilted cereal in a bowl / we
drown in brown boiling milk.
the haze of sparklers and fire-
works add to the deafening heat
that drips into

august.

Congratulations to Eileen Cronin who was a quarterfinalist for the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship for her script Autobiography of a Secret.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong whose poems “Look Back,” “Mother Tongue,” and “The War Still Inside” were published in Dryland.

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Breathe and Push: Teaching While Breathless

Classroom boardBy Hazel Kight Witham

This year has been a breathless one. Lately a clutch of lines from a poem by Stevie Smith has played like a refrain:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I am, this year, much further out than I thought, and, it seems, nearly every day, I am adrift, no toe-touch in the murky depths I find myself, staring back at the shore of my life, not waving but drowning.

I spend each workday treading water in the high seas of California’s public education system. Not waving but drowning.

Continue reading “Breathe and Push: Teaching While Breathless”

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Behind The Editor’s Desk: Dr. Raina J. León

By Lauren Eggert-Crowe

Dr. Raina J. León is editor of The Acentos Review, a quarterly literary and arts journal that promotes and publishes Latinx work, and which has featured the work of several Women Who Submit members.

On their website, the review lets writers know, “The Acentos Review publishes poetry, fiction, memoir, interviews, translations, and artwork by emerging and established Latinx writers and artists four times a year.  The LatinX community is international and so, too, do we pledge to represent that international community.  We welcome submissions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, a combination of two languages, as well as the use of indigenous languages.

“The debate may rage forever as to who or what constitutes Latinx art. Here, there is no such identity crisis. We are already here, writing the histories of our neighborhoods, following the traditions of our ancestors, as well as the poetic traditions that came before us. To paraphrase Baldwin, the poet’s task as historian is to keep the story new, even when the telling is costly. This is the aesthetic we foster at Acentos. It is always about the word, the work, and it all begins here.”

Dr. León is passionate and exuberant about her work as an editor and educator. I asked her some questions about her work at The Acentos Review.

Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Dr. Raina J. León”

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Learning Your Audience: The Benefits of Submitting to Literary Journals, Grants, and Residencies (Even If You Don’t Get In!)

1950s cinema audience with 3D glasses

For this week’s “Closing the Gap” article, I’m bringing back an oldie but goodie from 2016 written by our web designer and co-organizer, Rachael Warecki. Since writing this article, Rachael has continued to receive publications and acceptances to residencies such as Ragdale Foundation and Wellstone Center. Most recently, she won the 2017 Tiferet Prize in fiction.  I hope her advice on finding your audience through submission inspires you to join us this Saturday at our WWS New Member Orientation and Workshop in the Los Angeles Arts District. We will be submitting to journals, contests, residencies and fellowships in real time. If you are not in the L.A. area, please consider submitting with us remotely from the comfort your home and be sure to notify us Twitter, Facebook or Instagram when you hit send, so we can cheer you on! 

– Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Closing the Gap Editor

Learning Your Audience: The Benefits of Submitting to Literary Journals, Grants, and Residencies (Even If You Don’t Get In!)

by Rachael Warecki

Two years ago, I decided I needed to focus my submission process. I’d received acceptances from some wonderful journals, but I’m ambitious as hell and I wanted to take my writing and submission goals to the next level. Around the same time, I also decided to apply for grants and residencies, so I started to target my submissions and applications more strategically.

As I’ve written previously, this approach has had some success, mostly in the form of personal rejections. But the editorial notes and feedback have given me more than just warm, fuzzy feelings of validation—they’ve given me a better sense of my most receptive audience. In the two years since I decided to submit more strategically, I’ve discovered that my writing seems to appeal mostly to editors and directors who are women. The judges and editors who’ve written me the warmest rejections have identified as women or represented women-centric organizations, or both.

Continue reading “Learning Your Audience: The Benefits of Submitting to Literary Journals, Grants, and Residencies (Even If You Don’t Get In!)”

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This is No Joke: Humor Journals Worthy of Your Submissions

Writing Expenses Ledger

By Anita Gill

Recently, I came across Olga Kazan’s article from The Atlantic entitled “Plight of the Funny Female.” According to a mess of studies with smart people writing on notepads, women are not seen as funny.

Many women don’t consider themselves funny. Humor is for men. When going to a comedy club, you’ll see the mostly male line-up of comedians and one woman shoved in there so they seem inclusive.

Part of the problem is that men have made women think they aren’t funny. But according to Kazan’s article, men are more aggressive when it comes to being funny. They try and fail and try again. And with that, they have a higher success rate of scoring a laugh.

Gee, why does that sound familiar? Oh right! Because it’s the same thing men are doing in the publishing world.

As you probably already know, there are loads of literary journals available for your poetry, prose, and other creative media projects. But if you’re like me, and you occasionally write the snarky satiric piece, something that you feel deep down can’t be put out in the world, you may feel lost. It’s a bit more challenging to find a journal or website that showcases funny writing. The hits are old and contain several sites with broken links or closed journals.

It’s like nobody sees humor as quality writing here.

Continue reading “This is No Joke: Humor Journals Worthy of Your Submissions”

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WWS Chapter Roundup: March Publications

A wood plank table with black glasses, a pine cone, a book, typewriter, a journal, pen, and arranged in a semi-circle. There is a text box with the words "Chapter Roundup March" in the bottom center of the image.

As seen on our Join Us! page, Women Who Submit has chapters all across North America! These are just a sample of the work WWS members are getting published:
Publications from the San Francisco Chapter (2)
Lead : Rebecca Gomez Farrell

From L.S. Johnson’s short story, “Properties of Obligate Pearls,” in Issue 020 of New Haven Review:

“You have to know what to look for. Younger, definitely—stones from the elderly are heavy and black, decades of layers dulling the luster. No one wants the weight of a grandmother’s worries around their neck.”

From Ruth Crossman’s “An Election Year” short story in Issue 91 of Sparkle + Blink:

“First the guy from Motorhead dies. On New Year’s Eve the billboards on the venues say RIP Lemmy, and the metal heads hold wakes and mock funeral services in his honor. I’m not a metal head or anything, but it sets a tone.”

Continue reading “WWS Chapter Roundup: March Publications”

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A WWS Publication Roundup for March

A laptop computer with an article titled "Submissions Made Simple" on the screen and a stack of literary journals sits on top of the laptop base, titles facing out

2018 has been a wonderful year for WWS members finding homes for their work and March was no exception. Congratulations to all the women who had work published this month!

Congrats to Carla Sameth who had three poems published at Unlikely. From “Secondary Inspections“:

A nose, a foreign look, a memory. “They just want to know if you are Jewish,”
your mom says of questions about what country you came from;
you know that you’ll never pass for who you are. Everyone foreign claims your face.
City of Angels swelters, everyone here from somewhere else, still they ask,
“Where were you born?” and “How do you say ‘Hello’?” You answer fearing hatred.
Fear you came by naturally after strip search and secondary inspections. Not beautiful.

Also check out “Mornings Still Scare Me,” which Carla saw published at the b’k.  Continue reading “A WWS Publication Roundup for March”