writing and activism – Women Who Submit

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020

Breathe and Push: Pushing Publishing at the AWP Book Fair: A Choose Your Own Adventure!

By Noriko Nakada

I’m heading to AWP again this year. Last year was my first because I had the chance to table for Jack Jones Literary Arts. I also listened in on panels, heard from writers I respect and admire, and tackled that book fair.

The book fair is so overwhelming. All of those presses and programs and tables and books and writers. You could run into Jericho Brown wearing a flower crown, or Terese Marie Mailhot signing her memoir, or Wendy Ortiz browsing. In that overwhelm that is the AWP Book Fair, I was star-struck, and buying too many books, and stuck in my head as I wandered the aisles. I saw presses I’d sent work to who had passed. There were presses I’d never heard of. There were presses who’d published me. What did I have to say at these tables where my words were or were not welcome?

I felt lost, and small, so I found my way back to the Jack Jones table again and again. I only tabled there for a few hours over the course of the conference, but it was always a magnet pulling me, and it felt like my home base within that chaos. Even when I wasn’t tabling for them, every time I found myself in that fair, I’d walk by their table, visit with the staff or an author, ask if they needed anything, and help out before making my way to a lecture or panel.

Jack Jones isn’t at AWP this year, but I want to tackle that book fair in a way that feels healthy and productive. I don’t want to feel so lost and overwhelmed. So this is my AWP Book Fair action, and I invite any Women Who Submit members who are attending to join me in putting a little activism into your book fair wanderings.

1) Approach a press with one of our Women Who Submit postcards.

2) Present the card and introduce yourself. Explain a little about Women Who Submit, an organization which, as a response to the VIDA count, empowers women and nonbinary writers to submit their work for publication.

3) Choose your own adventure:

a friendly press: Thank the presses for doing their part to bring more gender equity into the publishing world. Maybe ask how they think they will do on the 2019 count, and what they plan to do to ensure continued equity in 2020. Ask about how they think they’re doing publishing women of color.

a press that is making gains: Acknowledge that the press has improved, but isn’t yet equitable. Ask if they are doing anything to ensure more equitable gains on the 2019 count or for 2020. Ask if they know about their racial representation and how they think they are doing/can do better.

a press that isn’t friendly to women: OK, only one of these is at AWP this year, but go ahead and let them know that they aren’t very equitable in their publishing of women and ask if they’re doing anything to change this. Ask how they might improve their representation of women of color.

a press that isn’t on the VIDA count list: There are so many of these! Ask them how many women editors they have, editors of color, queer editors? Are they actively recruiting marginalized voices? What are their strategies? Do they pay? Are they interested in hearing from our members? Particularly if there are women tabling, and specifically women of color, thank them for the work they are hopefully doing to ensure more equity in publishing.

4) Ask them to look for Women Who Submit members in their slush piles, and to be on the lookout for submissions during our Annual Submission Blitz in August!

5) Record your interaction. Did they seem receptive to WWS’s mission? Any names of editors or upcoming submission deadlines you should note? Will you send them work?

Press/Table	Response to WWS Mission	Editor Names*	Any upcoming call for submissions	Will you submit?

Please record your activism on this google form.

https://forms.gle/MNw1syCdMGbX87z49

It’s that simple! Make the most of your AWP!

Press designations from the 2018 VIDA Count: Book Fair location or N/A (not attending)

Friendly Presses

+60% women published
McSweeney’s: T1930
The Missouri Review: N/A
Prairie Schooner: 1668-1669
The Normal School: N/A
Pleiades: T2034
The Cincinnati Review: 1533, 1534

+50% women published
Tin House: 1635
Granta: N/A
Boston Review: N/A
Ninth Letter: 1532
Jubilat: N/A
Colorado Review: 1430
Conjunctions: N/A
Virginia Quarterly: 1129
Fence: 1751
n+1: T1321
The Believer: 1643-1644
New England Review: N/A
Kenyon Review: 1655

Getting Better: (made improvements >+5% in more equitable representation, but still not to 50%)
Poetry: 1457
The New Yorker: N/A
Gettysburg Review: 1135
Southwest Review: T259
Harvard Review: T1220

Male-Dominated Presses (less than 40% women represented)
The Times Literary Supplement: N/A
The Nation: N/A
The Threepenny Review: N/A
London Review of Books: N/A
The Atlantic: N/A
The New York Review of Books: 1058

Find us for WWS cards at the ACCOLADES Release Party on Thursday, March 5th from 4pm-7pm at La Botanica or at the ACCOLADES Book Signing on Friday, March 6th from 12pm-2pm at table Nosotrxs: More Than Books, 1038.

You can also catch WWS members all over AWP. Here is our AWP San Antonio guide.

Noriko Nakada writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. Publications include: Through Eyes Like Mine (2010), Overdue Apologies (2012), and I Tried (2019). Excerpts, essays, and poetry have appeared in Catapult, Meridian, Kartika, Hippocampus, Compose, Linden Avenue and elsewhere.

July 24, 2019July 24, 2019

Breathe and Push: Stay Cool and Keep Writing

photograph of protest signs reading "End Family Separation" and "We should never separate kids from their families" along with paper cranes.

By Noriko Nakada

It’s summer again, and I’m doing my best to keep writing. I imagine we all are.

It’s summer again; three years since police killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castille. I was wrecked that summer, and had to do something, so I marched through the streets of Los Angeles with Black Lives Matter and learned to say their names.

It’s summer again; two years since white nationalists marched in Charlottesville leaving me speechless, unsure of what to tell my young children, my nieces and nephews, and my students about people who hate them.

It’s summer again; a year since the faces of children separated from their families showed up on my feed, and the voices of children in cages transformed my dreams into night terrors.

This summer, my daughter and I stood at another protest of concentration camps for children separated at the border, and she looked up to me and asked, “They’re still doing it? They’re still keeping kids in cages?”

There have been rough news cycles during other seasons, but these past few summers have felt particularly tough. As we breathe in another heat wave in America, I urge you to keep pushing. Push your stories and voices of humanity into conversations crowded with hate and vitriol. Here are a few spaces where editors look to give voice to our times.

The Rising Phoenix Review published an issue Disarm: A Themed issue Responding to Mass Shootings in America. Regarding their publishing philosophy: “Our team is deeply committed to curating a diverse publication. We encourage writers from marginalized communities to submit to Rising Phoenix Review. Our team earnestly desires to breakdown barriers for writers and readers in marginalized communities. We strive to make our platform a safe space for all. Our publication is open to all poets, regardless of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or religious affiliation.”

The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly published an abortion ban protest issue this month and they are champions of “books, writing, and writers. With over 35 titles published since 2005, we’ve unflinchingly adapted to the changing world of publishing and we challenge the norms by embracing short stories, novellas, translations, reprints, and the avante garde. We maintain two exciting imprints – Alan Squire Publishing, specializing in boutique books and poetry, and 2040 Books, a press devoted to featuring ethnic authors and promoting diverse literature.”

Queen Mob’s Tea House published a special issue titled: “Where Are the Children” responding to the border crisis and treatment of refugee families. They are “an international online literary journal dedicated to writing, art, criticism—weird, serious, gorgeous, cross genre, spell conjuring, rant inducing work. We’re committed to creating an online platform that melds the social with the creative. A platform that speaks to your cravings, fantasies and heartbreaks; your daydreams from your lunch break; your good and bad choices; your contradictions; your process.”

Stay cool out there, writers, and keep submitting.

Noriko Nakada is the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

June 28, 2019July 1, 2019

Tsuru for Solidarity

multi-colored folded origami crane on a flat, black surface.

By Noriko Nakada

Read and bear witness. Retweet the tweets. Repost the images. Fold a crane. Fold another. And another.

Remember Sadako, the first story I heard, or read, about folding cranes. A girl who loved to run and play, an innocent victim of nuclear war who got leukemia years after the bombs were dropped. She folded cranes. One thousand and you get your wish. She didn’t make it to a thousand. The cranes she folded didn’t save her.

Fold cranes and attempt to make clean creases, to give energy and thoughts and wishes to children. Innocent victims again. This time they are in cages. This time they are separated from their families. Treated like animals. Criminals.

My sister-in-law folded 1000 cranes for her wedding. I contributed 200 to the cause. She had all 1000 of those gold folded origami cranes and assembled in a beautiful framed tsuri in the shape of the Nakada Kanji. In the rice field.

I once folded cranes at a table at the Deschutes County Fair in Oregon. I think we were protesting death squads in El Salvador, or the murder of a priest in Nicaragua, or the disappeared in Guatemala. Maybe it was later, and we were protesting nuclear weapons testing, or the first Iraq war, or acknowledging the anniversaries of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I taught nice white folks in Central Oregon who had never met anyone Japanese, who couldn’t believe my dad had been incarcerated as a child during World War II. “Well, that sure doesn’t sound very ‘Merican.”

It was. It is. America is all the truths we hold to be self-evident: the good and the bad. The ugly. We are a country built by people taken by force, built by people brought by force and forced to build this nation. This history is in the bones of the body of our nation.

We are a country who takes Native children from their families. We exclude immigrants from certain countries and embrace immigrants from another. We incarcerate whole families during times of war and turn refugees away and sentence them to death. We drop nuclear weapons on entire cities, take sides in civil wars, go to battle in the name of democracy, fight against communism, ensure our people have access to oil and resources and markets all for America and the pursuit of happiness.

We elect men who enslave, who father enslaved children, who rape, who murder, who who who.

So, today I fold. I teach friends to fold. I teach my daughter to fold and while we fold we think about the ways we can push back against all that is wrong. Push, y’all, and keep pushing.

Check out Tsuru for Solidarity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find ways you can help push back.

Noriko Nakada is a public school teacher and the editor of the Breathe and Push column. She writes, blogs, tweets, and parents in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

March 28, 2018September 26, 2018

Breathe and Push: Finding Light in Stephon Clark’s Name

By Noriko Nakada

This week there is another name to say.

Stephon Clark.

When the news breaks, it’s not because of the shooting. Police shootings like this happen with frightening frequency. What makes the news is the outrage, the crowds of protesters gathering around the city, shutting down freeways and sports arenas. It is the people who refuse to accept this familiar outcome that makes headlines.

I hear only the basics: he was unarmed. He stood in his grandparents’ backyard. He was shot twenty times. Protesters are calling for accountability; for justice.

Then, I look away. How many of you have looked away? It is hard to watch. To keep watching. Continue reading “Breathe and Push: Finding Light in Stephon Clark’s Name”

February 21, 2018March 5, 2018

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”

March 8, 2017March 6, 2018

Writing and Activism: Let’s Thrive

A large crowd of protestors stretch down a city street, buildings looming in the background. In the foreground a woman holds a protest sign and other folks hold U.S. flags

by Désirée Zamorano

So many of us since Election Day have hovered over our keyboards and felt frozen.

Indeed, why shouldn’t we feel petrified, the legacy of Obama under threat, the vision of who we are, as US citizens utterly upended, the walking nightmares announced each and every day? We find ourselves playing an emotional and draining game of lethal dodgeball, and scramble to regain our footing, our equilibrium, our creative muse.

Then we find ourselves with that perpetually dissatisfied editor shrieking at the back of our skull, telling us inarticulate and inchoate ways how we’re never going to write again, the world will never right itself, nothing we’re writing now will make any difference; it’s time, the voice continues, to discard this fallacy of being a writer and instead do something that will make a difference!

Ha. Of course as writers, we fall prey to making it all about our creativity. So what can we do?

Continue reading “Writing and Activism: Let’s Thrive”

December 28, 2016March 7, 2018

2016 in Review with Encouraging Words from Sara Novic for 2017

by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

2016 began with the establishment of the WWS Leadership Team who worked together on debut presentations for AWP16, BinderCon Los Angeles, and MixedRemix Festival. Thanks to our WWS Chapter Director, Ashaki Jackson, we welcomed new chapters in New York City, NY, Grand Forks, ND, Seattle, WA, and Oaxaca City, MX as well as other locations across the country. In September, we celebrated our 3rd Annual WWS Submission Blitz where over 100 women participated remotely and submitted to top-tier journals with over 20 women joining the LA meet up at the Faculty Bar. We held five private submission parties hosted by LA members, and new this year, we held our bimonthly new member orientations at different art and literary centers across the city. In February we met at Libros Schmibros in Boyle Heights with guest speaker, Tammy Delatorre, who shared strategies for contest submissions, April was dA Center for the Arts in Pomona with Cati Porter talking about directing Inlandia Institute and creating Poemeleon, a journal of poetry, June was Antioch University in Culver City with Pamela Redmond Satran speaking about the road to becoming a successful professional writer, October was Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice Beach with Siel Ju sharing tips for finding an agent, and finally this month at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, Sara Novic skyped in from Cincinnati, OH to talk about writing and activism post election. Continue reading “2016 in Review with Encouraging Words from Sara Novic for 2017”