A giant H bordered by curly brackets invites the reader into a sleek layout. A revolving banner of arresting visual art looms over the clickable genres before the headline announces, “Hypertext Magazine: 10 years of fiction, essays, poetry, visual art, interviews.” In a time when it’s difficult for journals to stay afloat, the fact alone that Hypertext has been active for a decade is impressive, especially having started right after the recession. But it isn’t just longevity that makes Hypertext a magazine worth your time. Their dual publishing of online and print contains excellent writing, much of which is authored by women.
On the first morning of AWP at the second session, I stepped into “Lenguas Revoltosas: Writers of Color Disrupting Traditional Literary Zones” a reading featuring Olga Garcia Echeverria, Maya Chinchilla, Veronica Reyes, Sehba Sarwar, and Alan Pelaez. As I sat down I noticed a tapestry embroidered with bright flowers covering the podium and AWP signage. It reminded me of a tip from my poetry madrina, Denise Chavez who said to always carry a rebozo if only to decorate the ugly podiums we speak from. When I looked beyond the podium, I saw signs all along the walls written in different languages. As poets took their place at the podium, a sign just behind their heads read, “something has happened here / algo ha pasado aqui.” In front of each panelist’s seat, a sign with their name followed by a six-word memoir: “Maya Chinchilla: A Guatefemme tenderqueer volcanic ocean intuitive.” When I looked up from the words around the room, I noticed that the speakers themselves were also dressed with streams of bright ribbons in teal, wine, and golden rod. It felt as if the panel itself had become a kind of altar.
“We had phrases and words in English, Spanish, Spanglish, and Urdu. I took in a tapestry from Chiapas, Mexico and we draped the AWP podium with this. This was about beautifying and adding color, but it was also about making ourselves “at home” in spaces that have not traditionally felt welcoming (in either overt or subverted ways). I think something as simple as a special piece of cloth and silent signage can speak loudly. It sets the tone for an even before the event even begins.” – Olga Garcia Echeverria
Their spoken and silent words, their dressing the space became like offerings to those of us just beginning this journey through three days of AWP, and I was thankful for the poets’ care, for this reminder that this often cold and anxiety-ridden event, can be transformed into something beautiful.
The next morning, arrived to the conference in time to sit in support of Khadijah Queen, Bettina Judd, and Ashaki M. Jackson on their panel, “All Your Faves are Problematic: #Metoo and the Ethics of Public Call-outs.” These women worked together in the public call out of once-celebrated black poet, Thomas Sayer Ellis, who had assaulted women in their community. On the panel, they worked together to share their experiences with this public figure and how they went about taking him down. Part witness and part tutorial on how others can do this work for their own communities, they lead by example and shared space for Native American writers, Erika T. Wurth and Elissa Washuta, to speak about the fight they are currently in to call out Sherman Alexie and their need for allies.
“The literary community is immense without a structure to report predation and assault, nor is there a standard pathway toward restorative justice. We designed the panel to identify the problem and describe our methods to turn the Hunt on its head; instead of giving any more space and security to a predator, we shared ways we took away his freedom over a long period. It’s not prescriptive, but it’s replicable. They key is a network—in-person and virtual—lead by survivors, that is persistent and clear on the end game.”– Ashaki M. Jackson
One of the most powerful statements the panel made was requiring the audience to write questions on small pieces of paper that they, the panelists handed out and collected. The questions were then curated and read by the panelists before being answered. No one was going to speak in this space without their consent, and it illustrated the kind of diligence needed to protect women writers of color in spaces like these, which are crucial for advancement in literary careers. “This is indeed a workplace,” Ashaki Jackson said on the day of. The message is behave professionally, or women will ban behind survivors to have you removed.
Directly after this panel, I went to “Writing & Mothering: Black Women Writing Under a Quadruple “Minority” in America” featuring LaCoya Katoe, Cassandra Lane, Ryane Nicole Granados, Tameka Cage Conley, and Cherene Sherrard. Moderator, LaCoya Katoe began the discussion by recounting the months leading up to her first child’s birth.
“I was pregnant in 2014 and 2015, and our news cycle was literally littered with black death— Trayvon Martin murdered in July 2013. Eric Garner murdered in July 2014. Mike Brown murdered in August 2014. Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Tamir Rice in November 2014. Eric Harris in April 2015. And these were just the names making national news; never mind the names of men I personally know and who were daily being affected by the criminal justice system. I did not want to raise a black son in America. But my son was coming, and I had to prepare for him.
Like always when I’m desperate, during this time, I reached out to my sisters, particularly those friends of mine already in the throes of mothering black boys in America. I reached out for help, guidance, support, tips, suggestions, anything they could offer at the time to help me process this fear. This panel was born out of those initial heart-wrenching conversations between friends about raising black boys in America, about protecting them, loving them in a country/world that doesn’t seem to. Over the last three years, we’ve morphed into something of a support group, our very own Mama Collective.” – LaCoya Katoe
These five women, mothers of black sons, had banned together to transform their pain and fear into power, creation, and even joy. During the panel, they were kind and giving with each other and with the audience. They shared insights on how to create “a room of one’s own.” They shared mental heath practices. Ryane Nicole Granados shared, “I’ve weaponized my words. They are my super power.” But most of all they shared their sisterhood.
On the third day of the conference, I had my own panel, “The Word on the Street: How to Start & Run a Community Literary Series,” and volunteer hours to complete at my MFA’s table, but I started with the panel, “That’s not Relatable: Radical Teaching on Race and Intersectionality in Writing” featuring Cynthia Guardado, Marisol Baca, Luivette Resto, and Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez. A collective of Latina academics, I was moved by their candidness with aggressions and hostilities faced in their classrooms, break rooms, and office hours.
At the beginning of the panel, Cynthia Guardado asked the audience to write down a list of biases students and colleagues see when we walk into a room. I wrote, “woman, brown, young, artist,” and it reminded me of all the times I was minimized in the classroom by the simple act of a male colleague stepping into the room with me. According to equalrights.org, “Latinas are experiencing the worst pay gap in the nation” earning of 55 cents to every dollar made by white men. We are undervalued in our classrooms and rarely seen as experts, but I appreciated how this panel used technology to change the narrative. Slides projected each panelist’s bio, major publications and handles as they spoke, and slides were also used to share resources. Cynthia Guardado even encouraged the audience to take photos to reference later.
“As far as social media and resources, I based this on considering what I often felt was missing at panels I attended. I wanted our panel to be more than a one time conversation so if people wanted to reach out to us for support, they could follow us or email us (of course I also wanted to highlight our publications because they are great accomplishments). I’m also looking for panels where I can grow as a writer and educator and often find myself leaving panels without tangible things I can use later. This was very important to me for our panel, and I knew we would have a lot of conversation and wanted to include slides with resources, tips, and information because sometimes its a lot to process. I also applied my teaching methods using auditory and visual techniques through technology to make the whole experience more tangible for folks.” – Cynthia Guardado
I finished this last day of AWP with bonding time with my two MFA-poet sisters, Nikia Chaney and Allison Tobey. Allison lives in Portland and let us stay in her guest bedroom. After a long day of panels, readings, and one dance party, we sat together on the guest queen bed and chatted about our poetry and our shared love of Fiona Apple’s lyricism. We applauded each other on how far we’ve come in our careers since graduating 10 years ago. In our little collective we have an editor, a publisher, and an organizer, but close to 1am on Sunday morning, the only thing that mattered was that we still had each other.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. A Macondo Writers’ Workshop member, she has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit.
Taxes looming in the background Technical support calls drowned the hours reserved for a scene. The uncooperative screen Shows Deductions 1099 Schedule C A foreign language to me
Go for a walk at the beach escape the whole number siege
Expenses multiply While the gains dissatisfy In the spread sheet display Not-enough teaching hour downplay The effort to create a breadwinner Out of the tepid words of the beginner
Groceries offer distraction An easy task without extraction
Paying the bills is not the issue Change a flat tire without a fissure Fight an intruder I can do without sudor Taxes, a whole new fiend I never esteemed.
Lavender salve on my hands To tackle IRS demands.
The following publications are seeking work by emerging writers:
1. Los Nietos Press Word limit: 48-100 pages Genre: Poetry and Short Stories Submission Fee: $0 Submission Guidelines
2. Coffee House Press Word limit: full length manuscripts / collections Genre: literary novels, short fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction Submission Fees: $0 Submission Guidelines
3. Rabid Oak Word limit: Under 1,000 words Genre: Poetry, flash fiction, flash non-fiction Submission Fees: $0 Submission Guidelines
Finally, the winter chill has started to thaw into a warmer, sunnier spring. Making the days even sunnier are these amazing publications from the members of Women Who Submit. Congratulations to all!
At 9:30 that morning, I climbed onto the roof of my church, thankful for the overcast sky. I had committed to help at our church work party a few weeks before the government openly started separating and imprisoning families at our borders and criminalizing refugees seeking a better life, like my father did 60 years ago when he immigrated from Hungary. I had considered going downtown to an occupy protest, but I chose to be on the roof among an array of brooms and rakes, a leaf blower, and five other church members. Our task was to clear pine needles from the roof.
What I thought would be a summer job in a small, college town in Indiana, became a time of unexpected and sometimes tragic encounters with other women’s lives. In my early twenties, I just finished my first year of teaching and needed work for the summer.
Like most people, I find cockroaches disgusting and repulsive, but one cockroach taught me a lesson just at the time I needed it. I’m afraid of bugs…always have been. I still remember them knocking and buzzing at the screen as I tried to sleep on a hot night without air conditioning in Chicago when I was a young girl.
From “Testament” by Lituo Huang at The Grief Dialogues:
On the day of your passing I watched your friends scatter—
some, to high places—tops of trees to wave their branches in winds that waved yours, tips of staves, ascending keening notes—
Many endometriosis symptoms have been normalized by our culture, hovering under the golf-sized umbrella with the label “female problems.” The injustice in this is when the invisible illness is diagnosed and managed earlier, women have better options and better help managing their pain. Even though there is no known cause or cure, a diagnosis is critical in creating a care plan with your doctor to help mitigate these symptoms and puts an end to the question, what on earth is wrong with me?
She has begun to spin. Thirty minutes on the bike, thirty minutes on the weight circuit, trying to follow along. Keep her body moving, round and round.
The gym sits in the little town of Sierra Madre where her older sister lives with her family.
She is the middle sister who lives nearby. Like the Rose Parade floats, she makes the trip from Pasadena traveling on Sierra Madre Boulevard, but the floats only go once a year on their voyage to their holding spot near Sierra Madre, on Orange Grove Avenue.
Congratulations to Lisbeth Coiman whose essay, “Grey Hair of Desire,” was published in Unchaste Anthology Vol. 3!
Congratulations to Lisa Richter whose essay, “Flood,” was published in Joomag!
When I moved to Los Angeles and escaped Oregon over 25 years ago, I wasn’t just trying to escape the cloudy, dark, rainy, snowy winters. I was also escaping the homogeneity of the white, Christian majority that dominates the Pacific Northwest.
The diversity of
LA has kept me here for decades, and the weather is a welcome bonus. I gained
sunny skies, temperate winters, and long summers that even sneak summery days
into winter, spring, and fall.
But this year, with wet like we haven’t seen in a long while, and a cold snap that gripped the southland so tight it even sent a few flurries down into the foothills, I was reminded of my fragile mental state on cold, dark days.
When the dark of
winter sinks in, even in sunny Southern California, I feel like sleeping,
hibernating, pulling to covers tighter and longer and keeping my eyes closed to
the world. I forget to exercise, to write, to eat green things, and sometimes I
even forget to breathe. I wish for a snow day, and dream that, for just a
minute, I live somewhere with snow. I feel like I would trade away my entire LA
life for a single day off.
I should no
longer be surprised when I find myself swallowed in this slothful seasonal
state. But each year, it takes three, or four, or five weeks for me to realize what’s
happening, that I’ve come off the rails, that I’m stuck in first gear, that
even though my foot is on the pedal and I’m flooring it, I can only go so fast,
and I’m probably doing real harm to my engine.
Thankfully, spring is here. The days are stretching longer and I am at the page, putting words down, one after the other. Yes, I’m still hitting snooze, and eating cake and French fries whenever I can. I’m not writing or reading as much as I would like, but I am going to be gentle on my winter-hating self.
A boy and a girl ready to play some ball. It must be spring.
I will breathe. I will get a column out into the world. I will revise and resubmit some poems and essays. I will watch my kids hitting baseballs and softballs into a blue sky. I will go for a run. I will even get up to Portland for AWP and when I’m there, I will engage with the writing world. I will, somehow, welcome spring.
As writers flock
to rainy, gloomy Portland, I hope we can all shake off the winter that might still
be clinging. And if you can’t, at least know you are not alone. Depression and
seasonal affective disorder are real. Please take care of yourselves as we all crane
our necks toward spring. Find the wildflower fields, the cherry blossoms, the
sun shining bright for a little bit longer each day. But if it is all too much,
please listen to the small voice that knows when you might need some help.
Listen to that voice and reach out if you need it, because we need you.
Noriko Nakada is a public school teacher and 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.
AWP is next week, and Women Who Submit will be representing in full force! Our headquarters leaders, chapter leads, and members from around the country will be showing up in Portland for this annual conference. We are reading our poetry. We are signing our books. We are hosting dance parties. We are hosting a happy hour. We are launching our books and speaking out against the current President. We are on panels that talk about starting a literary series, submitting our work for publication, being an adopted person of color, mothering, mental illness, epistolary writing, and forbidden narratives. Just try to go one day at AWP without attending a WWS panel, reading, or reception. It’s impossible. We’re everywhere!
And if it’s your first time at AWP and you want some tips, check out our blog post from three years ago, How To Do AWP.
I didn’t know about writing workshops until after I graduated from my MFA program in 2009. How I completed two years of an MFA without ever hearing about summer writing workshops, I’ll never know. But it wasn’t until two years later in 2011, when a friend I met at a reading for the now defunct Splinter hGeneration told me to apply to the brand new summer workshop, Las Dos Brujas, organized by Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban. I applied solely on her recommendation and did so without understanding what I was applying for. Months later, we found ourselves on a two-day road trip through the southwest to our destination of Ghost Ranch Retreat Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico (home of Georgia O’Keefe) for a five-day writing retreat with workshop leads Juan Felipe Herrera, Denise Chavez, Kimiko Han, Chris Abani, and Cristina. Eight years later, this workshop nestled in the elbow of red mesas, with its early morning hikes and sunset writing circles, is still in my top five writing experiences of all time.
A writing workshop is typically about a three to five-day experience where you pay to have your writing workshopped by a celebrated writer in the literary world as well as a group of your peers (some workshops are generative). To be invited to a summer workshop, you have to apply with a sample of your work and pay a submission fee. The total cost to attend can vary and may include the cost of the workshop (typically a three-hour chunk of time with your mentor and peers), room and board, nighttime entertainment (drinks and dancing), and travel.
I’ve attended four different workshops in my tenure as a poet: Las Dos Brujas, Macondo Writers Workshop, Tucson Festival of Books’ Masters Writing Workshop, and VONA Voices. These workshops in differing degrees have been geared towards writers of color, focused on social justice writing, and featured mentors of color. When I applied to Las Dos Brujas, this wasn’t something I was looking for, but once I attended and saw the kind of community and kinship you can find at these workshops, something I didn’t always find in my MFA program, I knew it was something I needed.
No two writing workshops are the same. Prestige, mission, mentor selection, size, location, and structure all affect the overall tone of a workshop experience. For example, Bread Loaf is the most prestigious and competitive writing workshop in the nation and it’s also the longest with a 10-day commitment. If you are looking to find an agent this might be the workshop for you, but it probably won’t be the best place to find community. Cave Canem, Kundiman, and Cantomundo, are community workshops for people of color. The selection processes for these are competitive due to limited space and high demand, but they offer major community support for those accepted. All three typically have application deadlines before January 1, but Jack Jones Retreat, “open exclusively to women of color writers and nonbinary writers of color,” is currently taking applications for their fall retreat. Two summer workshops still open are Tin House and Community of Writers-Squaw Valley.
No matter what you are looking for in a writing workshop, you can probably find one that fits your needs. When looking into these opportunities be sure to familiarize yourself with the mentors because they drive a major part of the experience as the facilitator of the daily, three-hour workshop. If you don’t know them, read their work (always read their work), and ask friends about their own experiences with these writers and spaces. You are spending time and money to participate, and one lesson I’ve learned is literary accolades don’t necessarily mean a person is a good mentor or instructor. Do yourself a favor and research.
The benefits of attending a workshop on the most basic level are access to writers you admire and enjoying time spent with like-minded people. You can also walk away with your work being read by a mentor and peers, hopefully with helpful notes on how to improve your work, and maybe a few writing exercises for later. Long-lasting benefits can vary as a summer workshop can be used as a place to find future readers, editors, and collaborators, to soundboard ideas for projects in process, and to build relationships with awesome writers across the nation.
When my poetry book, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications) was released in 2016, one of my biggest goals was to create a book tour for myself. I decided on a west coast tour from Los Angeles to Seattle, and in the planning stages I reached out to people I had met at Macondo, Las Dos Brujas, and VONA. Thanks to help from those communities, I was able to book events in Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and later in New York City, Las Cruces, San Antonio, and Houston. Another long-term reward was when Las Dos Brujas returned in 2017 with a workshop in San Francisco, I was invited by Cristina García and her team to lead a one-hour talk on applying to workshops, residencies, and fellowships based off my essay, “Building Up to Emerging.”
Of course, not every workshop will produce long-lasting friendships, partnerships, and job opportunities, but with each one I attend I do my best to enter the experience like a sponge and absorb all the knowledge, creativity, laughter, dance parties, ping-pong tournaments, and mind-melds that I miss out on the rest of the year sitting at home and working alone.
In the end, to attend a summer writing workshop is a major financial commitment, so I suggest doing your research and looking for a workshop that fits your needs. Many offer scholarships to help offset costs, and if you are a WWS member, in 2019 we are offering two scholarships of $340 to attend a conference, workshop, or residency through the Kit Reed Travel Fund for Women-Identifying and Non-Binary Writers of Color.
Happy submitting!
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. A Macondo Writers’ Workshop member, she has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit.
Most writers I know, including myself, are activists or behind-the-scenes supporters of several causes. When the political conjuncture we are living through in America threatens everybody’s sanity, writers struggle to focus before stepping up. Facing a myriad of social issues hurts these writers both emotionally and financially.
Creativity
dilutes in the stream of information/petitions/demonstrations,
and the ordinary responsibilities of work. I can’t even come close to imagine what
it is like to live through these times with children to take care of. The emotional
load seems to grow by the minute. The writer feels like borrowing a “welder’s
mask” to look at the blinding reality without hurting, without revealing tears.
With
the emotional burden of political activism comes the added weight of financial
demands. Bills can pile up easily on top of donations and contributions. The
line between urgency and necessary disappears in the mists of a stream of
crisis. We wake up to news of mass shootings, racial violence, and sexual
violations of immigrant minors in detention. At work, fundraisers and pot-lucks
drain the bank account. Add to that a humanitarian crisis in a homeland and you
wish going to sleep on the eighth day of the month and wake up on payday.
When my budget became unbalanced, like a flight attendant, I told myself, “put on your own oxygen mask before helping others, even your family.” My livelihood depends on my mental health. Without money, I can’t write. Since writing is therapeutic for me, my sanity is at risk.
That’s
when I jumped at the opportunity to take a scholarship for a social consciousness
poetry class online, Poetry for Survival taught by Xochitl Bermejo. Through this
class, I’m learning that I can’t see the page through tears. By detaching
myself emotionally from the issues dearest to me – Venezuela and immigration – I
hope to bring my unique perspective of the devastating reality of which I’m both
a witness and a subject.
Perhaps
the only advise I have for my readers tonight
is to take a social consciousness vacation before taking a stand. Disconnect, put
the check book in a locked box and forget where you hide the key. Go for an extended
walk by the beach. Only then, your voice will sound clear.
This month, the short list includes some free submission opportunities.
1.The Booklist – seeking reviewers of diverse backgrounds The Booklist is part of the American Library Association. Genre: All Languages: English and Spanish Application Fee: $0 Submission Guidelines
2. Green Linden Press Genre: Poetry, interviews and reviews Submission fee: Up to $12.50 Deadline: March 20, 2019 Submission Guidelines
3. Catapult Tiny Nightmares: An Anthology of Short Horror Fiction Genre: Short Horror Fiction Payment: $100 Submission fee: 0 Deadline: May 1, 2019 Word count: Under 1200 words Submission Guidelines
4. Ripples in Space: Flash Fiction for Weekly Podcast Gener: Flash Fiction Submission fee: $6 Deadline: Open Word count: Max 1500 words Submission Guidelines
5. Dusk and Shiver Magazine Genre: Fiction, Poetry, Artwork Submission fee: $0 Deadline: April 13, 2019 Word count: 5,000 to 7,000 words (Fiction) Submission Guidelines
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 lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Harbor Occupational Center and speaks for NAMI about living with a mental disorder.
It comes in nerve-frizzling, stomach-turning uncertainty. I
scour every sentence, every phrase, triple second-guess myself. I ask my
trusted readers to give me thoughts and cuts and end notes and validation
before I submit.
It takes me months sometimes to craft and hone and spit-shine a piece until I deem it ready for world. I imagine the world will judge all the micro-choices, the thin premise, the overwrought vines of ideas I could not prune back. And so I draft, and revise, and put aside, pick up again, add some, cut more, trim, reorder, cut the opening, extend the ending, carve, whittle, sculpt. I workshop myself weary.
And even then, I am unsure, doubting, wondering: who will
read, what will they think, is it as perfect as I can make it to be beyond
reproach, likeable, no—loveable—to all. I want to engage with the world, and my
people-pleasing bones make it very hard to do so without worrying what others
will think of this collection of words.
My first published essay took a sizeable lifetime and an MFA program to create, excerpted from a still unpublished memoir I had spent years writing and revising. I loved that piece (“The Storm Between Us” at Bellevue Literary Review), but the work that went into chiseling it into diamond-sharp focus was months and months in the making.
I wonder if the chiseling was my worry. It was hard stone to
handle. All the revising was procrastination of a sort. It was nerve-wracking
offering this story to the world: a braided piece about the DNA I inherited
from my grandmother, her hospitalization in Galveston, a dip back into the
hurricane history of that seaside town that mirrored the storm of mental
illness that threatened to crush us both.
When I told my father that I was writing about my own hospitalization a decade after the hell of it he said, “Why? Why would people want to read about that?” I want to say that he was trying to protect me, this man who talks about everything but the stories I most want to hear. I want to say he was not saying my story does not matter. That he was trying to shield me from criticism perhaps, or a lack of regard. I want to be generous in the face of his disregard.
But his question echoes across the years still. Even though I
know now and knew then that my story matters—our stories matter—and are worth
being well-told. Worth something not just to the heart of the listener or
reader, but to the heart of the teller, the writer.
And yet. The question still dogs me as I try to help
manuscripts years in the making find the light. As I become the advocate for my
own story because sometimes your queries go unanswered, and emails from
contests all start in apology and sometimes the agent shops a work and there
are no bites and they quit the literary world for another one a bit more kind.
Still: I am learning to breathe and push the work out. I am
learning to submit. Poems are easiest, bite-sized, not so demanding of working
and reworking that prose and longer works require. Perhaps not so vulnerable to
judgment. But still there are those jitters when I know a piece will go up, and
someone might read it, maybe even my father, and I do not know how or if it
will be received. I do not know what I am blind to in my own work, what I say
that might offend. I do not know if you are even here with me still, holding on
to the end, giving this a few minutes of your precious time.
There are many worthy words out there, and claiming space
for my own is part of the writing life I have the hardest time with. But the
words are worth it. And so: to submit is the precise word for this process. I
submit despite the fear, I submit despite certain rejection, I submit despite
the echoes of my father and the self-doubt and the uncertainty. I submit, I
submit, I submit and every time, there is less apology and more clarity.
Hazel Kight Witham is a writer, teacher, activist, and artist whose work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Rising Phoenix Review, Angels Flight, Sixfold, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, Lunch Ticket and Lady/Liberty/Lit. She lives and breathes in Los Angeles with her family. www.hazelkightwitham.com
I remember her breath quickening, holding her breast while she touched herself; I was too selfish to make love to her because I was already off and running, ruminating. As if I was on the ride: Soarin’ over California in Disneyland, California Adventure. I take notes like I’m already remembering the embrace I’ll never feel again when she’s gone. Something will take her away; I’ll think about how far away I floated, as she stroked my body in the morning, just behind me, as she leaned into my labia, my clit (I write these words as if I always had, but they come out awkwardly).
It is only in a musical that brings to life caricatures of British snootiness that the horror of several consecutive murders can turn into jolly entertainment.
One of the best examples of this comic portrayal of ignorance, in this reviewer’s opinion, was the lofty lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith, who was desperate to find “a place so low that hope itself has been abandoned.”
It’s slow as shit at Showgirls. Summer in the Coachella Valley is a sadistic blow-dryer you can’t turn off, and business comes to a screeching halt because all my regulars leave for their other houses in colder places or go on fancy European vacations with their wives. I’m “Candy” here but my regulars call me “The Lady in Red.” Riley and I always work on Tuesdays, waiting for the rare drifter to pop in for a happy hour beer and a quick blast of AC so we can talk him into a twofer and pay our bills. Riley’s the best pole dancer here by a long shot — she can do the Running Man while suspended in midair. Right now, she’s a superhero perched to fly, but there’s no one to dangle upside down for, so she leans on her fists with her elbows on the bar and talks, while her long, toned legs drip off the barstool. She tells me about her recent relapse and her anxiety disorder while our buns stick to the vinyl barstools.
There was no bodily autonomy in the house I grew up in. No privacy, no warm baths without ice water dumped from above, no agency over my body, and my brothers and I had no say in what we ate. Three seemingly random vegetables were force-fed. Why those three? Why not? They were the favorites of the reigning narcissist of the house. They were our mother’s favorites. Reject them, reject her. The essence of narcissistic abuse.
From “Water Tank” (and other poems) by Sehba Sarwar at Paper Cuts Magazine:
“It’s like you fell from the sky,” he said mystified, but he didn’t know I conjured him in a new moon. Bees buzz in his ears ordering him to work till callouses grow into houses for their dreams.
