Breathe and Push: Hampshire Gates and Mentor Meanderings

by Thea Pueschel

There are gates that some of us are born outside of. We may try to scale the barbed fence, but without guidance, we only wind up nicked and wounded. When I grew up in Orcutt, California, an unincorporated city in northern Santa Barbara County in the 80s and 90s, these barbed wired fences were all around, holding livestock and rusted tractors. 

Faded No Trespassing black signs hung on posts. Sometimes a gate would be left open and the temptation to pass would arise. However, uninvited, you never knew what was on that land. Might be a shotgun or a bull. That was what my mother, an Angeleno, told us, and being filled with trepidation, I listened.

I grew up the third of four daughters, in a family of blue-collar workers. Farmers on one side and house painters on the other. Hard working; dirt, or paint under the fingernails.

image of Hampshire Gate swung open to a grassy, tree-lined field
Sebastian Ballard, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

When I was 13, I went to work with my dad to paint a plant nursery. The Hampshire Gate was unlocked, and we drove up the easement. My dad pulled over to the soft sand shoulder and said the words I hoped to hear. “Would you like to drive?”

I slid out of the passenger seat and into the driver’s side of his white Chevy Luv truck. Barely able to reach the pedals, I pressed the clutch in hard and found first. He smiled. I pulled back onto the dirt road. I went into second. Pride filled my heart as it confirmed—I was indeed my father’s son.

The road was bumpy; we pulled up near the grower station. A kid and a dog played ball in the middle of the dirt road. There was a manure pile on the other. 

Not knowing what to do, I forgot about the brake and swerved and hit the manure pile at full speed—15 miles an hour. The truck lodged two feet deep into the pile. My dad shook his head. “What were you thinking, Pueschel?” 

“Not to hit the kid,” I said through the ache of my misguided intuition.

“You didn’t think about hitting the brake?” He slid out of the passenger side to dug us out leaving me alone in the driver’s seat for the first time. I had dreamt about sitting there alone since age eight, when he first allowed me to sit on his lap and steer. It was also the last until Driver’s Ed at fifteen.

The reality is my father could have told me to hit the brake and I would have obeyed, but he opted to let me figure it out myself. A moment of direct guidance wasn’t present. Along with work dirt, there was a constant reinforcement of rugged individualism. He was there, but simultaneously, I was alone.

Craft Gates

I thought writing was solitary. I saw the fence, but I couldn’t recognize the gate or see how to get to the other side. They did not leave it open like the nursery. My literary voice was unfamiliar compared to those I saw in the literary canon, and I had the rejections to prove it. 

Growing up androgenous and with ADHD left me on the other side of gates my entire childhood and much of my adult life. Like a closed Hampshire Gate, I could see on the other side of things, but crossing without permission, I never knew what I was heading into. I would be bit by barbs when trying to break into community with being “too masculine” by my female family members and girls from my congregation or being called too stupid or immature by teachers without emotional intelligence or proper professional boundaries. It gifted me curiosity and alternative perspectives. In workshops, folks have pointed out that I have a lot of different POVs. That’s the thing about being able to see through the Hampshire Gate. All you can do is observe what’s going on inside of them, and when your brain is wired differently, it alters how things are seen and what stories want to be told.

Gate Opening

A screenwriting agent approached me when I was in film school. He had fallen in love with my film festival long-listed script and expressed interest in representing me. I did as I did not do with the manure pile. I pumped the brakes. I didn’t have guidance and didn’t know what would be on the other side of representation. The possibility of success seemed as daunting as a bull, particularly because my screenwriting instructor had stated how flawed that same script was and how I should stick to directing because it was obvious I was more passionate about that. It was the shotgun that scared me off from professionally pursuing screenwriting.

I was first published in elementary school as the winner of a young writer’s award. Later, as a young filmmaker, I published film reviews under a pseudonym on the web, which led me once being on a panel with F. X. Feeney debating from the feminist perspective to a full theater. They had let me in the gate a few times, but without direction, I didn’t know how far I could wander up sans permission.

Twenty years later, I remained solitary. I wrote a lot, finished little, and published primarily in the Wellness space until three years ago. I would occasionally venture out and submit a poem or CNF piece. My unhelpful screenwriting professor instilled doubt in me. I shut down sharing fiction and screenplays. The rejections I received from the few times a year I submitted poetry or CNF were verification: I was unwelcome in the literary and creative writing space. That changed three years ago when I found WWS, a community eager to support and lift. A community based on unity versus competition.

A workshop curated by a WWS member through a local university with another WWS member as facilitator was where I found my confidence to share my fictional creations once again. It was a prompted one-off. I read my work. At the end, when we were in conversation, the instructor said to me, “You’re a fiction writer.” I self-deprecated. She refused to let me do so.

This was a gate opened wide for me. Someone saw me on the other side and encouraged me to cross into the literary landscape. Then the pandemic hit. My business was impacted and decimated, and all I had was writing. My work went from primarily CNF to fiction: the type of story I could control.

Mentor Meanderings

I ditched the mythos of rugged individualism in creative writing as I became a fully vested member of the WWS community with engaged literary citizenship. A collective is much stronger than a solo writer. I found writing partners and generous guidance from members.

This experience led me to think that I had evolved beyond interactions with men who weren’t particularly good at guidance, who closed gates I had enough skill to walk through, but too much trepidation to move without permission. I thought I had gotten over this trend until I enrolled in a mentorship with a male editor I held in esteem.

I thought, here is a gate I can access, and it was open. I was a courageous writer and had thirty-plus pieces published in the last two years, twenty-six of them fiction, a few craft essays, some blogs for Women Who Submit, and a few CNF essays. I had been paid for twenty-five of them, for twenty-two I was paid handsomely. I had tested my mettle and proved to myself that they intended the open gate for me. 

New post lockdown confidence and a lot of recent writing credits under my belt, I was sure this well respected and connected editor would be the mentor to guide me further into my success. Perhaps, one day indirectly it will have an impact, but in the now, the scabs from the barbs are healing.

The mentor had great credits, is well respected, and gave great craft talks. I went to a few of his drop-in workshops, and I had confidence in his ability to guide me. My interactions to this point were so positive, I recommended his workshops to others. Our first meeting went fine. We set up the parameters of what our one-on-one work would look like. I was hopeful.

When I received notes from him, I was extremely disappointed. He wasn’t cruel, but it was clear he did not get my work. Looking through the notes there was some useful feedback, but when we met it was clear, he either wasn’t the reader for me or he wasn’t reading the work fully (our last meeting he rescheduled, then the day of sent me a note asking if we could meet later so he could finish my packet). Some of his notes asked questions, that if he had read the text fully, he would have seen I answered those questions. I had others read the same works and verify that there were clear connections.

He seemed to be stuck in his world view, or maybe he was not into my writing. In one piece, I wrote there was a reference to feeling eyes undress the character to which he said “eyes don’t do that.” I argued, “It may be cliché, but eyes definitely undress people. Folks who live in perceived female form have had many an experience of eyes leaving them feeling attacked.” He disagreed because it wasn’t something he had experienced. In his worldview, eyes didn’t do that. I conceded with “what you are telling me is that it isn’t working, so it’s not working.”

The feedback was starkly different from that of other writers/editors I have workshopped with. As a neurodivergent writer, my work is meta. It’s part of who I am and it’s not something I can stop. My perspective watches patterns, focuses on the psychosocial aspect of human development, and often has multiple layers. Patterns emerge, not quite to the Beautiful Mind level, but they seem obvious to me.

The following meetings he kept bringing up that I was a genre writer, something I had never been called before. Genre writers do something far more difficult than I could ever do. They build complex worlds based on formulas. My brain rejects that kind of structure. 

I think what he was meaning is I use accessible language, which I do, but my work is more complex than the words he read, it just didn’t work with his taste. After our third meeting and him repeating genre about 10x, I told him I had never been called a genre writer before, ever. He attempted to assuage my frustration and stated he didn’t mean it as an insult. In most literary spaces I find when people say someone is a “genre writer” it’s not generally a compliment. It is a closed gate.

I would be remiss if I said I didn’t feel destroyed after our meetings. Once, I cried in frustration for four hours. The solace was that WWS member and mentor Colette Sartor prepared me for this. She said, “You are an experimental writer. A lot of literary editors will not get it. That’s okay, you just have to submit to the places that will.”

The editor said I needed to be less metaphorical overall. In another piece, he said I was too universal. What this told me is that we were not a good match. A few weeks toward the end of our program together on Twitter, he said that if he could write like anyone, it would be Elizabeth Strout. Had I known that, I would have known we were not an ideal pairing. Elizabeth Strout is a gifted writer that writes MFA style prose, but it isn’t my style of writing or preferred reading. My writing is New California and Strout’s is New England literature. Mine is experimental; it is odd; it is as unique as my neurology.  

The editor kept saying that I like to tackle different and difficult perspectives. I do not think he realized that this is the way my brain works. It’s not about liking to write a particular way, it’s my authentic voice. I choose accessible language most times because I find arbitrary barriers nonsensical, but the perspective isn’t forced, it just is. Trying to fit into neurotypical forms can make my brain feel broken and forced.

Friends, mentors, and colleagues all said the same thing: that he was a gatekeeper but not my own. My interaction with him triggered the same feelings I had going through elementary school with teachers that did not understand children who think and see the world differently. When all was done, I was able to detach from the feeling of being worthless. 

Now, I take the wheel, knowing I am the driver of my writer’s voice. I do not need permission to travel this road, the words are always with me. I zip over the literary terrain in the vehicle of my imagination and I am still learning when to hit the brakes. Sometimes I find myself lodged in a mountain of manure. I dig myself out with the support of a community. I learn, I adapt, and I course correct to find another gate to access. Thankfully, I am a member of a community that opens gates and provides kindheartedness along with useful guidance and direction.

Thea Pueschel is a nonbinary emerging writer and artist, a member of Women Who Submit, a facilitator for Shut Up & Write, a California Arts Council Panelist 2022, and a Dorland Arts Colony Resident. Thea’s first solo mixed media exhibition “44: not dead, just invisible” ran at The Center of Orange from September 2021-December 2021.  Thea has been published in Short Edítion, and Perhappened, among others.

Breathe and Push: Close Contact

By Noriko Nakada

The past Tuesday, I woke up at 2:30 am when my COVID test results came in. I was negative, but I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was thinking about the email from a parent questioning the social justice lens of my instruction. I was thinking about how my first-grader was worried about catching COVID because he’d touched his own poop. I was thinking about the phone call with my college roommate who told me about her colon cancer diagnosis. I stared into the dark, trying to bring back sleep, but I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning around it all. I pulled myself out of bed, got a work out in, and attempted to breathe. Then, I sat at the page and wrote a few lines about teaching, living through a pandemic, and processing grief.

Wednesday morning, I woke up before my alarm. The day sat heavily in my belly, but a full night’s sleep had me like a knife: sharp and ready. I was going to need to be like that blade in order to teach in a pandemic, to coach soccer in a pandemic, to parent in a pandemic, to write in a pandemic. My first grader was home for the week after a someone from his class tested positive. It was our family’s first close contact. A dear friend from college was having surgery, and I was waiting on news. Family memorials for an aunt and cousin who had passed during this year of isolation loomed along the horizon. I made my way from bed and into some yoga, because even inside the chaos, I can choose to breathe. In that breath, I forced myself to see the good: the gubernatorial recall had failed, a school voucher funding scheme had been tabled; the Oregon football team was ranked number four in the nation. Soon, I would be hosting all of my vaccinated siblings.

A girl poses for a picture on a foggy morning. Text reads: Just Kiara today... Gabe's class has a positive case so he's home for the rest of the week...

A week later, I woke up to the full moon shining through the bedroom window. The first grader was still home even though we all tested negative. I was bleeding again after a few months when I believed I had reached menopause. But this pandemic is like waiting for menopause. You think the end has arrived, but then the cramps, bleeding, and discomfort come back. Somehow the pain is worse than you remember, and you wonder how you’ve survived all this time. You wonder how long it will last. You wonder if you will be able to make it. But making it to menopause means surviving, and to making it through a global pandemic, despite close contacts and shifting CDC guidelines, means you keep get up in the morning and keep breathing.

I wake up. I keep going every day, and look for the good: Women Who Submit continues to submit work. We’ve released books, opened art exhibits, and come together on IG live, Zoom, and in-person to celebrate. We continue to support and lift one another up, because that’s how the WWS community makes its way through this pandemic. We seek out brave ways to be in close contact, even when it’s from a distance, and we stay breathing.

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

Noriko Nakada is a multi-racial Asian American who creates fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to capture the stories she has been told not to talk about. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Hippocampus, Catapult, Linden Ave, and elsewhere.

Breathe and Push: The World on Fire

a forest on fire

by Noriko Nakada

Last year, I wrote this meditation on time for Breathe and Push, but now things are different. Life is still strange, and the world is still on fire.

Within this global pandemic, there remains loads of uncertainty. Debate continues about masks and vaccines and what is safe and what is not. In this uncertainty, the family and I had our summer break, and after over a year of not seeing family, we decided to drive to Oregon. On our way, we witnessed the world on fire.

As we sped through the night through Northern California, the sky outside Redding glowed eerily. Flames shot skyward and plumes of smoke billowed. We kept driving. You can’t get too close to a world on fire.

As dawn light lifted into day, we drove through a scorched Southern Oregon. Last fall, I’d watched whole towns in this area burn to the ground, but we drove on and arrived in Portland to record-breaking heat. It was so hot, you’d think the world was on fire.  

After long-awaited visits with vaccinated family members, we drove across the Cascades where the burn scars from this past year remained. For miles and miles, scorched forests lined the two-land highway all around the Detroit Lakes region. The world had caught on fire.

photo credit: Oregon State Fire Marshal via Storyful

It stayed hot in Central Oregon despite the elevation gain, and days later, when we made our return trip, we again drove past smoldering ruins of a fire that had just started, but has grown so huge, it sent smoke across the continent. You guessed it. The world is on fire.

But here in Los Angeles, the summer has been temperate. A long-delayed international sporting competition has begun, and although young women of color like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles continue to show us how to take care of ourselves, how to listen to our bodies and how to know when to step back, I’m afraid we might be burying the lede.

While there’s a global pandemic and sporting competitions dominate the headlines, we have to remember to breathe. But this year’s road trip reminded me that our current lives are not sustainable. We cannot forget: the world is on fire.

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

Noriko Nakada is a multi-racial Asian American who creates fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to capture the stories she has been told not to talk about. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Excerpts, essays, and poetry have been published in Hippocampus, Catapult, Linden Ave, and elsewhere.

Breathe and Push: How a Hawk Lured Me Out of a Dark Holler into the Creative Light

by Anne Pellicciotto

Writing my secrets has always been my secret. 

I’ve scribbled away, diligently, in the margins of my life and, by now, in my fifties, I have a fully completed manuscript. Though it’s never done, is it? 

To keep the creative spark alive, over the years, I’ve taken workshops, gone away to residencies, joined critique groups, attended conferences. With the support of a writing community, and because I’ve had no choice, I kept going. I’ve written and rewritten: the very first version was a novel. I deviated to other stories, essays, blogs. I’ve always come back. 

I’ve mustered the courage to pitch to agents. I’ve gotten kind rejections. I’ve gotten silence. I’ve gotten a bite: Interesting, send it when it’s fully polished and ready to go.

It’s not ready to go; it will never be ready. 

A misty October in a holler in West Virginia.
image of a West Virginia holler by Anne Pellicciotto

Then, one misty morning this past October, in a holler, in West Virginia, that hawk swooped down and caught me in the gaze of his beady yellow eye. I stopped in my tracks. Everything became still. My heart thumped in my chest as I watched him, expanse of brown and white striated wing, sail upward.

“Simplicity and freedom,” I whispered, as he hung above me like an untethered kite.  Then a smile, the first in ages, spread across my face.  

I’d escaped DC for a much-needed break from the pandemic and political mayhem, from the helicopters circling over my neighborhood, rattling the windows in their frames, from appalling events that had yet to unfold. Over the course of my week in the woods the panic attacks subsided, my racing heart calmed, the mind-numbing headaches waned. I slept through the night. I wrote through my days. I hiked through the fields, along the brook, taking in the scent of jasmine and decaying leaves. 

Maskless, out in nature, I could breathe.

Back in Washington, I felt immediately trapped again. This suffocating feeling was not unfamiliar to me: trapped as a kid in a home with my drunken, enraged father; confined in a young marriage that was supposed to have saved me from my imploding family. 

In middle-age, in this time of Covid, I felt a bubbling urgency, once again, to escape. 

As a professional change consultant and coach, I’d spent the past six months guiding clients – business owners, artists, solopreneurs – through their pandemic pivots. In doing so, I’d navigated my own business pivot. I ported my services online and zoomed my days away like the rest of the white-collar world. My clients were inspiring: in the face of so much adversity, many made the shift from survive to thrive.

The problem was:  I wasn’t thriving. I hadn’t been since way before the pandemic. The silver lining of Covid for me, one of the lucky ones who hadn’t been inflicted directly, was that I could see my own fragility – and its polarity – my vitality.

The encounter with the hawk had woken me up to a glimmering possibility. But what was I supposed to do? What did simplicity and freedom mean? 

Initially, I took it to mean selling my house, divesting of my belongings, shuttering my business, and driving west across the country to seek out a new life. But that vision – along with a parade of real estate agents through my home of 22 years – only accentuated my fears. When I closed my eyes at night, the image of pulling away from Park Road, a car crammed with my earthly possessions, drifting around the wide-open west, untethered, ironically, did not feel like freedom. Instead, my chest felt constricted; the sleeplessness and anxiety returned. 

My therapist told me, frankly, “Anne, you’re scaring the shit out of yourself.” 

I chuckled nervously. I bit my thumb cuticle bloody. Did this mean I wasn’t ready? Ready for what?

I went back to my half-finished vision board for clues. The collage of pictures ripped from magazines and glued onto posterboard depicted serene scenes, isolated abodes with decks and Adirondack chairs facing vistas of water and mountains. A pink lotus flower bloomed out of the left upper corner with the word contemplate pasted above it.

When I really focused, I could see: the images were of me, very still, in quiet places. I had to close my eyes to access what was in the depths of my heart, a secret well-kept from even myself: I needed simplicity and freedom in my life to, shhhh, write.  

Even typing these words, revealing this truth to the page, felt like a betrayal, like something I should backspace and erase. But that admission – that writing has always been my passion – was a door, and I stood on the threshold.

My manuscript sits, weighed down by secrets. When will it be ready? When will I?

It’s time to double down on Monday Night Writing Salon, I tell myself. I’ll sign-up for a memoir class at the Writers Center. 

I blink my eyes shut and reopen them to my vision board, propped on the radiator. A calm river runs down the center, a kayak piercing the shady green water. A bluebird, not quite a hawk, drifts across a sunlit sky, song notes emanating from its beak.

I exhale a puff of exasperation, bend closer to the collage, brow crinkled. A woman in white dives into a tropical blue abyss. A hiker gazes across and open field toward the horizon with the message: Trails are merely suggestions.

The truth stares me in the face. 

The truth speaks to me in my dreams. The hawk opens its hooked beak and says I can.

 I don’t need another writing program, a swirl of busy work, a litany of applications, rejections, submissions, decisions. 

I have but one decision to make.

I don’t need a grant; I need to grant myself permission to stop zooming and go.

Writing is a story burning inside me. Writing is a decision to feed the flames.

Writing is the hawk that has reminded me, has lured me, has eyed me.

I stand at the edge of the field feeling the nudge of the breeze against my back. I take my first step through the tall grass. The ground feels firm on this path; my heart feels light. I am in motion.

The next steps are practical; this is a self-funded sabbatical. I prepare my house for rental, post an ad, field the inquiries, draw-up a lease, begin to sort through my possessions. I take another step and reserve my cabin in the woods, in the mountains, by a river, with a good desk and chair and light and air. I make those symbolic pictures real.

I have already run up against Resistance – a very familiar voice that says things like: “Well, you’re not a real writer,” and “The world doesn’t need another book,” and “Isn’t it a little late for a career change?”

This time I reply sweetly, firmly: It’s never too late to become who you are. It’s never too late to be free.

Head shot of author Anne Pellicciotti standing in front of a wide expanse of water.

Anne Pellicciotto, life coach and owner of SeeChange, writes about the crossroads in life that break and make us. Heeding the hawk’s message, she’s hit the road for a year of simplicity and freedom. In the void, Anne plans to complete Strings Attached, a #metoo coming of age memoir in which she marries her music teacher lover to save herself and, eventually, must break free from him. Follow her midlife coming of age adventures at www.seechangeconsulting.com/blog or on Medium at https://anneseye.medium.com/.

Breathe and Push: “Let’s Wait Awhile”

by Noriko Nakada

As the world begins to peel and crack itself back open, whether we’re ready for it or not, whether we choose to enter or not, I am reminding myself of those early days of the pandemic. The world slammed on the brakes to keep us safe, and for the past year I stopped racing to work each morning. I stopped racing to that reading or panel. I stopped racing to pick up the kids, or take them practice, or stop for a quick errand.

My life transitioned to a pandemic pace, and there was nowhere to go. No errand was quick, and lines wrapped around buildings. Everything required time and patience. What opened up during the shutdown was time for resting, and reading, and reflection. Too bad the stress, anxiety, and fear made even resting, reading, and reflection a struggle.

I’m not angry about it though. There is no right way to make it through a global pandemic. Surviving when we have lost three million is enough. After meditating on time, continuing to write, and burying a year, I am ready to take things slow.

Before I sprint back out, eager and unmasked to write my next story, I want to remember we are still in this global pandemic. I’m going to take a minute and listen to Janet Jackson: “Let’s Wait Awhile.”

This time at home has shown me I can slam on the brakes, close my eyes, and breathe.

“Let’s wait awhile (slow it down).”

I have learned that if a line in a poem, a paragraph in an essay, or a chapter in a novel isn’t sitting well, it can sit on the shelf. I can send it to trusted readers, or re-read, and revise until all rests in its proper place.

“Let’s wait awhile, before it’s too late.”

We can take our time. We all really can, so before I rush this essay onto the Women Who Submit site: “Let’s wait awhile. Before we go too far.”

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

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.

How Do We Breathe and Push in 2021?

By Noriko Nakada

The weekend after the inauguration, I woke up to flat Los Angeles light. I heaved a deep sigh into the fog that had settled in, and then urged myself from bed. Month nine of the pandemic meant getting up in the morning required a different sort of motivation. Still, I placed soles on cold floor, brewed some coffee, and settled in to write before the rest of the household was up. There was a new president now and a woman of color as vice president. No threatening tweets had been launched overnight. Still, a different sort of urgency settled in around me, like the gray that clung heavily to the world outside.

flat LA Light: watercolor on paper by Noriko Nakada

In February of 2018, we launched Breathe and Push. In that first column, I described listening to Valarie Kaur’s “Breathe and Push” speech as my family drove through the night from Oregon to Los Angeles. In the midst of so much political trauma, I wept as I stared up at a starless sky.

In that speech, Kaur suggested: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?”

Over the past three years, Women Who Submit has played midwife to the labor of so many women and nonbinary writers. With the support of this community, we have written and published and shared our words. Many of you joined me when I asked you to breathe and push toward a better America.

But after these long, hard years of labor, how do we breathe and push differently in 2021? After taking to the streets, and writing letters, editorials, to push against gun violence, family separation, child abuse, racial violence, and a hostile publishing world, we have continued to feed our creative work. Now, after hunkering down for almost a year to keep our communities safe, the losses from COVID 19 continue to mount, revealing and exacerbating so many of the inequities we’ve pushed against. The world has changed, but much remains the same.

I stared out into the gray light that morning in a country under new leadership, but still in the midst of a global pandemic, and as the fog burned off, I was tempted to step outside, to walk with relief through a world restored to what it was before. But I didn’t urge myself from sleep and will myself to the page just for things to be the same. There is still so much to do, both in the world and with my creative projects.

Let our words set us on a path toward something different because our stories can heal us and heal those around us. From the isolation of what has been nearly a year of quarantining, let’s write the story of our America. Write it and then demand that it to be told.

black and white headshot of Noriko Nakada

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, and Hippocampus. She spends her hours at home with her two kids answering approximately three thousand questions per day.

Breathe and Push: A Meditation

By Désirée Zamorano

An image of mature trees in sunlight.

“Ask your heart, from time to time, what is most important right now, in this moment, and listen very carefully for the response.” –Jon Kabat-Zinn

When I learned that my students would not be returning from spring break, it was like a shovel to the side of my head. I was jolted; cortisol ran through my body for days and weeks, and I had a constant, throbbing headache. I was asked to move my teaching, my content, my carefully designed community-building designed activities, online. Many of us found ourselves in the awkward and terrifying position of being told to stay still, and yet be heroically productive. Like the students, all my plans were interrupted, and my writing utterly side-lined.

I wavered between being frozen with inaction and indecision or distracting myself with constant movement: more dishes to make or bake or stockpile; more articles to read; audio books; an online course; youtube exercise clips; zoom meetups. Not still, not listening, just being certain there is noise and action and activity to crowd out stillness, thoughts and doubts and, in particular, fears.

That inner editor, that tireless nag, relentless reproachful, reminded me that other people were writing their wry think pieces, their touching essays, their profound poetry. Other writers signed agents; agents made deals, sold books. My inner editor, eyed me disdainfully, as if to say, “Why not you?” 

In the meantime, I considered that “last days” have passed, without my even realizing it at the time: the last meal at a favorite restaurant, the last purchase at an independent shop, the last recognition of a student’s presence before they return to their home state or country. The last physical classroom meeting for this semester.

My husband was let go from his job; I heard from friends and students: their job losses, a ruined relationship, weddings delayed or dissolved. Financial hardships, moving away, moving back home, relatives on the frontlines.

I needed to be still, and ask my heart, and listen.

My heart said, it is okay to mourn. 

I gave my inner editor the day off, the night off, the week off, the quarantine off. Shh, I told her. There, there, there.

*

We are humans, we are elastic and we accommodate the wonderful as swiftly as we do the unpleasant. We adapt. We are now a month or so into this odd world. Or three and half years, depending on your reference point.

We are in a holding pattern, in my case with its particular comforts and concerns. My home is cozy; in order to visit my 80-year old mother I can not see my children. My daughter is a cashier at a grocery store; people I know are suffering.

In one particular highly effective habit from Steven Covey’s iconic text he gives a Venn diagram and explains, where our area of concern overlaps our area of influence, therein lies our greatest power. I have tremendous anger and anxiety for so many current political outrages and utterly avoidable tragic outcomes, but that is far, far out of my area of influence. 

What, out of so many concerns, lies within my influence? My words on the page. My interactions with and responsibilities towards my friends, family members, students, community. Where I invest my time and money. My attitude towards this situation. 

What does my heart tell me now?

Out comes the printed draft with all my annotations, it is time to continue my revisions. I bite my tongue against the harsh words I have for my husband, borne out of spending so much time together. I connect and loop in with my friends and family. Put a colorful top and a cheerful face on for the zoom classes I teach. Reach out to the struggling students. Send money to people and causes in need.

The county announces a two week extension to our physical isolation. My doctor friend assures me it will be extended again. And again. 

Disturbingly, thoughts of the future creep in. How will I survive in a summer like this without students, who give me so much meaning and purpose? Like millions of others, I wonder, will there even be a fall semester?

Stop!  I shift gears, and ask my heart, what does it want, for the future?

My heart is very clear. It wants a tomorrow quite different from the yesterday that preceded all of this chaos. A yesterday where so many were struggling and financially subjugated.That makes me pause and reflect, now, looking to the future, what will we bring to tomorrow, to make this world anew?

Author photo of Désirée Zamorano.

Désirée Zamorano is an award-winning short story writer and the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Amado Women. A frequent contributor to the LA Review of Books, her essays and short stories can be found at Cultural Weekly, Catapult, Huizache, and Kenyon Review.  

Learning to Breathe and Push through the Darkness

By Noriko Nakada

A few days before 2017 came to a close, my family and I drove through a cold, dark night from Oregon to Southern California. As we sped along that long stretch of freeway, my partner and I took turns driving, while our kids slept in the back seat. I dozed off when I could, and when I couldn’t, I stared out at the dark landscape rushing past us: distant mountains pressed up against the horizon, shadows of hills crouched beneath a starless sky. Occasionally, I’d pull out my phone, and gaze at pictures of friends celebrating holidays with family and friends or news updates. That was when I first caught civil rights attorney Valarie Kaur’s speech, “Breathe and Push.”

In her address, delivered at an interfaith watch night on New Year’s Eve of 2016, she spoke about her Sikh grandfather’s immigration to this country, and the white man who came to his aid, rescuing him from a dark cell. She spoke about the injustices and discrimination that dripped across each generation in her family, and how members of her family stood up to hatred. She spoke about raising her young son to see a world that is magical, but the fear that she is bringing her brown son into a world that is even more dangerous than the one where she grew up. But after examining these dark corners where our nation lurks asks:

“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?” Continue reading “Learning to Breathe and Push through the Darkness”