Tag: 2020

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Breathe and Push: The Dying Days of 2020

by Noriko Nakada

Sitting here at home with a dying tree as the focal point of our holiday seems an appropriate way to end 2020. In these waning days and long winter nights of December, the year is dying. Los Angeles struggles for breath, symptomatic of a city where too many have refused to make decisions for the common good. Still, even this year holds beauty and light.

As I look back at my notes from the year, I’m filled with so much gratitude for Women Who Submit, for the spaces that emerged in this community across the days and nights of this pandemic.

We launched our first anthology, Accolades, and many of us made our way to AWP just before everything shut down. We held space for weekly check-ins on Saturdays where we danced and wept, shared and listened. We acknowledged accomplishments, set goals, and learned to ask for help.

We closed our eyes in grounding exercises and reflected on the houses of our work with Allison Hedge Coke.

We wrote alone together.

We participated in an all-day conference and a top-tier submission blitz. We supported and buoyed one another. We greeted one another, “Ahoy, girls!” and we published books, chapbooks, essays, stories, poems, and articles. We shared and listened in regular open mic readings. We submitted work in acts of hope and resistance, and we created a network for book reviews.

During a time when it was often difficult to gauge the right things to do, but also a time when the right things to do were obvious, Women Who Submit refused to cancel. We held one another accountable and shared resources. We read and celebrated and lifted up one another’s work because that is the kind of community we have created.

We held space and understood how both presence and absence were forms of grace.

Thank you all for making this community a place where we breathe and push and remind one another to keep going. Where a comment, a mention in the chat, a book recommendation, a call for a submission can become a thread that connects and sustains us through a web stretches across days and miles.

In a few days, I’ll take down this tree. It will be recycled into mulch and returned back to earth and soil. Women Who Submit will check in both before and after the calendar year shifts from 2020 to 2021. Women and non-binary writers across time zones will find ourselves at the hand-written page, or in the glow of our screens. We will write the first words of the new year, and then we will write the next words until we fill a page and then another. We will show up in our new spaces when we can, and they will provide what we need until we find safe ways to lift one another up in person again. Together, we will bury this year and use it to make something new. 

Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches eighth grade English at Emerson Middle School in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Kartika, Catapult, Meridian, Compose, and Hippocampus. She is spending her time in quarantine perfecting sourdough, biscuits, and pie crust. She has two kids and answers approximately three thousand questions a day. 

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Writing on a Budget: Writing Alone Together

by Lisbeth Coiman

Writing Alone Together is a community of writers who share the need of time dedicated exclusively to their craft. We are writers needing accountability in the long hours of a pandemic, when days melt into each other like a plastic spoon left unattended sticking to the metal edges of a hot grill.

By the end of March 2020, I couldn’t tell night from day anymore, the constant rain in those early days of the lockdown, and the grey sky, thick like a sun-blocking curtain, added despair to the two weeks of silence and solitude inside my apartment in Inglewood.

As usual, I reached for structure, the backbone of my sanity, blocking time for exercise, nourishment, chores, and work. But the lack of accountability to meet my writing goals put in jeopardy my ambitious plan to complete a bilingual collection of poetry before summer. Without the pressure of a concrete deadline, or the constraints of time spent on traffic and work, I ran the risk of retreating into my mind and surrendering to the overwhelming weight of the pandemic anxiety.

As a desperate selfish act of reconnecting with people who share my interests, I threw the idea of meeting daily for three hours in the morning in the abstraction of Zoom meetings to write in silence with fellow women writers. And just like that a community was born: Writing Alone Together (WAT). Initially four women joined me. WAT has now 40 members, and keeps growing slowly, with several small independent groups stemming from the idea.

A simple concept, WAT offers a safe cyberspace, structure, and a maximum of 15 minutes to chat before we silence our mics and write our souls out.

WAT is dependent of Women Who Submit, and accepts only WWS members who are committed to write. We meet now twice daily from 10 to 12 pm and from 4 to 6 p.m. That’s four hours of uninterrupted writing for women who are used to steal time from domestic and professional duties. We have already learned from the constrains of  life outside cyberspace to optimize time, and therefore, have become incredibly productive with these extra hours of work. Regular attendees have shared their success stories and make us all proud of what we can collectively achieve when we join forces.

WAT is building a community of women and non-binary writers exposed to the overwhelming conditions of 2020. We support and hold space for each other. We sometimes shed tears and try to reassure those who seem to be given in to the weight of our current common circumstances. And we write, silently in 2 hour segments, daily from Monday to Friday.

The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic with its potential of killing so many of us, together with racial tensions stemming for the contemporary lynching of people of color, protests, the threat of our country turning to totalitarianism, the effects of global warming destroying our landscape, homelessness, unemployment, all post a high risk to our physical and mental health, to democracy and way of life. But 2020 has also been a year of relearning life, learning to live, study, teach, communicate, and perform in cyberspace. Thus, we survive.

This is not the time to judge ourselves for selfish attempts of survival. Not all selfish acts are altruistic, but true altruism is in itself a selfish act, especially when in doing so, we reach for the nearest hand to survive with us. Selfishness knows no moral. It only turns bad if it causes the destruction of others. It turns good when a selfish act benefits those around us. Today, I am proud of the community created from my desperate attempt to survive writing during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020.

Thank you to those who co-host when I cannot open the room: Colette Sartor, Cybele Garcia Cohel, Thea Pueschel,  Deborah Elder Brown, Sakae Manning, and of course to the 40 other female writers who have come regularly or occasionally to join us in our adventure. Thank you to all who continue to hold each other in this cyber space.

Writer Lisbeth Coiman from the shoulders up, standing in front of a flower bush

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 currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.