Tag: Writing in a pandemic

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Loyalty Oath: Dia de los Muertos 2020

diadelosmuertos2019

by Marisol Cortez

As Women Who Submit prepares to launch our second anthology, Gathering, we will be featuring WWS authors across the genres and highlighting their forthcoming work.

Students in Los Angeles celebrate Dia de los Muertos.

Our first featured writer is poet, Marisol Cortez, a member from San Antonio. We celebrate this poem on its one-year anniversary, long before the winter surge, the election, and the Delta variant. It reminds us that although so many days from the past year/month/days bleed together, the past also contains distinct moments. This excerpt reminds us what life was like 365 days ago as well as what life is and has always been. It expands on the idea of loyalty and allegiance; connecting and reflecting upon this fast-changing and forever constant world.

Loyalty Oath: Dia de los Muertos 2020

by Marisol Cortez

I pledge allegiance to birds
and Black birders
I pledge allegiance to sea turtles
and silly gulls
I pledge allegiance to yard sales,
plate sales, voguing, ancient foraging
circuits: nuez, tuna, nopal, yuca
All the gifts of this land
we once wandered, not lost
like Cabeza de Vaca, but logically
seasonally ecologically
moving. I pledge allegiance
to dewberries growing on the banks
of the lake the Army Corps made
from dammed up river
and the red hornets
who live there too, whose protective sting
to my brow while foraging
sends me reeling,
falling
backwards with the force
of a strike

I pledge allegiance to sacred springs
I pledge allegiance to every wetland
and swamp that hid runaway slaves
and Native boarding school children.
May every effort to drain you
fail, may we fill you up again
instead, restore you, so that no
White House built beneath the lash
may comfortably occupy
your Potomac slough.

I pledge allegiance to rivers
that swallow up
ill-gotten walls and
the lies that built them
I pledge allegiance to the burning forests—
Amazonian, ancient redwood
and all alveoli everywhere:
from Floyd’s breath extinguished
beneath boot and badge
on a hot Minneapolis sidewalk
to the breaths of elders artificially inflated
by ventilators down in the RGV:
I pledge allegiance to all lungs, all breath,
arboreal or mammalian, Aeolian
winds of the body which
resist just by inspiring
exhaling
surviving

To read this poem in its stunning and expansive entirety, look for Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology. Preorder Gathering here!

Rooted in San Antonio, Marisol Cortez writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there. Always a poet, for a time she strayed into an academic career, earning a Ph.D. in cultural studies before returning to San Antonio to write in service of movements to protect la madre tierra. A mama of two, she currently juggles writing, parenting, and co-editing responsibilities for Deceleration, an online journal of environmental justice thought and praxis.

In 2020 she published her debut novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020), which in 2021 won the Texas Institute of Letter’s Sergio Troncoso Award for First Book of Fiction. She is also the author of I Call on the Earth (Double Drop Press 2019), a chapbook of documentary poetry, and “Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the ‘Mission Trail of Tears,’” which together bear witness to the forced removal of Mission Trails Mobile Home Community. Other poems and prose have appeared in Mutha Magazine, About Place Journal, Orion, Vice Canada, Caigibi, Metafore Magazine, Outsider Poetry, Voices de la Luna, and La Voz de Esperanza, among other anthologies and journals. For updates on projects and publications, visit mcortez.net.

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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: a Nation in its Infancy

By Lisbeth Coiman

My mother used to warn about the perils of a leap year. “Este año es bisiesto. Cualquier cosa puede pasar,” her voice dropped to a lower tone for added drama.

Maybe because of that warning, I have taken this stoically, promised myself not to complain about the new circumstances. I can’t stop a pandemic with whining.

  • Typewriter and single wedding band
    Compensating circumstances letter

I don’t want to think too much about the future either. I can have an earthquake kit ready at my door, and practice drop-cover-hold drills twice a year, but I can’t sleep with an opened eye waiting for the next big one. Although not as frequently as earthquakes and hurricane or those darn Oklahoma tornadoes, economic recessions and pandemics come and go. There is always a chance one or several will hit us in our lifetime. This is not a why-me situation.

Nothing is secure anyway. The idea of 50 plus years marriages, 40 plus years careers under the same employer, a house where you raise your children, your grandchildren visit, and becomes an estate sale when you die belongs to another generation. That generation, by the way, created the form of life we enjoy/or not, but it’s ours now. They are most at risk of dying in this pandemic, gasping for air, alone in a hospital, and placed in a zipped back and thrown in a refrigerated truck. Whether we appreciate their patriarchy, capitalist, conservative values or not, we are inheriting the country they helped shaped. At least we owe them the right to a dignified death surrounded by beloved ones.  So I do my part, me quedo en casa, help flatten the curve, don’t infect somebody’s beloved grandma.

Many of us will have to rebuild. But if you think about this as a hurricane that hit the entire world at the same time, first you have to deal with the aftermath before you think of rebuilding. I think of Moore, OK, a town that has a talent for attracting devastating tornadoes, eight in 21 years.

We haven’t reached the aftermath yet. We are still in the eye of the storm. Social Media will let me know that NY is under control. That will be my indicator. And so far, that’s not what I am hearing. What I am hearing is this country’s inability to deal with uncertainty or to follow instructions– two basic adult skills –because we are a young nation, still in infancy, throwing tantrums to have a haircut because we want the lollipop.

Maybe some people are right. It’s easy for me to talk because I am privileged. I don’t have children to raise. So far I’ve kept my job. So far things are ok for me, and will never compared to their suffering: a single mother with a cashier job and no insurance, or a Venezuelan without electricity or water or food, in a pandemic, with a dictator. I try helping those within my reach. I feel bad, but not guilty. What they see in me today is the product of a profound transformation, of years of individual growth, battling my own demons alone. Even if they saw me at birth, they still don’t know all of my stories.

That leads me to another take away. I don’t have the right to call privilege on anyone because I don’t know their complete story arc,  the size and weight of their cross. Even that Karen in yoga pants we all love to hate is carrying a cross – a stillborn, trauma she swallows with loaded margaritas, a stage four cancer she carries with stoicism.

In the meantime, I carry on with discipline: strict exercise routine, healthy food, enough sleep, and steady work for hours without interruption, advancing the goals I set for myself. Those goals do not depend on the economy or the pandemic, but on my focus and personal energy. It is a good time to do everything you want to do or do nothing at all. Just give yourself permission to live the way you feel life at this moment.

Call me selfish, but I have enjoyed every minute of owning my time. I have even gifted the joy in my face to neighbors passing by my window. “Es un año bisiesto. Cualquier cosa puede pasar.” And I decided to take a leap.

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 and dances salsa.
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Storytelling in Action: Personal Narrative

by Ramona Pilar

This isn’t the first time we, as a species on this globe, have experienced an illness that impacts every demographic facet of society. An illness that careens through the bullshit hierarchies and infects indiscriminately. 

This is, however, the first time a new or “novel” virus has emerged during this current era. A new virus for a viral era. And because of all the different outlets we have to communicate to, with, and at each other, there are wealth of experiences and stories being shared. News-wise, there has been some looking to past viral outbreaks – more often than not the 1918 Flu Pandemic – seeking insight or lessons on how to divine the best way out of this current crisis with some degree of sanity and sense of safety.

This led me to wonder about the literature of the time. I couldn’t recall any “Flu Lit” subgenre from around the turn of the 20th century, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. What I did find was that, while it was a major historical occurrence, the Flu didn’t quite find its way into literature in a major way.

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