The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during November 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in November 2023!
Los Angeles residents have always been stereotyped as Hollywood physically fit with a green juice in hand while driving down Rodeo Drive. I do occasionally enjoy a green juice but I don’t make a habit out of frequenting tourists’ traps. I pass the Disney concert hall while on my way to Chinatown, East L.A., Little Tokyo, or mid-city. Away from the glitz of Tinseltown, the heart beat of the city exists. Some Angelenos leave to seek more affordable pastures while others linger in the only place that they will ever call home. Some come from areas torn by war or in search of the American dream. This is a place where dreams are made and broken. Perhaps that is why I write and listen to stories about Angelenos. We thrive in a paradigm of contradictions.
I always remember to pack a pair of shades, water, sunscreen, notepad and pen while canvassing Los Angeles on the public transportation. They’ve extended the train lines, which suits me just fine. I can lumber around Sawtelle taking in the savory aroma of bone broth, dip out and be in Mariachi Plaza to hear a serenade while the glare of the afternoon sun beams down on all of those poor souls stuck on one of the freeways, which resemble parking lots during rush hours. I watch people as they walk down the street, bus tables in restaurants, attend to their children, or sit at the local coffee shop typing away on their computers while sipping on their coffee. I usually choose to write at home but the city and its inhabitants inspire me to step away from my desk and home library.
I yearn for the smell of incense, buttery Salvadoran quesadillas, jasmine, and marinated meats. I can smell all of these things from the crowded streets when I walk down just the right one. I sometimes wonder about the people that I encounter in those brief moments. What is their life like? What do we have in common? What are our differences?
In a place as diverse as Los Angeles, differences are easy to pick out, but it’s the similarities that can make people bond and feel empathy for others. Stories can be a powerful bridge to understanding one another. On occasion, I find myself imagining that the woman in front of the temple with the incense sticks is praying for forgiveness. The man in front of me at the panadoria is buying breakfast for his family. The basketball players whose movements blow the scent of fresh jasmine onto the street might be worried about their upcoming finals. The cook in the taco truck is wondering how he’s going to make ends meet this month. I don’t know their stories, but I know that we are alike in some ways, and that thought alone makes me take out my notepad.
I sometimes jot down a few notes and ask a few questions here and there. Occasionally, the answers yield more questions that will go without a response. I try to understand people who may have vast differences from me by researching certain topics related to their experiences.
Spending hours in a library conducting research on history, culture, and language is helpful to my writing. I‘d be a liar if I didn’t admit that the mildew smell of used books is a comfort for me. Going to a library is like coming home. My research doesn’t address all of the questions that I have from talking to people. There are times when emotions and the past guide reactions. Feelings can be difficult to explain or even comprehend. Who knows why one motorist will roll down their window and cuss at another person for cutting them off on the freeway while another one won’t even bother. Emotions about situations are a reflection of the past.
I’ve drawn the conclusion that to live here, one has to admit how much and how very little they know about the city’s residents. Although the differences between us can be numerous, we can always offer empathy. I listen with compassion and gain an insight that I would never have acquired had I not spoken to my fellow Angelenos. These life lessons help me in my day-to-day tasks as well as in my writing.
I ran into someone carrying a power tool on the bus. His eyes lit up when he saw the name of the school that I work for emblazoned across my chest in huge white letters on a fire hydrant red t-shirt. He asked if I was a teacher and what subject I taught. When I told him I work with small children, he told me stories about his daughters that ended with him instructing me on how to use a power drill. I sometimes think of him when I write stories about families. That twinkle in his eyes reflects the same starry gaze that I have when I reminisce about my own little “knuckleheads.” Our astronomically different lifestyles bear resemblance as we connect over children and unfinished projects in my apartment. I learn a fair amount about myself while talking to others. Their experiences guide me.
The most prolific life lessons that I have had through stories comes from the families that I work with as a preschool teacher. I used to work for non-profit organizations in areas that experienced frequent gang activity, poverty, and violent crime. The parents told me stories about being refugees, being harassed by cops, not having enough resources for their children. I had to take notes as I devised a way to best help with their children’s needs.
We are people of color, dark skinned and historically marginalized. I saw a bit of myself reflected in their appearance. We shared the same spaces. I visited the same grocery stores, restaurants, and walked down the same streets. In those instances, I become a part of a community story. We would vibe about the store clerk who always picked their nose when they thought that no one is looking. Complain about the higher prices at our favorite heladeria.
I grew up in an all-American suburban town in the San Gabriel valley. Just another pissed off teen in A.P. English writing poetry and journaling. My parents were able to provide a decent living for me and my little brother. While growing up, I didn’t have the same barriers to resources as my students’ families. Learning about life experiences that differ from mine expands my understanding and awareness of the human condition. This fact makes their stories resonate with me. I don’t focus on writing stories that reflect life experiences that are solely my own. A good book makes the reader relate to the characters in some way. A great book will make you emotionally invested in the characters. I am a speculative fiction writer. My aim is to intrigue readers by creating relatable characters in imaginative moments that no one on this good green earth has experienced.
My favorite books growing up were fairy tales or what I would dub as “whimsical flights of fantasy.” My writing reflects my earlier reading choices, but with a sprinkle of darkness and culture. My plot lines used to rack up body counts as if I was playing a video game. I’ve slightly amended my ways and began to focus more on relationships between characters without the climactic death scenes. Some life situations are just as stressful as being torn limb from limb by zombies. Maybe I’ve changed. Motherhood has become a prominent theme in my stories. Exploring folklore from around the world has taken root in my fiction. Fairy tales where Angelenos reside in conflict. Not every story has to have a happy ending, but it always has to end.
The stories that my past students’ families told me were also full of hope. In a city brimming with dreams, hope is contagious. There’s always a chance for a better tomorrow. At the end of the year, the center that I used to work for hosts a pre-kindergarten graduation. Folks filled up the auditorium while clutching balloons, bouquets, and stuffed animals. Some people have to stand because there aren’t enough chairs. The children perform a few songs, dawn graduation caps, and eat over frosted pieces of white sheet cake. The families shifted together. The metal folding chairs were scattered against the wall to make room for the adults’ latest gossip. An older cousin just graduated high school or college. A father just opened his own small business. A mother is expecting a new addition to the family. We share sorrow and rejoice in triumphs.
The last graduation that I attended at the center was a type of farewell ceremony for me as well. By the end of the week, I’d be starting at a new center. The preschool that I was starting at had raised beds for gardening, several fenced in play yards, and a beautiful interconnecting bike path. Outdoor play would be very different from the scenes of police brutality reenacted by my past students. When I told the families that I was close with that I was switching schools and that the new school would serve wealthy families, they rolled their eyes or gave me menacing looks. They were pissed off that I could leave them to serve families that had their pick of great teachers. I politely sympathized and took their outrage and disgust as a complement to my care of their children and teaching abilities.
Everyone faces challenges in life, although the challenges of the new families that I would be serving might be different, they were still plagued with their own obstacles in life. I couldn’t help but question my decision to leave the center for a more privileged population though. The choice to leave the center was not made light-heartedly. I wanted to stay because I had fostered relationships with the families, but ultimately my desire for new challenges and experiences had won out.
I occasionally run into my old students and people in the community that I once served. Our paths intersect when I stop by my favorite restaurants or bakeries in the area. We embrace, talk, and laugh about the old times. Tears come to the corners of our eyes while remnants of our bond bring back once forgotten feelings. Sometimes when I say goodbye, I can feel their resentments in their hugs or handshakes. Other times, I feel their affection and sorrow. As Angelenos, we bring meaning to each other’s lives in our everyday encounters. Stories told and untold about our differences and similarities. Tall tales that seem like legends among the temples, taco trucks, coffee shops, skyscrapers, and congested freeways.
In a city as crowded and spread out as L.A. you can marvel in her diversity. Draw strength from it. The promise of a better future draws people from different walks of life to this city. No matter what, there is always a tomorrow and another story to write.
Sara Chisolm is a speculative fiction writer based in the Los Angeles area. Her urban fantasy short stories “Serenade of the Gangsta,” “The Fortune of the Three and the Kabuki Mask,” and “We Found Love as the Undead,” were featured in the second and third volumes of the Made in L.A. fiction anthology series. Sara has co-edited for the third, fourth, and fifth books for the annual Made In L.A. anthology.
Gifted $2,000 in individual writers’ grants through the Ashaki M. Jackson No Barrier Regrant and Kit Reed Travel Fund (a $500 increase from the previous year)
Returned to hybrid programming by hosting 8 public events across the city including our 10th annual SUBMIT 1 Submission drive at Pocha LA.
Announced, curated, and edited the third WWS anthology, TRANSFORMATION, to be released by the new year in partnership with Jamii Publishing
Created mentorships for 9 of our members through a special opportunity with Reyna Grande
Established new WWS chapters in Portland, ME, Bloomington, IN, Austin, TX, and San Diego, CA with a Canada chapter launching in early 2024.
A #GivingTuesday tax deductible donation from you will mean helping WWS financially support more writers in 2024, grow our in-person programming while staying committed to accessibility through virtual options, promote our writers to a wider community, and ensure marginalized writers receive the same free support.
I was coming off of a weeklong high at one of the nation’s most prolific writers’ retreats and heading home, when I found myself grounded for an extra day in Columbus, Ohio. The airline I booked my travel with had reneged on their promise to get me back to New York safely–THRICE. Everything is by divine design though, because had it not been for those canceled flights, I would not have found myself in an Uber, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, headed to the main library in downtown Columbus. It was the library’s 150th anniversary, and it culminated in the Columbus Bookfest that was packed with readers, writers, books, craft talks and coffee. A writer’s oasis. I decided to close my impromptu day perusing the bookstore the library created on the second floor, filled with all the works of the authors present for the Bookfest. In the sea of covers and spines, a book grabbed me.
Ripe by Negesti Kaudo, the cover art is an illuminous majesty of work, rich and full with dynamic colors; bold, loud, beautiful. Plump lips covered in shimmering gold and bronze lipstick with the book’s title neatly placed across the center of the mouth. The cover screamed out to me, this book is rich! It is. This collection of essays is the author’s impeccable debut that explores race from a variety of intersections that all lead to what it means to her to be a Black woman in America.
Consider the invitation into the collection–the title, Ripe. When we hear that word, instinctively, fruit comes to mind. So it is in this body of work, the exploration of what it means to take up space–to be full of such goodness and sweetness on the inside (Flesh); to have to be hard and tough externally to protect that goodness (Rind); to know the origins of how you came to be and what you can and will become (Seed). To quote Kaudo’s dedication, this book is, “…for every other Black girl who learned to bloom in the dark.”
The collection of twenty-seven essays delivered to the reader using hybrid as form in some pieces, and divided into three sections, “Rind,” “Flesh,” “Seed,” explores race and culture from a most intimate and detailed perspective. The language is sharp. The images, vibrant. Still, this collection raises questions in the reader that Kaudo makes every attempt to answer through an exploration of self. It’s a look at the author’s experiences, nuances, and emotions and how these culminated into the woman she is and the woman she will come to be. It is also a recognition that the world often does not see her in the way she sees herself; often doesn’t see any Black woman’s depth and magnificence.
The opening essay, “Marginalia,” (a title which Kaudo uses twice more in the collection in different context and content) is to prepare the reader for the ride they are about to willingly take. Should apprehension about the collection’s subject matter swell inside you, that is dispelled by the end of the first page. Kaudo’s style of posing the intellectual question and then giving both example and answer in prose is dynamic. “When do children recognize race? When do children begin to point out that another child is an other? In the second grade, a Jewish girl’s parents told her I was ghetto. Later, in fifth grade, another black girl and I read a page in our social studies textbook over and over because it said that during the Holocaust, Jewish people were forced into ghettos. We said, ‘They can’t possibly mean our ghetto.’ They didn’t.” This starting point places us in the margins with the author, with her Blackness. It is beautiful and sweeping; little morsels of her life where she began to see herself the way the world saw her.
The definition of rind is a thick and firm outer coat or covering. In this first section of the book, “Rind,” the essays explore what it really means for a Black woman to have to default to tough skin because society defaults the Black woman to a trope; angry. In “Ether,” Kaudo provokes the thought of whether or not we, Black women, play into the trope or is it that the trope creates the space for us to be apprehensive about feeling our feelings and subsequently expressing them . “A blackout rage is like an orgasm of anger–the buildup sucks, but the release is great.”She posits, “Sometimes I’m angry, sometimes I’m sad, but mostly I wish my emotions could be disconnected from the fact that I am Black and a woman.”Having to navigate white supremacy on a daily basis in macro and micro doses leaves a trail of rage that is oftentimes masked by silence for fear of laying into a stereotype that society has nursed and fed and pampered. Black women not only have to be aware of who they are but simultaneously must leather our skins in order to manage the daggers that come our way. Every day. “Some people deserve to feel the ether. But I swallow it and walk away.”
I too have had to quiet my anger and laugh off disrespect in spaces where folks absolutely deserved my full wrath. It is a bitter morsel to have to swallow. “How to Steal a Culture” looks at blackness and whiteness through a lens of intimacy while playing with form; it is a ‘how-to’. “Always make sure to remind her of her body. Chances are, you’re smaller than her in the hips or breasts, so offering to share clothes can be both a compliment and an insult–a way to spin your superiority as inferiority.”It’s an exposing of a poison that seems to be consistently sprayed on Blackness in an effort to prevent its bloom. Kaudo presents the duality of desiring to be the very thing that you oppress while actively oppressing it.
Her skill when it comes to form is apparent in “UnBothered-A Microaggression.” This has to be my favorite piece in the collection while simultaneously enraging and making me sad. It is charged and electric and dazzles. It also punches and slaps. The form in this piece takes its shape when the phrase, “And when it happens, it won’t sit right with you. You’ll feel a pang in your chest, and you won’t be sure if it’s anger or sadness. you‘ll have three options: fight, flight, or—”,precedes an instance of microaggression. These are layers of a cake filled with catastrophe, disappointment, the unimaginable, and then frosted with exhaustion. “My friend and I are discussing blackness: oppression, lack of history, no place. Our brown friend wants to join the conversation, but becomes frustrated when we say it is not his place, he has no authority. He looks at the two of us with a smirk and says: ‘Raise your hand if you’ve been to Africa.’ He puts both hands up.”The repetition of the phrase that carries through the piece is an expertly crafted catalyst for the rise of emotions that Kaudo is giving us through the multiple experiences. Thirteen to be exact. These moments occur to Black people across the globe, but specifically here in America, at an astounding rate of societal norm. It begs the question, how and what do we do to fix it? And though the question may be a reach, living it is tiring.
Flesh is defined as the soft substance of a human consisting of muscle and fatty tissue. It is the pulpy portion of a fruit. The weighted part of a being. It is typically the parts of ourselves that we pay the most attention to or otherwise, neglect. The pieces in this second section of the book, “Flesh,” promote loving ourselves; our hair, our bodies, our skin, our complexion, our tone of voice, our size, our curves, our fullness of being—in spite of society telling us that there is no value or worth in the aforementioned as it pertains to Black women.
“Black Girl Sabbath”is an homage to what caring for ourselves as practice, as ritual, should be, but still remembering and then reconciling with the ways in which something as basically human as our hair can be rooted in oppression. Kaudo gives us weighted strokes of history while coloring our minds with a kaleidoscope of beauty and wonder as it pertains to hair. “Cosmopolitan published an article about how to have kinky hair…by using a crimping iron. This is one of the moments where white audiences and black vernacular don’t mix.”Kaudo expands on the dance between cultural reference and the use of language and how it wholly negates how a specific culture and/or race of people identify with said reference. Not so much baffling as it is disheartening.
A seed is the germ or propagative source of anything. The beginning. In this final section of the book, “Seed,” we come to understand the depth and range that this body of work encompasses. It is tenderly and carefully woven to give the reader a full view of the tapestry that is Kaudo’s life, elements and pieces of her to swallow whole.
In the essay that the book is titled for, “Ripe,” we go with Kaudo as she experiences a quarter-life crisis and meets the world, in real time, when she comes to the understanding that she is wholly responsible for her own self. There is a caveat. Blackness. Blackness in America. Womanhood. Womanhood in America. Black Womanhood in America.
Kaudo’s use of lyric and prose to explore race, culture, and identity across a host of intersections, but specifically and profoundly as a Black woman in America, is compelling. If you’ve ever felt unseen, unheard, under-appreciated, or under-valued at any juncture in your life’s journey, this read is for you. But if you also want to curb your biases and understand what it means to live a life unlike your own, this read is also for you. Packed with insight, imagery, and a powerful use of language, Ripe, will leave your intellectual palette satisfied.
Tsahai Makeda is a Hudson Valley based writer with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She’s received support for her work from The Kenyon Review Writers Retreat and The Center for Black Fiction Wild Seed Writers Retreat. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, & REWRITE London.
Before I found my way to leading writing and story workshops, I’d already spent several years facilitating in the domains of personal growth and spirituality. During that time, I worked with students from a range of backgrounds but, thanks to their ability to invest time and money into their own transformation, a majority of them were affluent white women. I grew fatigued. As a mixed Latina from a historically disadvantaged community, the contexts of race, difference, and economic inequality through which I interpreted the world were mere blips in their consciousness; unless I began to augment my existing curricula with the kinds of DEI and social justice content I cared about, I knew that I’d remain unsatisfied.
When I shifted my focus to the realms of writing and storytelling, I took what felt like a huge leap of faith; I decided to work primarily with people of the Global Majority. I did this not only because I was seeking students whose perspectives and values were more closely aligned with my own, but because I wanted to create spaces which centered writers who are routinely marginalized in predominantly white classroom environments. Since then, I’ve led workshops to immigrants and first gen Americans, Black, Latina, Asian, and Indigenous women, and a growing number who, like me, identify as “mixed.” Among these writers, I’ve found a shared vocabulary of experience and perception that was lacking among my white students and, rather than drained, I feel energized from supporting the development of stories that have potential to upend the status quo.
Prior to making this shift, I’d already sought to create workshop settings that supported diversity and individuality but, when I added creative writing to the mix, I began to think about this more intentionally.
Thinking deeply about what had been missing from my learning experiences, I set out to design the kind of environment I’d yearned for but never had: one in which a white male mindset wasn’t the default, white male aesthetics weren’t the ideal, and explorations of gender equity weren’t limited to white feminism.
Growing up Puerto Rican and Jewish in the Bronx, all the teachers I’d ever had, with the exception of my 11th grade trigonometry teacher, were white. Nevertheless, I was always on the lookout for creative role models whose backgrounds reflected my own and I was always disappointed; just as I was disappointed in my desire for books and films, which affirmed my identity and my community. With little else to choose from, as a teenager I sought to emulate the work and craft of mostly white men. Later, at college, I worked closely with my advisor who was a kindhearted Henry Fonda type from Kansas. Though he encouraged my attempts as a playwright and screenwriter, he couldn’t provide the guidance. I longed for.
My challenges were so unlike the ones he’d faced that he could sympathize with me but couldn’t advise me. By the time I graduated, I’d decided not only to become a filmmaker whose work would validate the experiences of other little girls from marginalized communities, but one they could turn to as a mentor and role model.
Once in Hollywood, I honed my craft in screenwriting programs, eager to write the kinds of stories I dreamed of seeing. I wrote a magical realist coming of age story, a Sci-Fi adventure with a biracial heroine, and a noir script about Caribbean colonization. While both peers and instructors recognized their potential, my continued lack of guidance left those stories underdeveloped. And though those same readers regarded my background and settings as colorful, none could help me unravel their complexities or embed them meaningfully into my work. Despite my best intentions, I’d fully absorbed the message that my viewpoint didn’t matter in a white-centered world, and I found myself stuck, my capacity to develop an authentic authorial voice stunted.
Despite these difficulties, I still enjoyed the writing process and valued the emphasis my instructors put on narrative structure. Hoping that technical excellence would compensate for my struggles to be authentic, I devoted myself to mastering it. As had been true in my entire life, my instructors were all white men and, like my college advisor, they were generally kind. To quote Joy Castro’s “Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course essay, “I was never mistreated,” but I remained unmentored.
During this period, I didn’t meet a single Latina screenwriter, never mind a Jewish-Latina one. Finally– creatively and mentally spent – I hit rock bottom. Burnt out after eight years, I broke down in my therapist’s office; I’d forgotten what, and why, I’d wanted to write in the first place. It was not long after that tearful confession that I stopped writing, let go of my dreams, and began considering a different future.
When a friend recommended that the local Arts High School hire me as a creative writing teacher, I found myself standing in front of a classroom.
Now on the other side of the divide, I knew what was at stake for my students from marginalized backgrounds. I decided that my classroom would not only be a place for learning craft but a place where writers could develop a strong sense of self and the confidence to tell the truth.
In his essay “On Teaching Writers of Color,” Bill Cheng writes that the best workshop leaders make their students feel that they are invested in their work; “they don’t just nurture nascent talent,” he says of such teachers, “they build relationships…they are open and honest not only about their hopes and ambitions but also their failures and their insecurities.” As an instructor who took a long and winding road to teaching, that is the only thing I can do.
After five years, the classroom environment I create is informed by a range of influences that go beyond the places where I learned to write and includes sacred spaces in which I experienced personal transformation and healing from my writing trauma. In the classroom, I make the following promises to myself:
To see my students as three-dimensional human beings whose genius lies in the fullness of who they are, whatever their background or experience,
To act as “the wall,” a guide whose steadfast belief in another person never wavers,
To address each student and their work with curiosity rather than critique,
To acknowledge and celebrate the fundamental desire which inspires each writer to tell their specific story, and
To support them in writing for the readers who matter to them: not for me, not for their teachers, and not for the generic (white) reader who, for so many years, they’d been taught to write for.
I welcome each person who crosses the threshold as an already beloved community member,
To act as “the wall,” a guide whose steadfast belief in another person never wavers,
To trust the unexpected and potent associations that arise spontaneously in creative spaces.
Imbued through all of this is respect for the writer’s vulnerability and faith that mindful support and mentorship can transform writing that is adequate into writing that sings with its author’s true voice.
Jesi Vega is a Puerto Rican-Jew, a Bronx native, and a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Based in Tacoma, WA, she leads storytelling workshops and provides editorial support for traditionally underrepresented writers. Her work draws on extensive knowledge of personal development modalities, film, theater, nonfiction, and tarot.
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during October 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in October 2023!
A review of Elsa Valmidiano’s essay collection The Beginning of Leaving
By Juanita E. Mantz
Being a voracious reader, I’ve noticed that some books touch me deep inside, and change me, leaving an imprint, almost a like birthmark, that only I can see. For me, an example is Elsa Valmidiano’s most recent book, the beautifully crafted hybrid essay collectionThe Beginning of Leaving. It begins with a poem, quite fittingly titled “What We Were Meant To” and with the lines, “Are we born feet first/to hit the ground running/our hearts already exposed/slashed open to bleed?”
From there, Valmidiano begins a discovery and excavation of the self along with a deep questioning of family and a search for home. Part memoir, part travelogue, with an interspersing of her lyrically stunning poetry, Valmidiano lifted me up, taking me on a literary trip that I won’t soon forget. Falling into the book was like diving into a crystal blue pool of water; I was immersed and transported and at times, even held my breath until I could remember to exhale. Then I would breathe, and read and read some more, savoring it and admiring Valmidiano’s ability to convey such depth in her words.
In the first essay First Home, Valmidiano eases us into her story, telling of her birth in what she deems “the Motherland”, deftly describing her infant years in Las Piñas in the Philippines. She speaks of her beginning, and then of her leaving at the age of sixteen months. After describing her bloodcurdling screams on the plane, Valmidiano questions, “Could I have been missing Motherland but just couldn’t say in words?”
This theme of returning home resonated so much with me and as a memoirist who herself writes about leaving home then returning, it struck a deep chord. You see, as a kid with a chaos filled and turbulent home life, I always yearned to be somewhere, anywhere other than my hometown of the Inland Empire (located in Southern California, a region about fifty miles east of Los Angeles).
But I, much like Valmidiano with her Motherland, eventually realized that the Inland Empire was calling me home and I would return to my community in my thirties when my father got sick and passed away. It is also where I would stay, to this very day.
The Inland Empire is ultimately where I would find my calling as a lawyer (by moving from corporate law to public defense) and even more importantly, I would find my voice as a writer (my memoir is titled “Tales of an Inland Empire Girl”). And ironically enough,I would also recreate these locations in my memoir, thus returning home, like Valmidiano, both literally and figuratively.
Valmidiano’s book is also much about family and on her visit home, she describes where her father grew up, in a barrio once known as Lapog, but now known as San Juan. Reading her lyrical words, it reminded me so much of my own father, who died about seventeen years ago, My dad was not from the Philippines, but instead he was a “white” cowboy from Montana whose parents were so poor that his parents put him and his siblings in an orphanage for a time so the state could feed them. Valmidiano’s words and the images she constructed of her father and his past, reminded me that lack of economic privilege crosses racial lines and is systemic and generational but that I, like Valmidiano (who is a lawyer turned writer like myself) broke the cycle of poverty through education.
As a nonfiction writer and poet, Valmidiano is exquisitely precise in her details, and even tells us how one showers here, in this place, and how one must crouch and “pour cold buckets of water over one’s head”. It is the simplicity and beauty of the language which conveys the most. And we hear her voice and the voice of those who came before in her stunning prose and we see, as Valmidiano says, “Ghosts of our ancestors linger within these walls . . . .”
This book is both about the present and the past and Valmidiano reminded me of how words can encapsulate and recreate time and place. A friend of mine once compared writing memoir to building a time machine and the beauty of Valmidiano’s work lies in how she expertly pilots her figurative paper made time machine through her craft, transporting me to a time and place I recognized well, one that resonated and reverberated in my soul, to a time of childhood, and a time of memories, both experienced and retold. As Valmidiano states, “Maybe your daughter and I both dream of your memories and all those family, friends and detractors who told you theirs.“
Valmidiano has much to say on femininity and the body which is of such crucial importance in these post overturning of Roe v. Wade times. She is able to write about the complexities of being a feminist and struggling with the trauma of terminating a pregnancy. As she writes, “On the outside, I was charming and unstoppable, while inside, I felt like I was dying.” Valmidiano ultimately shows the reader that one can be conflicted and yet pro choice, which she definitely is.
And later, Valmidiano chronicles her own struggles with fertility, which mirror mine, highlighting the effects of a toxic workplace and over demanding work life on fertility. As she writes so eloquently, “In fertility speak, you cannot successfully plant in dry, cracked soil and expect anything to grow. All the fertility drugs in the world could not defy what Mother Nature was trying to tell me.” I found it refreshing to hear the issues written about in such complex and intersectional ways.
The book is also about family history and a digging into the past. Valmidiano is able to deftly investigate and write about many of her relatives in an honest, yet compassionate, way. This book is about memory, about ghosts, about her ancestors and their history and yet also about the present and the now. As Valmidiano so eloquently writes, “Maybe I eventually live out moments of your life as they first appear in mine.” Her prose shows that the space time continuum is more than a theory and that in her world, it is her reality.
My takeaway from this hybrid essay collection, one that Valmidiano has wrought so carefully and achingly, is that home is where we say it is. Valmidiano illustrates that home can be a creation in itself and the writing of it is an act of bravery.
Valmidiano’s book further showed me that home is a treasure chest of memories and experiences that we are writers and creatives can use as fodder for our creative endeavors. There is a reason that the first books of writers, from James Joyce (whose book Dubliners, captures the city he self-exiled himself from) to Sandra Cisneros (whose book The House on Mango Street, details parts of her hometown of Chicago) to Isabel Quintero (who writes in Gabi a Girl in Pieces of a fictional town in the Inland Empire that looks much like Corona, California), focus on their hometowns. I think that is because “home” is a magical place filled with nostalgia and brimming with memories, both sweet and bittersweet and even at times, traumatic.
This book is ultimately more than just a collection of pieces, it is also a naming and a reframing of home and culture. The Beginning of Leaving is simply a celebration of everything one has loved, lost and left. Much like the life I have lived, Valmidiano has lost and persevered and found a way to make it all worthwhile via her creativity and art. In the end, I realized that Valmidiano was not only taking me home, she was taking me on a journey and I was willing to follow her wherever she is willing to take me. As Valmidiano tells at the end of her beautiful book, “And when It comes to leaving, we have to start somewhere.”
In The Beginning of Leaving, Valmidiano captivates and mesmerizes and as a reader, I never wanted it to end. Some say home is where the heart is and ultimately, this book is all heart and reminded me to listen carefully to the ever beating heart of my own home.
Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a USC Law educated lawyer, writer, performer, and podcaster. She has 2 books, a memoir titled “Tales of an Inland Empire Girl” and an award winning chapbook titled “Portrait of a Deputy Public Defender, or how I became a punk rock lawyer“. She was awarded a 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. Find everything on her author website: https://juanitaemantz.com and find her Life of JEM podcast on Apple Podcasts.
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information,
you are fundamentally at war with yourself…
The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know.
That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
~Bessel van der Kolk, M.D
My body began spasming and shaking. Sweat beading up everywhere. Panic, panic, panic attack attacking me. Breathe. Aimee Takaya (my friend, yoga instructor, and Hanna Somatic Educator) kept her hands on my shoulders, letting me know I was safe. I was not being attacked. I was being held. A terrifying feeling after running away from love for 8.5 years. The only person who had held me during that time was a friend who also pushed me away. It left me in a state of unrest—terrified of being loved. Hypervigilant. (Or maybe I just needed someone to be the one to push me.) Possibly searched for the one. (Maybe I found exactly who I wanted.) Now I wasn’t just trying to escape pain and loss, I was ready to leave my skin behind.
But let’s rewind a bit. I moved to the mountains to heal. My friend Aimee and I met at a local coffee shop for hot cocoa and avocado brownies, to discuss future somatic plans. Then a blizzard hit. I spent weeks shoveling for extra cash and plotting my escape to the Valley—to teach and read at the Association of Writers & Writing Program event, in Washington. After the blizzard, I picked up extra sub jobs and drove five to six hours through Pearblossom and Angeles Forest highways—three days a week—to teach art. I was determined to work myself out of financial stress, due to what the mountain folks proclaimed a Snowmageddon. Sometimes on my way home, I stopped to take photos and went on a few hikes in Devil’s Punchbowl and the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. I made stops in desert shops and got crafted candies and soda. It wasn’t all apocalyptical. It was heaven too. I watched the sunrise and set—on my drives to and from home. I chased rainbows. I stopped to play in the rivers. I didn’t watch my tears tumble on the rocks. I made wishes and set intentions. As the school term ended and summer warmed the mountain, I tottered into bed—barely able to pull the covers over my body.
Aside from the occasional hobble to the toilet to throw up—I could barely walk. Hives pushed their way to the surface of my skin, covering my face. I thought all the shoveling from the Crestline blizzard and four hours of driving a day caught up to me, but it was all of my trauma screaming at me through flashbacks. It was psychosomatic. My body felt like it was eating itself—like I was being devoured by fear. My ribs clung to my lungs, pressing down on my heart. My muscles squeezed and shivered as my legs kicked furiously—not nervously. I wasn’t sure if I had had a seizure or not.
My therapist said that Eye Movement Desensitization (EMDR) has caused seizures, in rare cases, but I had been doing EMDR on and off for three years now. Plus, my therapist uses the hand held mechanism that uses vibrations instead of the eye movements. She also felt that since the seizures stopped that she would trust that I was okay. (This was only a concern because I had a skull fracture with a concussion at the age of one, which may have resulted in a Traumatic Brain Injury. And experienced fainting from dissociation, since I was 13. I also had seizures due to psychotropic treatments in the past.) I realized that my trauma was causing my symptoms and had done years of research on plant medicines, which brought me to the conclusion that now was the time to use all of my resources. I did guided plant medicine and the daily vomiting and convulsions stopped. My cat, Mama Berry, did her best to heal me with her mighty purrs, and I finally had a couple of hours of somewhat restful sleep. And even though Mama Berry has powerful purrs, I finally called Aimee and told her I was ready to start my somatic education.
Although somatic bodywork and therapies are just now becoming a new craze, the practice has been around since the 1970s. The Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training, which was founded in 1975 by Thomas Hanna and Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Ed.D., describes their commitment to providing somatic theory, research, and practice to aid others in “reawakening the mind’s control of movement, flexibility, and health” online through their Somatics Educational Resources page, where you can find books, magazines, and CDs. I had first heard about somatics in massage school in 2003, from my massage teacher, Marlene Schwartz. Marlene even had a business called Soma Therapy—I worked there for a little over a year. This form of somatic therapy fascinated me. But, my medical plan didn’t cover it. I wondered how I could find this practice or even afford treatment. Now, over 20 years later, I still couldn’t afford treatment. Aimee and I came up with a plan, and I got a loan from school. I made a huge leap and committed myself to 10 weeks of somatic bodywork, while doing 10 weeks of EMDR, a form of somatic psychotherapy that has been around since the 1980s and is now covered by many medical plans. I mapped out a plan with all of my healing tools. I had my Native American flute, cello, art, poetry, my yoga and massage education, and 11 weeks off of work and plant medicine.
As a person who has spent 24 years in therapy and wrote research on traumatic responses, I knew I would need a team to help me assimilate all the information my body was trying to process. Francine Shapiro, PhD, describes EMDR in Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy as a way of “targeting the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information processing system.” She explains that “old memories can then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that is no longer damaging.” I was still processing stories that my family members casually told me about what they had done to me—as if they were cute, funny, and even endearing. How does a person process trauma when abusers try to normalize their abuse? All I could say is that’s not normal. Everything in my body told me it wasn’t okay, but I didn’t understand how to process what they said or what I remembered—until my body forced me to.
Crawling and dragging my way towards healing has been a long journey. I have made choices in romantic partners that led to furthering my physical, emotional, and mental abuse, and I have learned from them. As Francine Shapiro explains, “The past affects the present even without our being aware of it.” I will not be ashamed by my decisions (conscious or unconscious) but acknowledge that those choices were made because of childhood conditioning and my desire to be loved by adult figures who could only love me in the way they knew how. Somatic bodywork didn’t feel like it would be enough to heal me from the past I was raised in and the paths I had chosen—I needed a team.
I teach youth empathy, introspection, and community building for trauma recovery. My ultimate goal is suicide prevention. I do this because I have been through enough and had years of education and self-discovery to share, but the journey doesn’t just end. I know I’m not just going to sprout wings and fly just because I want to. But as I recently told students I mentor in juvenile hall, we have to start with a dream.
My dreams started with wishes to heal others, but my memories were gaslit and my nightmares were flashbacks. My body was ready to let go of things I wasn’t willing to admit to myself were real. My biggest struggle was believing my own memories because of gaslighting and brainwashing since I was a small child. I wet the bed and had night terrors until I left my parents’ house—pregnant and married—at 19. I entered an unhealthy marriage. Then separated by 26. I came out of the closet after a suicide attempt at 27. I wrote my past self letters, burnt them, and turned them into mulch. I told my massage clients that we don’t let go until we’re ready, but I didn’t know how much truth there was to that statement until I began to let go. My body was ready since the first time I passed out in the science lab, at 13. I was diagnosed with neuro-cardiogenic syncope by 22, which is now seen as a symptom of trauma. Only as a teen, doctors thought these fainting episodes were panic attacks. Recently, I have been told they are symptoms of my head trauma and dissociation. Now, I could barely rise up by noon. Aimee told me, “You look like you’re holding yourself up. And your body is leaning forward like you’re going into battle.”
She was right. I was in battle. And I was holding myself up—like a marionette. It was hard to lift my feet. I kept tripping on myself. Instead of my brain and body acting as one–my body was my avatar. My mind wouldn’t allow me to let go, because I had to come to terms with the truth. Every time Aimee held a limb to aid me in movement—I spasmed—forced to face the truth. What was worse is that I really needed to be held, but I was repelled by touch and hypervigilant. We did breath work every time fear stopped me from moving forward. We moved to points just before pain shocked me, and often that meant tiny micro movements until I let go.
My friend Aimee held me with patience, understanding, and knowledge. She held me without judgment and allowed me to be present for myself without scrutiny. She is the first person I have ever known who was capable of holding space like that. To feel safe enough to show my ugliest parts. She created a sacred space in my living room and in a studio with her ability to witness. I am positive that location had less to do with my healing than the space within us both. I had finally found the inner space I had been searching for.
Suddenly, I could pick up a cup again. Suddenly, I could sleep. Suddenly, I could sit. Suddenly, she could hold a limb without me jumping and shivering and sweating and crying. So I went to therapy and did EMDR and suddenly, I started to remember. Suddenly, I started writing poetry. Suddenly, I started to smile. Suddenly, my eyes followed. Suddenly, my face stopped scowling. Suddenly, I could walk again. Suddenly, I was me. Suddenly, I was a version of myself I had never got to know. I was awake for the first time.
I still have to keep up with my somatics and sometimes I regress a little, but only to wake up to more realizations about myself. It isn’t as hard to overcome mental, emotional, and physical hurdles as it once was. I think the biggest lesson was in learning that most of my pain was psychosomatic. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Just the opposite. My injuries were very real, both physical and psychological trauma caused them. Trauma from physical and psychological abuse that caused rashes, hair loss, sprains, tendon damage, a skull fracture, endometriosis, depression, panic disorder, suicidal ideations, seizures, dissociation, etc. It was and is all real. I let go and once I was ready to believe—I never thought I would say this–it was easy.
Gina Duran is an artist, poet, and educator with a focus on marginalized youth. She is a Theatre Of Hearts/Youth First Artist-In-Residence, and founder of the IE Hope Collective; an outreach for marginalized youth. Her debut collection of poetry “…and so, the Wind was Born,” was published by FlowerSong Press.
The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during September 2023. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in September 2023!
“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer.” – Derek Walcott
Like many people, I first heard of the indie rock band Little Moon when they won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest this past May. Written by the Utah-based couple Emma and Nathan Hardyman while his mother was in hospice care, their winning song, “wonder eye,” confronts death and explores the liberating sense of not knowing what comes after. Around the time they wrote it, the couple was also leaving the Mormon church. Coincidentally, Little Moon’s redemptive paean to atheism debuted just months after NPR re-aired the story of the 2014 excommunication of Mormon feminist activist Kate Kelly. Her offense: organizing a protest in which she and other women requested entry to a male-only Priesthood meeting. She equated her expulsion, for simply exercising her free speech, as a kind of “spiritual death.” Although I’ve never talked openly about my Mormon past, it felt like Little Moon and Kelly were sending me a sign that it’s time to write about my own journey to the other side of Mormonism.
I grew up Mormon in the atheist city of San Francisco. Every Sunday, my father led his three daughters down the steps of our tall Victorian and drove us in his blue Volvo station wagon along the hills of the city to that white stuccoed church that stuck out among the festive painted ladies crowded around the Bay.
Often, I’d sleep over next door at my best friend’s house on Saturday nights, hoping to be forgotten about, but Sunday morning her telephone would ring and my father’s voice would come on the line, summoning me to church. My favorite fantasy in those days was being one of Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers. I imagined myself squeezing into a ball and flying up the chimney and out over the city.
After years of attending church classes in which young women were instructed in their future lives as homemakers while the young men went off to Priesthood meetings, my last stand was over a workbook I was supposed to be working on but that only gathered dust in the trunk of the Volvo. The book had lots of tasks that felt useless to me, such as baking cookies for the sick, crocheting needle point, and ironing my Church clothes on Saturdays. Amidst the pressure over the workbooks, our teacher completely ignored the true miracle before us. One of my fellow students, a lovely moon-faced blonde—I’ll call her M—was growing more pregnant by the week. Yet we never celebrated the new life in our midst. M’s pregnancy was treated as a mark of shame, her growing belly hidden under blousy black dresses, her demeanor sullen and downcast. Then our teacher’s husband, who was the Bishop, ran off to Utah with another woman from the congregation. She disappeared, and classes were suspended. The ships sailing outside looked suddenly hollow to me, as though they might be made of cardboard, and I wondered whose hand had put them out to sea. Soon after, I also left church one day and never returned.
Centered in Utah, Mormonism stays mostly out of the mainstream and is often viewed with disparagement. Within the faith, dissent is taboo, as demonstrated by Kelly’s excommunication. But, as I know from my own silence around my religious background, fear is the enemy of creativity. After I left the Mormon Church, I lost my sense of gravity. I ran to New York, then L.A., then Mexico City. I found my bearings by throwing myself into the study of Hispanic literature. I delighted in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, since they so gloriously, outrageously broke from Catholic conservatism. But, having turned away from my own roots, I had no idea how to locate my voice. I didn’t realize that someone could leave a religion while holding onto their culture until I read writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga in graduate school– writers who had rebelled as sincerely as I had against patriarchy, but still clung so fiercely to their culture that they reinvented it, reimagining the past until it fit them like a vestal garment.
If Little Moon’s creative breakthrough came with “wonder eye,” my own, smaller one occurred during a Mexicanist conference at UC Irvine this year. One of the panelists, Dr. Jacobo Sefamí, who grew up in Mexico City of Syrian Jewish descent, was reading a paper entitled “The Sacred and Exiled Kábala in the Essays of Angelina Muñiz.” As he recited all the Hebrew words for the name of God, a story my dad once told came back to me. It was about his great-great-grandfather, a man who had four wives who lived in four houses on four corners of the same street, in the southern Utah village of Pine Valley. I remembered hearing that one of the wives, who was a dressmaker, had fled to New York. Listening to Dr. Sefamí, I thought about that great great aunt, living in New York in exile, and about my own self-imposed exile. Wondering if my ancestress searched for the names of God in New York, I jotted in my notebook a poem entitled “The Fourth Wife” (forthcoming in Sunstone). A couple months later, with the encouragement of fellow WWS writers, I applied for a grant from the California Arts Council, in part to write more of my female ancestors’ histories from Utah. Recently I found out that I received the grant.
It’s as if by that same sense of grace that I switched on the radio this spring to hear a young band with Mormon roots making music that so joyfully and noisily rebels and transcends. Fronted by singer Emma Hardyman, Little Moon also features Nathan Hardyman on bass, Bly Wallentine on electric guitar, Bridget Jackson on harp, Chris Shemwell on drums, and Grace Johnson on keys. Watching them play with fresh earnestness in their music video, it’s easy to imagine them cutting their milk teeth on sacred music. According to the original NPR news release, “wonder eye” surprised the judges, moved them to tears, and filled them with hope. For me, the moment in “wonder eye” that gets me is when the music swells and Hardyman’s four-octave voice swoops into the chorus.
To where we are and where we go
Wonder Eye, wonder Eye
And when I go I’ll give my all to the sky, to the sky
Wonder Eye , wonder Eye
Commenting on the meaning behind the song, Hardyman told NPR, “Mormonism believes in life after death, resurrection and eternal families. There is beauty and comfort in our former beliefs of certainty, light and life; we honor and respect such teachings. But we also find deep beauty in uncertainty, darkness, chaos and death. Perhaps it’s all one and the same.”
“kind, kind home,” another song in Little Moon’s Tiny Desk concert set, registers the difficulties of leaving one’s community, the feeling of being an outsider and of having to learn to stand on one’s own.
I think I lost a kind, kind home.
It’s my fault I’ve run away,
even though I wished to stay.
You’re a ghost,
a dropout just drifting in this town.
Feeling lost and feeling all alone
I will try to be a kind, kind home.
For years after leaving the Mormon church, I felt adrift. I thought I had left the spiritual part of myself behind, but I rediscovered it in a Twelve Step meeting in my thirties. Throughout my twenties and thirties, I kept trying to find a place that felt like home, until I realized I carry it with me wherever I go. I plant seeds of self-knowledge on the page; if I tend them, they flourish; if I neglect them, they dry up. This summer, words grow around me like flowers, and my notebook fills with poems. To paraphrase Derek Walcott, poetry is my prayer. It is where I proclaim my belief in the importance of my ancestresses and their ongoing presence in my life; that, as in Mexico, the shedding of colonial religion gives way to something deeper and older, a spirituality that links all people with the earth; that the spirit is not gendered; that love is not a sin; that loving oneself is never wrong–no matter how far one has strayed. I believe that motherhood is sacred whenever and to whomever it arrives.
In the face of this nurturing, I feel my old anger give way to curiosity. Even some exercises from my old Young Women’s workbook no longer seem silly to me. Iron your Sunday clothes. Visit the sick. Bible passages come back too, from childhood readings with my dad. Do not hide your light under a bushel, but let it shine. I hope to return someday to my family’s village of Pine Valley, to stand on the corner of the four wives, and to gather more of their stories so I can tell them. I think they deserve that.
Audrey Harris Fernández is a Lecturer in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Matthew Gleeson, she translated “The Houseguest and Other Stories” by Amparo Dávila (New Directions, 2018). Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Harpers, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her poem “The Fourth Wife” is forthcoming in Sunstone. She lives in Long Beach, CA with her daughter and husband.
Author’s Note
Audrey Harris Fernández would like to acknowledge the support of the California Arts Council and Los Angeles Performing Arts Initiative for this piece. She is currently working on a series of essays on Mormonism, and is gathering stories from other Mormons/ LDS who have left the Church. She is interested in what we hold onto and what we share (such as stories, customs, rituals, beliefs and connection to community), as well as reasons for leaving. If you would like to share your story, please email her at audrey.harris@gmail.com.
