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Finding the Power in Submission

by Lisa Cheby

After my father died when I was ten, I watched my mother, who had been a stay-at-home mom, struggle with returning to the workforce while avoiding managing her grief. At the time, I only saw the struggle and deduced my job in life was to never depend on anyone else. This somehow translated into a reluctance to ask for anything from anyone. Through college and film school, I embraced autonomy, working summers to pay tuition on my own, coordinating moves within Florida then to New York City and Los Angeles on my own, paying my bills on my own, finding jobs on my own, buying a home on my own, and traveling on my own.

In her book Shakti Woman, Vicki Noble writes how the taboo of menstruation and women’s bodies paired with women’s conditioning to deny the Dark Goddess in themselves leads women to view autonomy as unacceptable and, quoting Sylvia Perera, devours their “sense of willed potency and value” (30). With all this autonomy, with all my effort to create a life where I depended on no one, I wondered why I still felt devoid of “willed potency and value.” Rather than empowered, I was disconnected and inhibited. Continue reading “Finding the Power in Submission”

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A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JUNE

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

The summer has gotten off to a pub-tastic start! Congratulations to all the women who have had work accepted or published in June.

From Alana Saltz‘s “How ASMR Videos Help Me Cope with My Anxiety” on Bustle:

Until six months ago, I’d never heard of ASMR. All I knew was that I had a fondness for particular sounds and voices. When people spoke to me kindly and softly, it eased some of the symptoms that came with my anxiety disorder. Certain accents and tones made my body feel tingly and calm.

Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR JUNE”

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Building Up to Emerging: Tips for Applying to Fellowships, Residencies and Workshops

by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

The first time I applied for a fellowship was in spring 2009. I was about to finish grad school, and I sent out a slew of applications like I was applying for a PhD. I figured it was the next logical step as I readied myself to move beyond my MFA program, and I had the mentors close by to help. I gathered transcripts and letters of recommendation, curated samples of work and wrote project proposals. I remember one mentor agreed to write a letter with what I perceived as little enthusiasm. When all the rejections came in that summer, I read the bios of those who won and took notice of all their previous awards and accolades. I thought back to that mentor and considered her lackluster support the response of someone who understood the literary world better than I did at that time.

See what I learned from this experience was that “emerging” doesn’t mean new like I thought it did, Continue reading “Building Up to Emerging: Tips for Applying to Fellowships, Residencies and Workshops”

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Writing Myself: On Becoming a Real Writer

by Marya Summers

In the summer of 2003, poets from around the world converged in Chicago for the National Poetry Slam. One densely packed nightclub was electric with anticipation for the group poem showcase, a highlight of the annual event. You could have supplied power to a small town with the energy my own body was generating as I took the stage with two women on my team to deliver the poem “Penis Envy.” It had received perfect scores the night before in preliminary bouts.

For any team, but particularly for our small-to-middling town team from Delray Beach, Florida, this showcase was The Big Leagues. Because it wasn’t part of the competition (it was a “best of”), all we had to do is exactly what we did the night before – deliver our bawdy, satiric conjecture on what we would do if we had penises. We were only a few seconds into our poem when the room began to hiss as if giant, terrible snakes were about to strike. I recognized the sound immediately. I’d heard other poets call it “the feminist hiss.”

Continue reading “Writing Myself: On Becoming a Real Writer”

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

by Rachael Warecki

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

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

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

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The Long and Winding Road of Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket

by Diane Sherlock

While working on my MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles, I started my fourth novel, Wrestling Alligators. My primary mentors for the book were Rob Roberge (Liar: A Memoir, Crown 2016) and Gayle Brandeis (Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, HaperOne 2004). I finished a first draft for my thesis project in May, 2009, and continued to polish it to the point where I was confident about sending it out to agents. At the time, my daughter was an assistant to a lit agent in Hollywood, and he read it and recommended an editor he’s worked with for many years. I sent it to her and she peppered me with hard questions about the material, pointing out that some of the imagery was in conflict. She was pessimistic about my solving those problems. That lit a fire under my inner “I’ll show you!” She recommended a big reorganization of the material, which ended up serving the book well. I walked a lot of miles in the hills near my place to figure out answers to her hardest questions and after a few weeks, I solved them. It was one of the best breakthroughs I’ve had. Even so, the Hollywood lit agent passed.

Undeterred, in no small part because I’d been through a lot of rejection with screenplays in Hollywood, I sent it out to about 100 agents. For the few agents who requested exclusivity, I set a time limit of 2-4 weeks, nothing open-ended. Mostly, I contacted dozens of agents at a time with simultaneous submissions. I received many requests for pages and many compliments about those pages. One agreed to represent me if I could get a publisher on board. This was sounding a lot like Hollywood: do the hard work, and we’ll close the deal for you.  Continue reading “The Long and Winding Road of Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket”

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How and Why To Hang In There When Rejection Gets You Down

by Toni Ann Johnson

When Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (WWS Cofounder and blog manager) posted on the private Women Who Submit Facebook page a couple of weeks ago asking if we wanted to do a monthly rejection brag, I shuddered. Boast about my failures? Uh, pass.

Well. Then I got an acceptance on a short story after 3 years and 56, yes 56 effin’ rejections. And I guess I did brag about it, though it’s not the rejections I was proud of; it was the fortitude.

So here I am, the oft rejected and ashamed (until I’m not) submitter, here to offer encouragement about why you should remain persistent, too.

Continue reading “How and Why To Hang In There When Rejection Gets You Down”

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A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR MAY

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

Spring has sprung and with it has come a new crop of publishing successes for WWS members. Here is a brief look at the work published and awards won this month.

From Carla Sameth‘s “Feed Me, Fund Me, Leave Me Alone” on Brain,Child:

From age 8-12, boys go from puppy dogs to war video games to Beyonce. The transition is a collage, what you see decorating their walls; Tupac, Bob Marley and Martin Luther King are on my son’s walls too. When Raphael was 12, we went to Israel for a wedding and a pre-Bar Mitzvah trip. Jerusalem was oppressive with its over-arching trifecta of religious intrusiveness. But leaving for Tel Aviv, Raphael spied the olive skinned Sabras wearing bikinis and Uzis and said, “Now, we’re talking!”

From Carla‘s “Letting Go” on Full Grown People:

Raphael looks directly at me from what seems like an insurmountable distance across the tight rope. He stands still for a moment, balanced. “Mom, I’m okay. You need to just think about yourself now,” he says.

Congratulations to Rachel Warecki whose story “Something Blue” was shortlisted for the Masters Review Volume V anthology. Amy Hempel will select the ten winning stories for publication.  Continue reading “A WWS PUBLICATION ROUND UP FOR MAY”

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Writing English as a Polyglot

by Hong-My Basrai

When we finally left communist Vietnam, my father said: “Never look back.” His words had a finality to them. They stuck in my twenty-two-year-old mind, and so I began my never looking back process, starting with learning to communicate predominantly in English.

The acquisition and manipulation of languages were second nature to me. I had been doing it all my life—soaking up Vietnamese in the cradle, French in kindergarten, Chinese from classmates, English to survive, and Gujarati because I had married into a Gujarati Indian family.

Basic English had come to me easily enough. It was just a small step from uttering my first “thank you” to verbal fluency, then progressing fast from ESL writing class to English 1A composition. What was harder was learning to elevate my writing proficiency to a level suitable for a public audience. Since I had picked up English on the go, learning it by imitation, like a baby, with most words borrowed from my prior knowledge of French, I had to pay extra attention to spelling of similar words, particularly homophones like address and adresse, envelope and enveloppe, May and mai; false cognates, words that have similar spelling but different meanings, like infant and enfant, anniversary and anniversaire, song and son; and words of Latin and Greek roots like destroy and détruire, or abnormal and anormal, etc.  Continue reading “Writing English as a Polyglot”

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Claiming a Corner of Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own”

by Cassandra Lane

“The thesis of A Room of One’s Own—women must have money and privacy in order to write with genius—is inevitably connected to questions of class,” Mary Gordon wrote in a 1981 forward to the book that comprises Virginia Woolf’s famous extended essay.

I read the book in early 2001, highlighting Woolf’s self-assured sentences in bright orange ink and writing in the margins with fervent scrawls. As an African-American woman who grew up poor yet still believed I had stories to tell, a voice that needed to be shared, and who desired, more than anything, to tell stories with brilliance, I certainly took issue with parts of Woolf’s argument. Whereas she insisted that one write calmly and without bringing attention to the self, my heart raged against social injustice; I wrote in first person. I was not wealthy or emotionally detached enough to be the kind of writer she described.  Continue reading “Claiming a Corner of Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own””