Accolades – Women Who Submit

By Noriko Nakada

Maybe you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, Women Who Submit is celebrating 10 years! I mean, even Poets & Writers took notice of this badass organization and the women and nonbinary writers who are pushing against the patriarchy by supporting one another in our creative journeys.

As part of our first decade anniversary, we invite you to submit to our second anthology: Gathering. The first Women Who Submit anthology, Accolades highlights previously published work by Women Who Submit members, while Gathering celebrates how, in 2020-2021, “we continue to gather across the country, support one another, and find joy in the midst of our trauma.”

Gathering “welcomes submissions of both unpublished and previously published poems, essays, stories, plays, and hybrid work from all WWS members. Our goal is to gather work in response to the current conditions of our world. It is an opportunity to share the trauma and celebrate the joy.”

If you have already submitted, claps, claps, claps!

If you are still looking through your drafts for the right piece to submit, keep the May 31^st deadline in mind.

If you don’t think you have anything written yet, here are some prompts for each of our genres. Go for it! You have a whole three-day weekend to draft, revise, re-read, revise, edit again, and submit something for Gathering. Or, just write to the prompts because it’s like improv and a fun exercise to jump into a different genre and write for fun for a bit.

PROMPTS

DRAMA: Write a scene between characters with an unresolved past who find themselves unexpectedly stuck in line together.

POETRY: Using recycled lines from poems you’ve drafted throughout the pandemic, write a new poem and incorporate specific flora and fauna. Maybe try a villanelle or a duplex!

FICTION: Capture a scene of post-pandemic bacchanalia where a character gets lost.

NONFICTION: Write three different brief scenes capturing various points of a relationship or a place. Weave them together into an essay.

Remember to read the submission guidelines and then, we hope you will breathe and push submit.

Noriko Nakada writes, parents, and teaches 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, Hippocampus and elsewhere. She edits Breathe and Push for Women Who Submit.

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.

Tag: Accolades

Breathe and Push: Prompts for Gathering

Breathe and Push: The Dying Days of 2020