During this ridiculously difficult year, Women Who Submit has offered hope. Our members have supported each other during accountability sessions and publication parties and virtual community readings. We have extended a warm, virtual hand to people when they receive rejections—“motivation letters” as our wonderful member, Hannah Sward, has encouraged us to dub them. And we cheer loud and hard when our members publish their work.
So three cheers for the following WWS members who published across all genres and venues during December, the final month of this long year!
As 2020 draws to a close–and never have I wanted more to see a year end–I am yet again awed by the publication prowess of our members, who have had work appear in numerous venues across all genres. Congratulations to the following WWS members who published work during the month of November!
Another round of incredible publications by our membership. Each month when I put together this post, I’m awed by the determination, talent, and perseverance of every one of us who gets our words out into the world. So congratulations to the following WWS members who published work during the month of October!
It’s time for WWS’s publication roundup to celebrate all of our fantastic members who published in August. Submitting work and publishing it are daunting tasks, even during the best of times, which these aren’t. So all of our WWS members should be applauded for their determination to get their words out into the world.
This month, let’s celebrate these WWS members for their publication achievements!
Congratulations to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and Jenise Miller, whose collaborative video poem “For the Love of LA” appears on YouTube courtesy of The Music Center.
More congrats to Jenise Miller, whose poem “Right/Isthmus” appeared in PANK.
On a black machine in the exam room, I read the words right/isthmus. I only knew isthmus, as narrow body of land, water on two sides, home to my great-grandparents, their bodies black machines that dug the canal where two oceans now meet.
Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that “I know words. I have the best words,” yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump’s rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality.
A shout out to Isabella Rose for publishing the chapter “Self-Love: A Valuable Gift” in the anthology Life is a Gift: Loving You. From the description of the anthology:
Each co-author shares their inspired wisdom and wealth of experience to guide readers to enhance and heal relationships with others as well as within themselves. What has been described as the “Self-Love Bible”, Life Is A Gift: Loving You reveals methods to becoming self-aware, shares poetry and stories to reveal the truth of life and teaches to look at life from a different perspective.
Kudos to Teresa Reilly Keesan, who published the essay “Til Death” in the Summer 2020 issue of Joo Magazine (pp. 24-27).
I can’t remember when I first met Dr. Patil and I don’t know what my brain looks like inside. He does.
My memory is shot these days, but I remember the bananas and almonds I’d eaten the morning of my accident. And how, an hour or so later after weight training at the gym, I got on an elliptical until my stomach started to ache.Somehow — maybe I fainted or perhaps I just slipped — I fell and cracked my head against another exercise machine. Blood from a bisected meningeal vein blossomed into a catastrophic epidural hematoma, the growing pressure rising up against the bone. The force of the fall ricocheted by brain inside its cocoon, resulting in a seizure, a contrecoup concussion, and a subdural hematoma: a second pocket of blood fizzling on the brain.
Also check out Elline Lipkin’s poem “Two Braids” published in the Winter/Spring 2020 edition of the Notre Dame Review.
And there’s also Thea Puschel’s flash fiction “Safer at Home,” which was a winner of The Abstract Elephant’s 2020 Summer Fiction Contest.
No one ever thinks it will happen to them. Those things you see in the news. The bolt of lightning that strikes a person. The body left charred. The car that drove through a living room and knocked the house off its foundation. The child hit as he crossed the street, leaving behind red streaks of blood where he once stood. It has always happened to someone else. Not to me. Not to my family.
From Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, the flash fiction “What He Needs to Know” published by Toho Publishing.
It takes all my energy to focus on my cafeteria cups: soup, coffee, and a gelatinous blob that calls itself dessert. The lunch crowd is long gone, and the easy listening music overhead echoes in the emptiness. I’ve been at the hospital since 5:00 a.m., and this is my first meal. Without looking up, I feel her standing across from me, see her hands on the opposing chair.
My ex-husband’s new girlfriend clears her throat.
And to Flint, congratulations on publishing the creative nonfiction piece “Avery” with Erotic Review.
I’m not proud to admit this, but eight years ago I went through this phase where I was suddenly attracted to men. Or if you prefer, persons with a non-detachable penis. So I went straight to the source, and posted an ad on the Craigslist W4M personals in Los Angeles: Kinky Queer Chick In Heterocurious Phase & Wondering What All the Fuss Is About. I was a very popular W.
Although we do not refer to them as disabled writers, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Flannery O’Connor had traumatic brain injury, depression, and lupus, respectively. We could dedicate an encyclopedia solely to American writers with mental illness, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath and William Styron to David Foster Wallace, and more recently Esmé Weijun Wang. The list is endless, but of these writers only Wang, whose first book was published in 2016, has directly addressed her identification with the word disability.
Jet lag, long and difficult flights, and sleepless nights are only a few of the afflictions endured with frequent travel. For most travelers, these are managed in myriad ways – from adjusting clocks a week ahead of flying, drinking endless glasses of water, imbibing cherry juice, downing bottles of melatonin, cutting caffeine and alcohol, upping the Xanax doses, or taking a chance porting THC products across international boundaries.
That’s what I call you because the mere sight of your go big or go home smile is like the sun filtering through our shutters on a bright California day. It’s the summer before your 13th birthday but for months now you’ve been reiterating that you’re taller than me, that you can almost fit in your father’s shoes, that your dreams are ever-changing: soccer player, drummer, paramedic. You are just as strong-willed as you were as a toddler, but to my delight your personality has also emerged as outgoing and kind. You are compassionate to strangers, concerned about world issues, and you are constantly, unabashedly questioning. It is usually in these moments of inquiry where my enchantment with you turns to frustration and fear. You see son, I have lived in this Black skin longer than you have. I have learned to walk a fine line between approachable and articulate, between joy and rage. I know that the difference between coming home alive or becoming a hashtag might be the stifling of my understandable need to question someone’s unjust begrudging of my humanity. So your father and I usually exchange a glance and maybe a sigh and in the small window before you disappear into your video games with friends, we try to explain to you the terrifying duality of being Black and being perceived as an adult in America.
Lituo Huang’s microflash “16A” appeared in Daily Drunk Posts.
The woman on the bed, with hair like brown shoelaces over her scalp, says, “I told you to never trust anyone who puts on shoes to get the mail.
Nurses, grocery clerks, postal workers, Lyft drivers, and the folx who deliver your quarantine snacks — they can all wear masks at work without raising eyebrows. But strippers all across the country are required to wear zero (or tiny) clothing in order to perform in tight, sweaty quarters in close contact with strangers. At some strip clubs in Los Angeles, performers even sign contracts agreeing to be naked on the floor. If they break the rule and wear a single article of clothing, they are fined up to 80 dollars.
When COVID-19 raged across the United States, strippers, massage therapists, nail salon technicians, and many other workers who rely on human touch watched our livelihoods vanish without any warning — and for thousands of us, the possibility of any federal or state assistance remains frustratingly out of reach.
Over the last five years, I’ve studied all of the child fatalities in Los Angeles County with open Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigations. To some, this research might seem grim, but I’ve found comfort in unpacking these redacted files. The files trickle in from my public records requests, five or ten at a time. I spend hours identifying the blacked-out information. I start by checking the child’s age and date of death in one of these case files against a Los Angeles Times homicide report. Then I search the Internet for other clues, the dark boxes slowly revealing some of the facts of their story.
Doubtless, one of the things that draws me to the files is the short spell I spent in the child welfare system. It’s a club you join and never leave. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of being taken from your mother. I’m forty-three now and grieve that loss again and again.
On Thursday we published “‘Hansel and Gretel’ in LA County” by Melissa Chadburn. The title we came up with, I realized only later, was an unconscious homage to Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Janet Malcolm’s great book about a murder trial involving a child custody battle that took place in Queens. There is a genuine thematic link, in fact, with Chadburn’s story—which, though based on her empirical research into welfare services investigations of child deaths, also draws on the mythic roots of the violence and horror that occur inside families.
Several days each week in my neighborhood in South Los Angeles I head out for a run. When my family and I moved here in 2018, the neighborhood was already shifting. It was the summer before teachers were preparing to go on strike, before the spring when Nipsey Hussle was murdered just a few blocks away. It was a year after Alton Sterling was killed by police and two years before Ahmaud Arbery.
I run through the neighborhood captured by Lynell George in After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. She writes about these streets as the veins and arteries of her childhood, and now this is where I run in pleasant weather: up 59th Street to Alviso, across Slauson, and up the hill.
On the first day of Hindi class, I learned the word for “vomiting.” Not one of the words I would have introduced had this been my language class to teach, but in returning to the classroom as the student, I kept my criticisms to a minimum. The textbook was to blame. The authors organized the chapters to provide handful of the characters in the Hindi alphabet, known as Devanagari, and then provide a small vocabulary list of words including those recently-taught letters. “A” is for “apple” and so on.
Recently, I came across Olga Kazan’s article from The Atlantic entitled “Plight of the Funny Female.” According to a mess of studies with smart people writing on notepads, women are not seen as funny.
Many women don’t consider themselves funny. Humor is for men. When going to a comedy club, you’ll see the mostly male line-up of comedians and one woman shoved in there so they seem inclusive.
Part of the problem is that men have made women think they aren’t funny. But according to Kazan’s article, men are more aggressive when it comes to being funny. They try and fail and try again. And with that, they have a higher success rate of scoring a laugh.
Gee, why does that sound familiar? Oh right! Because it’s the same thing men are doing in the publishing world.
As you probably already know, there are loads of literary journals available for your poetry, prose, and other creative media projects. But if you’re like me, and you occasionally write the snarky satiric piece, something that you feel deep down can’t be put out in the world, you may feel lost. It’s a bit more challenging to find a journal or website that showcases funny writing. The hits are old and contain several sites with broken links or closed journals.
It’s like nobody sees humor as quality writing here.
2018 has been a wonderful year for WWS members finding homes for their work and March was no exception. Congratulations to all the women who had work published this month!
Congrats to Carla Sameth who had three poems published at Unlikely. From “Secondary Inspections“:
A nose, a foreign look, a memory. “They just want to know if you are Jewish,”
your mom says of questions about what country you came from;
you know that you’ll never pass for who you are. Everyone foreign claims your face.
City of Angels swelters, everyone here from somewhere else, still they ask,
“Where were you born?” and “How do you say ‘Hello’?” You answer fearing hatred.
Fear you came by naturally after strip search and secondary inspections. Not beautiful.
Congratulations to all the women and nonbinary writers who have been published this month! Here is publication news from WWS-SF!
From Janna Layton’s poem, “The Seventh Room,” in the literary magazine Polu Texni:
The Masque of the Red Death” is short—
a story in seven pages—
and so much of it
is Poe’s description of the rooms,
the twisting ballrooms of the castle
where Prince Prospero has locked himself away
from the plague.
An eventful year finally winds down as we all look forward to a fresh start in 2017. Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit members who have had work published in 2016 and to those who sent their work into the world in December.
“What did you do to your hair?” Mother exclaimed, sorry she’d sent Beth to the neighborhood salon alone. “What about your graduation pictures?”
Beth fingered the brightly colored stripes that corrupted her freshly-cropped, light-brown hair. “That’s why I did it! The green and orange match the Ducks!” She was ecstatic about leaving her isolated desert home for the lush consciousness of Oregon in August. Until then, she had other problems to worry about. She kissed her mother on the cheek and ran out the door.
