Yellow Arrow Publishing Blog

Kapua Iao 2/22/22 Kapua Iao 2/22/22

Meet a Board Member: LaWanda Stone

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to introduce LaWanda Stone, Director of Diversity & Inclusion. Welcome to the Yellow Arrow family! LaWanda leads executive communications at Stanley Black & Decker and inner communications as a certified yoga instructor at Life Time Fitness. She also teaches through the company she founded, Namastone Yoga. Her passion is to help individuals show up as their authentic selves and be seen through storytelling. Her worldview has been shaped traveling North America, South America, the United Kingdom, Africa, and Australia. She has degrees in journalism from Howard University, organizational leadership from American Public University, and an RYT-200 yoga teaching certification from Life Time Fitness. You can find her on Instagram @Namastone_Yoga.

She will be co-leading the workshop “Poetry of the Body: Writing from an Embodied Perspective” with Nichola Ruddell on March 3. Make sure to sign up for the class today! According to LaWanda, “I’m excited to help underrepresented women find their voices and share their tapestry of perspectives as we all move through this world, one word at a time.”

LaWanda recently took some time to answer some questions for us. Show her some love in the comments or on Facebook/Instagram!

Tell us a little something about yourself:

After earning my journalism degree, I held reporting and writing jobs at Fortune magazine, washingtonpost.com, Chicago Tribune, and Dow Jones Newswires. I was eventually recruited into corporate communications and haven’t looked back. As long as I’m storytelling, I’m happy.

What do you love most about the Baltimore/DC area?

My windows overlook the Patapsco River and I absolutely love living, doing yoga, reading, and making meaningful connections near water. It’s a visual and audible gift.

How did you get involved with Yellow Arrow and what do you do?

Former colleagues steered me to Yellow Arrow. Notably, our Executive Director Annie Marhefka inspired me to explore getting involved. Between my family, career, and yoga teaching, there is no shortage of responsibilities, but Yellow Arrow just fit. The mission and purpose align with who I am and the energy I want to help put out into the world.

What are you working on currently?

My ice-skating game. I’m repeating level 3 adult ice-skating lessons to build upon my crossovers, turns, and a previous instructor’s description of me: “You’re like a low range freestyle skater.” I’ll take it!

What genre do you write and why?

Profile pieces are my sweet spot. I received a writing award in undergrad for a profile piece on my Aunt Jackie who owned a bookstore, Cultural Visions, and inspired students like me who came behind her at our alma mater. Profiling personal stories and experiences to help other people is one of the best ways to learn in my book.

Who is your favorite writer and why?

I’m inspired by the iconic Zora Neale Hurston who attended Howard University, like me, as well as Barnard College at Columbia University, like my daughter. And I’m enthralled by J. California Cooper whose words make me feel like I’m not reading but being taken for a ride.

Who has inspired and/or supported you most in your writing journey?

When I was a shy, soft-spoken girl who felt unheard, writing helped me find my voice. Honestly, God’s voice has encouraged me to write the most—with subtle nudges from people who’ve been placed along my path.

What do you love most about writing?

The release that it brings. I also take pride in helping other people communicate. As a ghostwriter for executives, I help convey business priorities to the people they need to make the products and shape the culture that will make the enterprise thrive.

What advice do you have for new writers?

Get a taste of each facet of journalism so that you can discover which genre suits you best.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

You can support us as we AWAKEN in a variety of ways: purchase one of our publications from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, join our newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 102, Glen Arm, MD 21057). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 2/15/22 Kapua Iao 2/15/22

Tôn Kutômkimun (How We Rise)

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to announce the next guest editor for Yellow Arrow Journal, Rebecca Pelky. Rebecca will oversee the creation of our Vol. VII, No. 1 issue. Mark your calendars! Submissions open March 1 and the issue will be released in May.

This next issue of Yellow Arrow Journal will be on the overarching idea of r[a]ise. Rebecca states,

“I think that r[a]ise has the potential for myriad interpretations, but at its heart for me is the idea that one rises as an individual and/or one raises others up. Rising is awakening but raising is also about what we do next as part of us but also outside ourselves: we raise children, raise food, raise awareness, raise questions. How do the two words interact in fruitful ways?”

We are excited to announce the theme of Vol. VII, No. 1 next week.

Rebecca was one of our ANFRACTUOUS poets with her incredible piece “Nuhpuhk’hqash Qushki Qipit (Braids).” She holds a PhD from the University of Missouri, an MFA from Northern Michigan University, and is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Clarkson University. She is a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and a native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Through a Red Place, her second poetry collection and winner of the 2021 Perugia Press Prize, was released in September 2021. Her first book, Horizon of the Dog Woman, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2020.

We are also excited to announce that Rebecca will be teaching the workshop “Writing the Archive” for Yellow Arrow in April. The goal of this workshop is to introduce participants to various methods of writing creatively using archival materials as inspiration. While we often think of archives as places where research—in that most academic sense—occurs, archival documents can also be source material for creative inspiration. Archival material is mostly how Rebecca wrote her Perugia Press collection Through a Red Place.

Find out more about Rebecca at http://rebeccapelky.com/.

Please follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram for the theme announcement. Below, you can read more about Rebecca’s perspectives on r[a]ise. We look forward to working with Rebecca over the next few months.

By Rebecca Pelky

Ihtôqat nutôcimohkawô. Let me tell you a story. It’s the story of The Three Sisters, Shwi Mitukushq. This story has many different versions among Indigenous peoples, and this is one of them. Once, there were three sisters living together. Each of these sisters was very different from the others, but they all enjoyed spending time in the field next to their house. The youngest, who was not yet grown, crawled along the ground. The middle sister liked to lounge against the eldest, enjoying the wind and sun on her face. The eldest, feeling responsible for the younger sisters, always stood straight and tall, keeping an eye on things—especially the wanderings of the youngest. One day, the eldest sister noticed a boy visiting the field. They were all curious about him because he was talking to the animals. The boy began to visit often, and always showed them interesting things. Then one night in late summer, the youngest sister disappeared. The two elder sisters mourned her loss, and though they searched, they couldn’t find her. Not long after, the middle sister also disappeared, and the eldest was left alone. She blamed herself for not watching over them carefully enough. In her loneliness over the winter, she began to age and wither away. Thankfully, in spring, her sisters returned. They had been so curious about the boy that they had followed him and then were unable to return because of winter’s arrival. Seeing how much distress they’d caused the sister who always looked after them, they vowed to never leave again. That’s why the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—are always planted together. Each plant helps the others thrive: beans climb the sturdy corn stalks, which allow them to bask in the sun above the squash plants’ vines and broad leaves. In turn, beans provide nitrogen to the soil and also stabilize the corn during high winds. Meanwhile, the large squash leaves help the soil retain moisture by shading it. The three sisters grow best when they rise together.

As I write this blog post to introduce myself, I’m sitting at my desk in a house on land that once belonged to the Mohawk people, whose name for themselves is Kanien’kehá:ka (“People of the Flint”). The Kanien’kehá:ka are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which many know as the Iroquois Confederacy. I’m not Mohawk nor do I belong to another tribe in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Yet I share this to express my gratitude. For the Haudenosaunee and many other Indigenous Nations, including my own, gratitude is central to our worldview, and what is gratitude but the recognition that we don’t rise alone. In recognizing my privilege of existing and writing to you in this space, I hope to raise others up with me—raise awareness, knowledge, perceptions.

As I’ve learned more about the history of my Mohegan ancestors, I’ve also learned that I have many reasons to be grateful to the Haudenosaunee. Like the sisters, my people would have had a difficult time thriving without them. In the 18th century, around the time of the Revolutionary War, my Indigenous ancestors were trying to move west, out from under the influence of colonial alcohol and land grabs. They, along with people from several other tribes, established a town in what would become Upstate New York. They built a church and called their town Brothertown, or, in Mohegan, Eeyamquittoowauconnuck. This was only possible because the Oneida Nation welcomed them into their territory, vowing that, “. . . and now brethren we receive you into our body as it were, now we may say we have one head, one heart, and one blood. . . . And if the evil spirit stirs up any nation whatsoever or person against you and causes your blood to be spilt we shall take it as if it was done unto us; or as if they spilt the blood from our own bodies. And we shall be ever ready to defend you and help you or even be ready to protect you according to our abilities. Brethren, we look upon you as a sixth brother. . . . The Oneidas, Kiyougas, Manticucks, Tuscaroras, and Tdelenhanas, they are your elder brothers. But as for the Mohawks, Onandagas, and Senecas, they are your fathers . . .” At the heart of this welcome, and indeed at the heart of the many Indigenous worldviews is that the success of a community outweighs the success of the individual—we should raise each other up as we rise ourselves. Even as my ancestors migrated again to Michigan territory (which would become Wisconsin), the Oneida, some of whom also moved to Wisconsin, continued to be close friends to the Brothertown Nation. That relationship remains to this day.

It’s all been a kind of awakening, as I learn more about what it means to be a Mohegan of Brothertown (and Mohican and Eastern Cherokee and African and German and British and French). Which parts of myself do I need to raise up? Which parts of myself need me as an ally? It’s a strange paradox to contain so many people—the colonizer and the colonized. But those parts also have to coexist in order for me to thrive. That’s not always easy, but I remember the lessons of the three sisters. I remember the lessons from my Brothertown ancestors—how Mohegan, Narragansett, Tunxis, Pequot, Niantic, and Montaukett peoples built a town and a church together, and together, have raised each other up for over 240 years.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

Kapua Iao 2/8/22 Kapua Iao 2/8/22

Poetry is Life: How it Happened

So far, 2022 has been a jam-packed year for Yellow Arrow Publishing. We have chosen to AWAKEN in 2022, to reopen, reintroduce, reactivate, and restructure many of our core programs, including our Writers-in-Residence program (application open February 7–25), workshops (first class at the end of February!), and publications. Ann Quinn, Yellow Arrow Journal’s poetry editor and our only workshop instructor in 2020, has played a major role throughout the first month of 2022.

Her workshop “Poetry is Life” will begin again in March and as you all know, we just released the fantastic Poetry is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow, a guidebook for both readers and writers of poetry, alike.

Find your copy of Poetry is Life in the Yellow Arrow bookstore and reserve your spot in her class today. The live reading of Poetry is Life was on February 6 and is now available on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel: youtu.be/cg7x3c_uVwo.

So, how did it all happen?

By Ann Quinn

Our first meeting was in person. March 7, 2020, was to be the first of 12-monthly sessions—a year of poetry—in Yellow Arrow’s new house, decorated by volunteers with donated furniture and fixtures and lots of yellow paint. It still smelled a bit mildewy, but it was ours. Eight strangers gathered, with that slight prickle of mistrust—what will she ask of me, what will they think of me—but before long we were reading a poem together and parsing it and starting to break down the walls, just a little bit. Two hours later, we had shared, we had seen one another in our writing, we had eaten donuts from Hoehn’s Bakery, and we promised to come back in April.

And you know what happened next. But this class had been a dream of mine, and I was not about to let it go because of a pandemic. I called Gwen Van Velsor, Yellow Arrow’s founder, and said that I wanted to continue on Zoom. She agreed, somewhat doubtfully, I think, as long as I provided the account.

This was the class I had wanted to take, for decades. When I was 26, my mom gifted me a poetry weekend with Sandy Lyon, a poet who hosted weekend workshops in his home in Bethesda, Maryland. At that point, I had done some journaling, and I had written the occasional sonnet, but I was not alert to the magic latent in words arranged carefully and sparely on the page. And then the weekend was over, and I didn’t know how to carry this coolness on all by myself. So I returned to the rest of my messy life and was just a bit more inclined to read poems when they showed up and to wonder how the writer did that. And to take every opportunity, rare as it was, to write with others. And to return over and over to the question that Mary Oliver asks, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Twenty years later—after graduate school in music, a year in an ashram, a brief stint in acupuncture school, lots of freelance work, marriage, and two kids—I interviewed a neighbor, Michael Collier, former Poet Laureate of Maryland, in order to write an article about him. In preparation for our meeting, I read one of his books. I read the poems one at a time, in waiting rooms, at the playground, in the minutes between my kids’ bedtime and mine. And the poems circled in my head and made me think and wonder and see things in new ways. And after the interview, Michael gave me a book that included an essay on how he decided to become a poet. You could decide to become a poet? Your poems could be bad at first, and then gradually improve? It seems so obvious now, but at the time it felt revelatory. I began reading voraciously and getting up early to try to write. I longed to take a class, but the nearest class was an hour’s drive, if I was lucky, down 95, 495, and Connecticut Avenue, and I couldn’t count on getting back by the end of my kids’ school day. My passion slowed to a simmer. My family came first.

Then my mom died. If you’ve experienced grief, you know how life-changing it can be. And if you’re reading this, you probably know how healing poetry can be as an outlet. Now poetry felt crucial. And my kids were older. I found a way to get to Bethesda one day a week for a Poetry 101 class with Nan Fry. I got into an advanced poetry class at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with the marvelous Lia Purpura. I’ll never forget the feeling of walking into the undergraduate classroom at 50. How keenly I felt my age, and yet at the same time I felt 12. But how my heart sang. That semester, and the following (in which I took Intermediate Poetry with Lia—and I would happily take Beginning Poetry with her, too), were days in which I carried a light in my chest—it was like a low-grade, long-lasting feeling of being in love. And still, I would cry at the slightest remembering that my mother was gone. Meanwhile, the poetry poured forth.

Lia told me about a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington. I got in. Three years later, I graduated. I had some publishing success, including a book, Final Deployment (2018) from Finishing Line Press. But I was keenly interested in teaching, and I was looking for opportunities. I volunteered to lead a writing group at my church; before long, the free class had sorted itself into a small but dedicated group of writers who were willing to be vulnerable and real, confirming that yes, this was what I wanted to do.

Doors don’t always open at first. Poetry, like any of the arts, has a certain self-imposed hierarchy, where sometimes it feels as if obscurity wins the prizes. This is a shame because poetry has so much to offer everyone. And coming out of an MFA program, many people wonder which path to take. I think everyone has an important story, and what my study has given me is a way to gently lead those who would write poetry down the path of craft, for that is where delight lies.

Gwen created Yellow Arrow to open more doors to writers who might not otherwise be heard. Teaching here, and helping edit the journal, I feel like I’m helping these voices find their way. This class has been a gift. From the very first session on Zoom, we’ve had students from the West Coast, the Midwest, the South, and even Canada. A cohesive group has formed, and while we welcome others into the class, there are eight regulars who have attended almost since the beginning (three of whom were there on the donut day). We felt it was time to show you what we’ve done so far, which is how Poetry is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow happened. “Poetry is Life” is the class I wanted to take, all those years ago. And Poetry is Life is a way to share it with you.

You can find a copy of Poetry is Life in the Yellow Arrow bookstore and through most online distributors. Poetry is Life was compiled by Ann and includes contributions by Linda Gail Francis, Patrick W. Gibson, Jessica Gregg, Sara Palmer, Julia W. Prentice, Patti Ross, Nikita Rimal Sharma, and Jobie Townshend-Zellner. Cover art, “Coastal Vibrancy,” is by Claudia Cameron and the cover design is by Alexa Laharty.

Ann Quinn is a poet, editor, teacher, mentor, mother, and classical clarinetist. Her award-winning work has been published in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Broadkill Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Haibun Today, and Snapdragon, and is included in the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. Her chapbook, Final Deployment, is published by Finishing Line Press. She teaches at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and for Yellow Arrow Publishing and is the poetry editor for Yellow Arrow Journal. Ann holds an MFA in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Catonsville, Maryland with her family. Visit her at annquinn.net.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

Kapua Iao 2/4/22 Kapua Iao 2/4/22

How Our Roots Define Us: A Review of Dannie Ruth’s Inside the Orb of an Oracle

By Darah Schillinger

In her book, Inside the Orb of an Oracle (2020), Dannie Ruth transforms everyday images into art, bringing to life both grief and joy in the moments we may overlook. This collection of poetry illustrates how death and destruction belong alongside love and intimacy, combating the heavy reality of grief with the small, beautiful parts of life that may seem insignificant, like the grass on your toes drifting to the bottom of a pool. The poems manage to critique American values while also praising the cultures that have formed in spite of those values, recognizing that despite America’s deep systematic failures, it is the resilience of its people that we must celebrate.

The chapbook begins and ends with family, first describing the “equilibrium” of her own birth between her parents and sibling and seeing herself as “the end and the beginning of the whole.” The chapbook then ends with short, poetic descriptions of everyone significant in the poet’s own life, bookending the poems themselves with the immortalization of family. Ancestral ties and family are the dominating themes throughout the collection, as Ruth consistently refers back to her own roots and identity as a black woman in America.

We continue to discover more of our story, but most impeccable is this untethered bond that has bred four generations of black.

-I am a descendant of my great great grandfather’s third wife.

There is importance impressed upon her roots that cannot be ignored, revitalizing the idea of ancestry in a time when we’d rather forget the past than learn from it. Ruth’s emphasis on family and her roots seems to give meaning to the present, finding self within the stories and experiences passed down through generations. In “car ride lullaby,” the speaker describes a family reunion and the sights, sounds, and smells that defined her childhood:

The smell of grass charcoal, and old bay outback,

out front a street race

sunlight bouncing off dark backs

stretched arms and legs at the finish line

The smell of black and mild’s, beer, weed and wine, cigarettes and raspy conversations

These images are so routine yet illustrated so beautifully it’s as if we have transported there ourselves, watching everything happen in vibrant flashes of color and sound. The moments of joy and daydreams we are given perfectly contrast the grief and violence we see on other pages, giving a well-rounded, complex look into the speaker’s personal experiences.

The theme of ‘the linear’ defines Ruth’s poetry, imagining the white narrative as the default line of truth that excludes every other narrative it has erased. The linear is used to criticize America’s treatment of black voices and engage her readers in a conversation of colonialism, advertising the linear as a polished version of America's truth in need of critique. In “line leader,” the poem begins with:

His story is linear like the schools teach

And ends with:

He soothes:

No one else will breathe

our air. Fight against us

if you dare, you of darker

skin & coarser hair.

We are not told explicitly who the dominating “He” is but given the language of othering provided by the ending stanza it seems the “He” is actually a personified image of the white, male narrative of American colonialism. The “He” is a symbol of the oppressor, real but elusive, because of the sheer pervasion of whiteness within our society. As we know, there cannot be one dominating social group without the oppression of another, and with her poetry, Ruth puts into words the frustration, anger, and helplessness one feels when fighting a system that oppresses them.

Like the linear, death is central to Ruth’s storytelling, acting as a grounding force that sobers us and reminds us to savor the moments we may take for granted. In “only time we heard dad curse,” the speaker begins the poem with:

someone from the neighborhood shot a dog

& tossed this death over our fence

Here we are given a glimpse into the speaker’s own relationship with death, turning it into a tangible force that can be thrown away and thrust upon us. If we view death as someone forced, it revisits the old conversation about the unfortunate reality of unpredictable death, which Ruth also touches upon in her poems about gun violence and disease. From “guns”:

They reside at your local McDonald’s, Wal-Mart,

maybe even your grandmother’s purse.

dependable, destructive, damned,

damn near patriotic.

And from “my world”:

I had seen so many die

suddenly, slowly, miraculously

I began to understand the value

of a life and a life unfulfilled.

Death becomes visible in these poems, reminding us of our own mortality without instilling the same fear we’re accustomed to. Death becomes a handgun, the sterile white inside a hospital, the corpse of an animal. To Ruth, death is no longer something abstract and looming, but rather something sad and very real—something that can be tossed from one yard to another.

Not only is Dannie Ruth’s Inside the Orb of an Oracle a beautiful, free-verse glimpse into what makes a black, female poet in America but it is also a symphony of joy and color, death, and the whispers of slavery still manifesting around us, all compiled into one gorgeous chapbook. After experiencing it for myself, it is clear we must all read and reread until every smell is experienced, every image seen, and every poem is absorbed into the warmth of our chests.

Ruth, Dannie. Inside the Orb of an Oracle. C&R Press, 2020. https://crpress.org/shop/insidetheorbofanoracle

Darah Schillinger is a rising senior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland studying English Literature with a double minor in Creative Writing and Philosophy. She previously interned for the literary magazine EcoTheo Review in summer 2020 and has had poetry published in both her school literary journal, AVATAR, and in the Spillwords Press Haunted Holidays series for 2020. Darah currently lives in Perry Hall, Maryland with her parents, and in her free time she likes to write poetry and paint.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

Kapua Iao 2/1/22 Kapua Iao 2/1/22

Poetry is Life: A Workshop Becomes a Book

Yellow Arrow announces the release of an unexpected but delightful poetry guide, Poetry is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow. The book, which grew from a monthly writing workshop launched in early 2020, is both a celebration of poetry created during the pandemic and a step-by-step practicum for those who wish to create their own verse.

In 12 chapters corresponding to 12 workshop sessions, readers will experience the class themselves through poems that participants created in response to work by beloved poets from William Blake to Terrence Hayes, from Elizabeth Bishop to Tracy K. Smith. Readers then can use the provided prompts to create their own poems. The book’s intent is to reacquaint readers with contemporary masters, introduce up-and-coming poets, and provide an interactive and structured approach that can be applied to their own practice.

The book was compiled by poet Ann Quinn, who also led the class. Ann was the first-place winner in the 2015 Bethesda Literary Arts Festival poetry contest and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook, Final Deployment, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She is Yellow Arrow’s poetry editor.

Eight poets, ranging from beginners to those with published books of poetry, participated in the monthly poetry workshop and contributed to the book. While the majority are from the Baltimore area, others hail from San Diego, Charlotte, and Detroit.

The cover is an acrylic painting with mixed media created by Baltimore artist Claudia Cameron.

Paperback and PDF versions of Poetry is Life are now available from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. If interested in purchasing more than one paperback copy for friends and family, check out our discounted wholesale prices here. You can also search for Poetry is Life wherever you purchase your books including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

And don’t forget to join us for a reading of Poetry is Life on February 6 at 3:00 pm. Find out more here.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. If interested in writing a review of Poetry is Life or any of our other publications, please email editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com for more information.

Kapua Iao 1/25/22 Kapua Iao 1/25/22

Awakening: Drawing Inspiration from Yellow Arrow’s 2022 Value

By Annie Marhefka

Happy new year, Yellow Arrow community.

Each year, staff and board at Yellow Arrow come together to select our value for the year—one word that reflects where we currently are on our journey and one that encompasses all that we are embracing and aspiring to in the year ahead. Last year, we chose EMERGE as our value, following 2020’s theme of REFUGE, where we focused on creating a safe place, a shelter for our community. In 2021, we anticipated an emergence—metaphorically, as we navigated our individual journeys in isolation for much of the year, and physically, as we had paused many of our programs as an organization and as a society.

Though we are not out of the proverbial woods of the global pandemic yet, we can sense a change—a revival, a rousing of the senses. We have learned, we have grown, we have changed, as individuals, as an organization, and as a community. There is a collective newfound awareness of what deeply matters to us, and our focus this year is on embracing that change as we ignite the way forward. Yes, there is much still for us to mourn and contemplate and grieve. But on this morning, the start of 2022, we choose to AWAKEN.

For the past two years, Yellow Arrow has had to pause or modify many of our programs in response to the epidemic and its impact on our operations. For 2022, we are excited about the opportunity to pave a path forward into a new day and as such, our chosen value is AWAKEN. Things will be different, certainly, but we have learned incredible lessons about our resilience, our collective passions, and our literary community’s needs and shared hopes. These lessons will serve as the springboard for our future direction.

If isolation and distancing have had a positive impact, it is that we have been encouraged to awaken our senses to those around us. Compassion and empathy have become necessities and we have pushed ourselves to be more present: to see, hear, smell, taste, touch what is around us more deeply and thoughtfully in order to understand what others are feeling. This awakening of the senses is not just present in how we feel internally, but in the stories we share with others, and Yellow Arrow hopes to inspire our community of writers and readers to incorporate those senses within our written words.

Awakening also signals a new beginning, a fresh way of working and being together. At Yellow Arrow, we have committed to reinstating our core programs in new ways, with a virtual writing residency, online writing workshops, and expanded digital support for our readers and writers. If and when the opportunity to gather in person arises, we will fully embrace it with a focus on safely fostering our mission. But for now, we will look for new ways to spark our creative lights.

And to awaken also means to open our eyes wider, to dig deeper into the background and grow our individual and collective awareness of what is happening around us. We have always had a solid foundation of women writers and a focus on supporting those with voices that have been marginalized by old systems. This year, we aim to expand the diversity of writers and readers we work with even further, in an effort to further support underrepresented populations in the literary arts community. We have brought on LaWanda Stone as Director of Diversity and Inclusion and look forward to the passion she brings to expanding our outreach and incorporating these values in all of the work that we do.

While we present our 2022 value to you with a message of hope and renewal, we also know that many of you are continuing to suffer—whether it be from mental health issues, physical issues, (COVID-19 related or otherwise), or just the tremendous burden that weighs on us as we navigate through the challenges we face in the world around us, and within our own homes. Some of you may not feel ready to take on this changed world just yet. If that is you, please rest. We will be here when you are ready to AWAKEN.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

Kapua Iao 1/24/22 Kapua Iao 1/24/22

Reintroducing Yellow Arrow’s 2022 [virtual] Writing Residency

Application Opens February 7!

Yellow Arrow Publishing is so pleased to reintroduce our Writers-in-Residence program for 2022! Our writing residency program was developed as a way to support and connect emerging writers who identify as women in the Baltimore area, and while we had to put the program on hold last year, we are thrilled to share that we have reimagined the program and will be hosting four [virtual] writers-in-residence for 2022 in April and May. The application opens February 7, so if you are an emerging writer in the Baltimore area, read on for more details and start preparing your application packet!

Read about the 2020 Writers-in-Residence here and the 2019 Writers-in-Residence here. Get your PDF copy of both residency publications from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. From NOW until February 25, you can purchase PDFs of the 2019 and 2020 residency publications (zipped together) for the low price of $5.00. See what past writers-in-residence created!

Requirements:

Applicants must identify as women and reside in Baltimore City or County. Application packets, including a Google Doc form, resume or CV, and a writing sample, must be completed. The Google Doc will be available at yellowarrowpublishing.com/writerinresidence-program February 7–25.

Who Should Apply:

Emerging to mid career writers are encouraged to apply. You should be able to commit 5–10 hours per week on your writing during this time, but when and where you do your writing is entirely up to you! We specifically designed this residency for writers with many competing demands on their time, so that you can fit the program into your life—whether that means working around a full-time job, part-time gigs, motherhood, quality time with your pet, or other personal responsibilities! We are looking for a diverse range of applicants from a broad scope of neighborhoods in both Baltimore City and County.

Where will you write?

We encourage our Writers-in-Residence to take inspiration from the Baltimore community by writing in spaces representative of your neighborhood, and we hope that Charm City’s influence is present in your writing. We hope that by April/May it will be safer to engage in-person but if it’s not, the weather should be nice enough that you can take advantage of outdoor spaces. The entire program has been designed to be feasible virtually, but when and if we can meet safely in-person, we will certainly try to do so (with your safety as our top priority).

What we hope you will gain:

Writers-in-residence will connect and share within a cohort of local writers during the two-month residency program. Yellow Arrow commits to motivating, supporting, and amplifying the voices of our selected writers-in-residence. You will be provided feedback on your work by your peers in the program, and your blog posts will be featured on Yellow Arrow’s website and social media accounts.

What we hope you will give:

Writers-in-residence will write at least one blog post for Yellow Arrow and teach at least one virtual workshop offered to the Yellow Arrow community during their residency. In addition, they will participate in required events, including orientation, up to four virtual sessions with their cohort of writers, and a virtual reading of their work at the completion of the residency.

Questions? Email anniemarhefka@gmail.com with “YAP Residency” and your name in the subject line.

*****

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. To learn more about publishing, volunteering, or donating, visityellowarrowpublishing.com.

Kapua Iao 1/18/22 Kapua Iao 1/18/22

Writing Groups: Why or Why Not?

By Angela Firman, written December 2021

I almost didn’t show up that first night. I was cranky after another day in quarantine chasing my four-year-old son while juggling my daughter’s virtual learning schedule. I sank onto my bed and closed my eyes, desperately wanting a nap. “It’s the first session,” I reasoned with myself, “I have to at least check it out.” With trepidation, I logged into my laptop and clicked the Zoom link to my first writing workshop with Wildfire Magazine. That split-second decision changed my life.

I have identified as a writer for as long as I can remember, but no one knows it. There is a box hidden in the farthest corner of my closet full of my journals dating back to kindergarten. A reader is hard-pressed to find a descriptive detail among any of the drivel I narrated year after year, yet the emotion nearly leaps off the page. The hastily scrawled letters and trailing sentences reveal my urgent need to write. Growing up, I consistently received compliments about my writing from teachers and relatives who claimed I was “a natural.” I didn’t understand what made them say that because I never tried to be good at it. In fact, it directly contradicted my experience in algebra and chemistry where I put in an excruciating amount of effort yet received the lowest grades of my school career.

My journaling tapered off after college as I became consumed with my work as a teacher and then eventually as a mom. It wasn’t until a cancer diagnosis at the age of 34 sent me into a year of treatment involving chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery that I picked up the pen again. As at other points in my life, although not as intensely, I could not ignore the urge within me to write. There were points when I was seized with such intense emotion that the pen nearly jumped into my hand; the only relief from my scattered brain and breaking heart was to write—however incoherent. Dumping my thoughts onto the page in fits and starts, in sentences and phrases, in squiggles and stabs, calmed my heart and cleared my mind. This was especially true in the months following treatment. I was fortunate to have the chance to escape my identity as a cancer patient, but I struggled to pinpoint who I was after a traumatizing year. A soft-voiced writer in southern California gave me my first clue.

April Stearns, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Wildfire Magazine, published my words first. Seeing my piece in print was as terrifying as it was electrifying. I felt exposed seeing my thoughts out in the world, but hearing that other women resonated with my story validated my urge to write. I felt like a toddler first learning to walk who is finally ready to release her firm grasp on the adult thumbs above her. I had heard I was a good writer before, and I even felt it myself when I emerged from an especially fruitful journaling session, but the publication was the affirmation that allowed me to forge ahead.

The publication in Wildfire was also how I found myself logging into a writing workshop hosted by April on a spring evening in 2020. During a block of writing time, I lifted my eyes from my notebook to spy on the other attendees hunched over their notebooks. Here were six other women like me, navigating their own battle with breast cancer, who felt the need to write. Some of us signed up for the workshop in search of community, some for the dedicated time to write, and some, like me, for the chance to learn. I was only an hour into it, and I had already tried two or three new techniques April suggested for bringing a scene to life. Although my low self-confidence prevented me from sharing what I wrote the first night, I was inspired by the other women’s courage. They brazenly shared newly written drafts full of unfinished thoughts and void of any coherent structure. The culture of the group over the next four weeks was so inclusive and supportive that I ended up sharing my own unruly, fragmented drafts multiple times during all our remaining meetings. As we got to know one another our responses moved from conspiratorial nods and thoughtful “mmhmms” to “I love that word choice” or “The imagery is stunning.” After participating in April’s workshops for another six months, and publishing more pieces in Wildfire, I was feeling confident and thick-skinned enough to start getting a bit bruised: to start receiving constructive feedback.

As it happened, one of the members of our writing group, Melody Mansfield, was a published author and former writing teacher. Mind-reader could be added to her resume because, just as I realized I was ready to take more risks as a writer, she offered to lead a second writing group geared for women who wanted to improve their writing. I eagerly logged in alongside five other women each Tuesday morning to drink in the sage advice and brilliant insight Melody offered each of us as we took turns sharing our writing. Each session was devoted to one writer. We heard the author read, then she muted herself and listened as the other women, with Melody’s guidance, refined her piece. We began by stating in the shortest way possible what the piece was about, then we offered up our compliments before explaining points of confusion. Masterfully woven into our discussions were lessons from Melody about writing techniques such as verisimilitude and economy of language. We ended by gushing about the parts of the piece we could not live without.

This group, The Refiners, as we came to call ourselves, improved my writing technically and stylistically, but that isn’t why I continue to log in each Tuesday. These women stopped being my “writing buddies” a while ago and have become some of my dearest friends who make me more than a better writer; they make me a better person. For through their writing, their feedback, and their endless words of affirmation I have learned the power of showing up for others. I have learned that being persistent in pursuing the things you enjoy can lead to much more than you ever imagined, and that hidden within your passions are unknown loves just waiting to be found.

To learn more about Wildfire, you can find their archives here and their workshops here.

Angela Firman is a Midwesterner at heart living a Pacific Northwest life with her best friend and their hilarious, sometimes demanding, roommates aged 4 and 8. Angela is an avid reader, a closet-cross-stitcher, and a fervent writer. While she has always enjoyed journaling, writing became a source of healing for Angela after being diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer at the age of 33. She found a place in the literary world in a writing group for breast cancer survivors—women who have grown to be some of her dearest friends—and now at The University of Washington where she is earning a certificate in editing. Her nonfiction writing has been published in Wildfire Magazine, Open Minds Quarterly, You Might Need To Hear This, and Press Pause. You can find her on Instagram @angelafirman11.

*****

Kapua Iao 1/11/22 Kapua Iao 1/11/22

Meet a Board Member: Jessica Gregg

Yellow Arrow Publishing is incredibly excited to officially reintroduce Board Secretary Jessica Gregg to the Yellow Arrow family. Jessica is a former journalist whose day job is now in public relations. Her poetry chapbook, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019, the same year she served as one of Yellow Arrow’s Writer-in-Residence. She is always looking for something new to write about.

Jessica adds, “I am very excited about the Poetry is Life book [set for release February 1] that is coming together under the direction of Ann Quinn (Poetry Editor) and Kapua Iao (Editor-in-Chief). I am eager to help spread the word about this project and about Yellow Arrow in general. We are a wonderful resource and a wonderful organization, and I think there are many writers who would benefit from knowing about us.”

She recently took some time to answer some questions for us. Show her some love in the comments or on Facebook/Instagram!

Tell us a little something about yourself:

My first chapbook of poetry, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019, and I just finished my second one this year. It’s called All the Wives Got Furs, and I am currently searching for a good home for its poems.

What do you love most about Baltimore?

Baltimore is not pretentious. It’s quirky and full of stories, which makes it a great place to create.

How did you get involved with Yellow Arrow and what do you do?

I was a Writer-in-Residence in 2019, an experience that was invaluable. I volunteered with Yellow Arrow before the pandemic and then recently joined the board. I also am part of Ann Quinn’s “Poetry is Life” class, and we are putting together a book of our work, based on the class, which has been a fun process. Yellow Arrow will publish the book next month!

What are you working on currently?

I am actually writing a young adult manuscript that has two main characters and not surprisingly, one who has been known to break into poetry.

What genre do you write and why?

I write poetry. I love wordplay and all the different formats that poems can take. I also feel like the ‘social media age’ is a perfect time for poetry. People have set ideas about the genre, but really, the genre is full of surprises.

Who is your favorite writer and why?

There are so many great poets out there, but a poet whose work I often return to is Jane Kenyon. I also carry a purse big enough to always hold a book, and Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is currently resting in there; he is another favorite. Finally, I am a big fan of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s podcast “Poetry Unbound,” which is a great place to discover writers I have not read.

Who has inspired and/or supported you most in your writing journey?

The blue-collar work ethic of my colleagues in my past journalism life inspires me to keep going because they showed up to work and wrote every day. That has stuck with me. But many local poets have inspired me with their excellence—Ann Quinn, celeste doaks, Erica Dawson. Gwen Van Velsor also inspired me by starting Yellow Arrow.

What do you love most about writing?

I love crafting sentences, playing with words, and just the general act of creating a story. In other words, I really like the process. There is a lot of joy in it for me, even though I don’t always write about the joyful.

What advice do you have for new writers?

Keep writing. First and foremost, keep writing. But also look for a community that can support you and encourage your progress.

*****

We are so fortunate to have Jessica join our team; she has provided (and will provide) much support throughout the fall and into 2022! Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 12/14/21 Kapua Iao 12/14/21

The Light Reflects Our Path: A Thank You to Family and Friends

Dear supporters, authors, readers, and staff,

As we reflect on all we have endured and accomplished this year, we begin with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. This year, like the last, has been laced with challenges as we have continued to navigate the changing landscape in the arts and literary community, and the significant events that have impacted small businesses and nonprofit organizations like ours around the country and the world. During these times, we have seen that literature and words are more critical to us than ever before—we must sustain our ability to support those who have stories to share and provide our community with the tools and resources that lift their voices up. We could not have succeeded in doing so this year at Yellow Arrow Publishing without the unwavering support of our authors, our readers, our staff, our volunteers, and our invaluable supporters.

We began this year in reflection, with the release of Yellow Arrow Journal on the theme RENASCENCE. In RENASCENCE, we were taken by the awareness and appreciation for our roots, our histories, our shared and unique experiences. Our guest editor, Taína, shared her words on the power of pen and ink:

“In the correct hand . . . paper and ink are tools of resistance. Of rebellion. Like my ancestor etching petroglyphs on the caves of Isla Mona, it is daring to make permanent a fleeting existence. The fuel which has ignited revolutions and birthed nations. In the hands of the silenced, paper and ink is a re-claimation. A renascence. It is ours.”

We explored our stories and cultures with a lens of both nostalgia and awakening, a reflection of our common and unique experiences and a call for change.

Then with our EMERGE: Pandemic Stories and Coming Into View zines, we faced the trauma and the victories brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and let our voices play a role in our growth and transformation. The zines were based on the Yellow Arrow 2021 yearly theme EMERGE and the desire of all who participated in the zines to expand, develop, and come to light. We hope to continue this zine tradition each year with our chosen yearly theme.

And in our November journal, ANFRACTUOUS, we celebrated the resilience and persistence of those who twist and turn but do not break. As Guest Editor Keshni Naicker Washington states in her introduction, “Of all the stories we tell ourselves and others, the most significant follow the words ‘I am . . .’” This unbreakable spirit is what drives us from this period of emergence into a new year and a new perspective.

We were thrilled to publish three phenomenal chapbooks—No Batteries Required (Ellen Dooling Reynard, April 2021), St. Paul Street Provocations (Patti Ross, July 2021), and Listen (Ute Carson, October 2021)—and have just announced the incredibly talented writers we will publish in 2022: Amanda Baker, Darah Schillinger, and Nikita Rimal Sharma. You can learn more about these and last year’s authors here.

Pick up a copy of all of our publications in our bookstore and please show your support to our 2021 authors by watching them read their pieces on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel.

This year, we were also able to reflect at an organizational level, thinking back on our foundations (check out Founder Gwen Van Velsor’s blog on this topic here) and thinking ahead to our next steps. We have set in place our goals and plans for 2022, which include expanded workshop offerings and events for writers, the resurgence of our Writers-in-Residence program (stay tuned for an announcement about this in January!), and a focus on further diversifying our work, both in the words and writers we publish, and the folks behind-the-scenes who drive us forward. We have expanded our Board of Directors and are set to introduce a new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement.

Finally, in an effort to provide sustainability for the initiatives we have planned for next year, we have launched our fundraising campaign: Turning the Next Page. This campaign will run through year-end; if you have not donated yet and are able to, we would so greatly appreciate your support! Funds go towards supporting tomorrow’s authors today.

Yellow Arrow depends on the support of those who value our work; your continued support means everything to us. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@DonateYAP), or US mail (PO Box 102, Baltimore, MD 21057). You can further support us by purchasing one of our publications from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, joining our newsletter (bottom of page), following us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Once again, thank you for supporting independent publishing and women writers.

Sincerely,

Annie Marhefka and the Yellow Arrow Publishing team

Kapua Iao 12/7/21 Kapua Iao 12/7/21

Meet the 2022 Yellow Arrow Publishing Pushcart Prize Nominees

The Pushcart Prize honors the incredible work of authors published by small presses and has since 1976. And since then, thousands of writers have been featured in its annual collections—most of whom are new to the series. The Pushcart Prize is a wonderful opportunity for writers of short stories, poetry, and essays to jump further into the literary world and see their work gain recognition and appreciation.

The Prize represents an incredible opportunity for Yellow Arrow to further showcase and support our authors. Our staff is committed to letting our authors shine. Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. We are so proud of everyone we publish at Yellow Arrow. Without further ado, let’s meet the 2022 Yellow Arrow Pushcart Prize Nominees!

**Ute Carson**

“Talking and Listening,” *Listen*
~ Like inhaling and exhaling, /we need both. /By exchanging stories, /we can reach understanding. ~

Ute Carson, a German-born writer from youth, has published two novels, a novella, a volume of stories, four collections of poetry, and numerous essays, here and abroad. Her poetry was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize before. She resides in Austin, Texas with her husband. They have three daughters, six grandchildren, a horse, and a clowder of cats. Please visit her at utecarson.com.

Ute was featured in Yellow Arrow Journal’s (Re)Formation issue and her .Writers.on.Writing. was added to the Yellow Arrow website August 2021. Ute’s chapbook Listen was just released in the Yellow Arrow bookstore.

**María Elena Montero**

“Four Quarters,” *Yellow Arrow Journal*, Vol. VI, No. 2 **Anfractuous**
~ I was four quarters at peace. The whole of me, sitting there highlighted by streaks of auburns and bronzes. Four quarters at peace with owing an explanation to no one. ~

María Elena Montero is a writer born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area. She is AfroLatina of Cuban-Dominican descent and fluent in Spanish, rumbao, and bachata (not necessarily in that order). María Elena’s essays have appeared in The Acentos Review, in the award-winning SankShuned Photography Art Book, the anthology Peínate: Hair Battles Between Latina Mothers and Daughters, and the literary magazine midnight & indigo. When she’s not bird watching, teaching yoga, or writing, you can find María Elena at meechiemail.com and her CNF “Four Quarters” in Yellow Arrow Journal ANFRACTUOUS.

**LEAH MYERS**

“A Writer Who Can’t Read,” *Yellow Arrow Journal* Vol. VI, No. 1 **Renascence**
~ A writer who can’t read is a sorry sight. When I don’t understand a language, I want to skim over it. I want to let my eyes gloss its twists and bends so that I do not have to feel lesser for not understanding. ~

Leah Myers is an Urban Native American writer with roots in Georgia, Arizona, and Washington, and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of New Orleans. Her work has previously appeared in Craft Literary Magazine, High Shelf Press, Newfound, and elsewhere. Leah is a member of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe and can be found on Instagram and Twitter @n8v_wordsmith, or at leahmyers.com.

You can learn more about Leah in her Yellow Arrow Journal .W.o.W. from July 2021 and a “Writer Who Can’t Read” in Yellow Arrow Journal RENASCENCE.

**Melissa Nunez**

“Alight,” EMERGE: *Coming Into View*
~ I am accustomed to the point of tuning out, at times, the mournful coos of the white-tipped doves, the cackling caws of grackles, mimics of mockingbirds, even the self-announcing great kiskadee; their quotidian shades and shapes quickly perceived and processed, not penetrating past the subliminal. ~

Melissa Nunez is an avid reader, writer, and homeschooling mother of three. She lives in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas—a predominantly Latin@ community. She writes both essays and poetry inspired by observation of the natural world, the dynamics of relationships, and the question of belonging. Her work has been featured in Folio, Yellow Arrow Journal, and others. Melissa has a flash essay, “Je Vois la Vie en Rose,” that came out in Issue 7 of the online magazine eucalyptus & rose while “Regeneration” was published in FEED Issue 2.25 and “Leche y Miel” was included in Issue 2: Día de los Muertos of Alebrijes Review. Her essay “Silent” is forthcoming in Issue 21 of Minerva Rising. You can find her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.

Melissa contributed her nonfiction piece “What is Mine” to Yellow Arrow Journal’s Vol. VI, No. 1 issue on RENASCENCE. And “Alight” is from EMERGE: Coming Into View. You can find her prerecorded reading of “Alight” on Yellow Arrow’s YouTube channel. You can learn more about Melissa in her November 2021 Yellow Arrow Journal .W.o.W.

**Ellen Dooling Reynard**

“No Batteries Required,” *No Batteries Required*
~ I write in pencil, the original computer /of pine wood, graphite, and rubber, /instead of metal, plastic, /and that mysterious something called circuitry. ~

Ellen Dooling Reynard spent her childhood on a cattle ranch in Montana. Raised on myths and fairy tales, the sense of wonder has never left her. A one-time editor of Parabola Magazine, her chapbook, No Batteries Required, was published in April 2021 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Her poetry has also been published by Lighten Up On Line, Persimmon, Silver Blade, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Muddy River Poetry Review. Now retired, she has relocated to Temecula, California, where she is working on a series of ekphrastic poems based on (and including) the work of her late husband, the French painter Paul Reynard (1927–2005). Follow Ellen on Facebook and connect with her at ellendoolingreynard.com.

**Patti Ross**

“Indemnity,” *St. Paul Street Provocations*
~ It was your ancestors who started the fight. /Don't you see the need to make right? ~

Patti Ross graduated from Washington, D.C.’s Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts and The American University. After graduation, several of her journalist pieces were published in the Washington Times and the Rural America newspapers. Retiring from a career in technology Patti has rediscovered her love of writing and shares her voice as the spoken word artist little pi. Her poems are published in the Pen In Hand Journal, PoetryXHunger website, and Oyster River Pages: Composite Dreams Issue. Follow her blog at littlepisuniverse.com.

Her poignant debut chapbook, St. Paul Street Provocations, can be found in the Yellow Arrow bookstore.

If you haven’t had the opportunity yet, please make sure to donate to our Turning the Next Page fundraising campaign. Yellow Arrow is able to share stories of writers who identify as women because of our incredible community of supporters. Your assistance contributes to the publication of our journal as well as our incredible chapbooks and zines.

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 11/30/21 Kapua Iao 11/30/21

Behind the Issue: ANFRACTUOUS (Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VI, No. 2)

By Keshni Naicker Washington

“Of all the stories we tell ourselves and others, the most significant follow the words ‘I am . . .’”

To be a writer, poet, or artist is to be an outsider. We give form to our experiences, creating channels and access points for others to connect into in the process. And once a thing has form, we can choose to carry it, put it down, or step beyond it. Belonging is not something we negotiate with the external world, it’s inside us.

To be a writer, poet, or artist is to be brave enough to press the submit button that sends your work into the hands of strangers, risking it being received with resonance or not, and being willing to do that over and over again.

As guest editor of Yellow Arrow Journal ANFRACTUOUS, I had the unique opportunity to be on the other side of that button for the first time. I remembered the sting of the rejections I have received as a writer and so I was apprehensive about the task of choosing between submissions. But the process followed by the team and helmed by Kapua Iao, Editor-in-Chief, laid out a firm path. Due to the volume of submissions, I was soon chin-deep into the “blind” reading process (reading the pieces without any author identification) with Yellow Arrow staff members as we voted on our ‘favorites.’ The high caliber and vast landscape covered by the entries took me on many worthwhile journeys. I remain in awe of the courage and authenticity with which each piece was shared by its creator. The responsibility of making the final choices weighed me down for several days but it also felt right that it should be so difficult.

The Yellow Arrow team’s experience and wisdom certainly smoothed the process and steered my adherence to the theme of the issue—ANFRACTUOUS—and the pieces’ cohesion with each other as we strung them together intentionally to create a progressive and overarching story of the twists and turns of belonging-ness. ANFRACTUOUS starts with the etherealness of a cloud and the search for a home in the opening poem “Homebound” by Sylvia Niederberger and ends with the insight of hindsight on a full life lived in “At Last” by Mary Marca. Along the way we get a peek into the search for belonging that spans not only the continent of North America but across oceans to Africa and Europe and India, as well.

The pieces in this Yellow Arrow Journal collection explore these ideas of belonging-ness and the winding and intricate paths of diverse human experience. Some wrestle with the present-day and some cast a searchlight on the past. Meaning is examined in the land or places we leave or cleave to. And ultimately all included authors are standing apart and forging their own sense of belonging-ness as they bravely own their story and offer it to the world as a signal fire for others between these pages. For this, they (and everyone who submitted) have my sincere admiration and gratitude, and so, too, does the staff of Yellow Arrow Publishing, who give their time to create spaces where these signal fires can exist and breathe and take pride in stewarding new voices into the literary world.

Life is a process of becoming. I believe that the purpose of art and writing is to help us hold a mirror to the world and ourselves.

Paperback and PDF versions are available from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. Discounts are also available (here) if you would like to purchase copies for friends and family (minimum purchase of five). A great opportunity with Christmas just around the corner! You can also search for Yellow Arrow Journal on any e-book device or anywhere you purchase books, including Amazon and most other distribution channels.

And if you are interested in reading what our incredible authors thought of the theme, pick up a copy of the PDF version along with the paperback. Included within the PDF version only are the authors’ and Keshni’s responses to the following question: what/who/where was a turning point toward acceptance/belonging? Take some time and reflect on your own response. Is there a turning point for you?

One final note. With this blog, we are excited to release the prerecorded reading of Anfractuous, “An Exploration of Belonging: The Anfractuous Reading,” on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel today.

Get the full reading here and please support Yellow Arrow by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

I hope by reading the offerings in this issue and listening to the authors’ voices you will be inspired to reflect on your own identification that follows the words “I am . . .”

It has been an honor to be invited by the Yellow Arrow team to contribute to such a mission in the creation of the ANFRACTUOUS issue. Available now! Go get your copy!

*****

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 11/23/21 Kapua Iao 11/23/21

Accepting Yourself: Yellow Arrow Journal (Vol. VI, No. 2) ANFRACTUOUS

“Of all the stories we tell ourselves and others, the most significant follow the words ‘I am . . .’”

Keshni Naicker Washington’s first sentence to the introduction of ANFRACTUOUS, Yellow Arrow Journal Vol. VI, No. 2 (fall 2021), sets the tone for the entire issue. One that explores the idea of belonging and unbelonging; as Keshni, the issue’s wonderful guest editor, explains, “. . . we become some self-fashioned mosaic of belonging unique to our own choices and the intricate twists of our experiences.” What does it mean to belong and who gets to decide when/how someone belongs?

When we first announced the theme ANFRACTUOUS (full of windings and intricate turnings, things that twist and turn but do not break), we weren’t sure what to expect, if submitters would explore the conscious/unconscious decisions that make us who we are. But they did, and we laughed and cried and commiserated and sympathized. Our hearts soared while reading the over one hundred submissions we received. Thank you to everyone who took the time to send us their stories. Ultimately, we had to narrow down our finalists; the chosen pieces and contributors resonated with Keshni, the Yellow Arrow team, and each other by weaving a beautiful story about belonging-ness. We hope that you, our dear readers, are ready to take this voyage with our authors and with Keshni. Thank you, Keshni, for putting together such an extraordinary issue.

Paperback and PDF versions are now available from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. Discounts are also available (here) if you would like to purchase copies for friends and family (minimum purchase of five). A great opportunity with Christmas just around the corner! You can also search for Yellow Arrow Journal on any e-book device or anywhere you purchase books, including Amazon and most other distribution channels.

One final note, don’t forget to check out our prerecorded reading of Anfractuous, “An Exploration of Belonging: The Anfractuous Reading,” which will be released on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel on November 30. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek.

We hope you enjoy reading ANFRACTUOUS as much as we enjoyed creating it. Thank you for your continued encouragement of Yellow Arrow Publishing and the women involved in ANFRACTUOUS.

*****

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 11/16/21 Kapua Iao 11/16/21

Gratitude is a Divine Emotion: Yellow Arrow Staff

By Kapua Iao

“Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever.”

from Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

One of the many ways Yellow Arrow Publishing encourages women writers and women in publishing is through inclusion within the organization itself. We welcome (and thrive with) our volunteers and interns, not only for our own benefit but to also (hopefully) provide a prospective future publisher with some necessary tools and knowledge about the publishing world. And even if a volunteer/intern does not plan to continue within the publishing world, the tools and knowledge of working in a women-led, collaborative organization. One that champions the different and the unique. One that looks for partners and allies rather than simple connections, whether from our own Baltimore community (such as Towson University!) or from further afar.

As Editor-in-Chief, it would be impossible to organize, create, and publish without the incredible help of our volunteer staff and interns. They provide the thought process behind each journal by picking each issue’s theme and reading/voting on each submitted piece. They then read through the chosen submissions and edit them carefully and thoughtfully, not to change the voice of the author but to ensure that the voice flourishes. They provide continuous feedback and proofread the final product before release. And the same goes for our published chapbooks; the process of forming something for publication is thoughtfully long but fulfilling, nonetheless.

We try to find each volunteer, each intern, space in our organization to grow and flourish in the area they are most interested in (and of course where we need the most help!). Past staff members have worked at our live events and at Yellow Arrow House. They hand bound our publications and put as much love and tenderness into each copy as we could hope. Now that we are a mostly virtual publishing company, they focus on editing as well as writing blogs and press releases. They create promotional material and images for our authors and explore or research for future marketing campaigns, events, and collaborations. And above all else, they support. Not only me but our authors as well. I am so thankful to have had them with me on this journey.

So let’s introduce our newest staff members (editorial associates mentioned in an earlier post still volunteering with Yellow Arrow (see here) are Bailey Drumm and Siobhan McKenna). Each has my appreciation, including Michelle Lin who recently left Yellow Arrow to follow her own arrows.

Katherine Chung

Chung, Katherine.png — Lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland
*YA position*: marketing intern, June-Aug 2021
*What did you do*? I created content for the Yellow Arrow social media pages, edited and proofread their website, and wrote personal narrative blogs.
*Did you go to Towson University*? Yes! I will be graduating in December 2021.
*What are you currently working on*? I am currently working as a marketing intern for Towson’s dining halls. I work alongside the head of marketing and am associated with Chartwells student success program. I am also working on a short story for a fiction writing class that I am currently taking. Finally, I am volunteering on-and-off campus since I am in a community service fraternity.

Katherine Chung is a senior at Towson University studying English and Creative Writing. She will graduate in December 2021. Katherine currently lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland with her parents. During her free time, she loves to write short stories and memoirs, read young adult books, and update her blog. To read her blog, visit katchung13.wixsite.com/website.

Angela Firman

Firman, Angela.jpg — Lives in Tacoma, Washington
*YA position*: editorial associate, Sept 2021-present
*What have you done so far*? I read submissions and copyedit for the *Yellow Arrow Journal*. I also proofread Yellow Arrow’s first author/staff zines, EMERGE: *Pandemic Stories* and *Coming Into View*.
*What are you currently working on*? I am working toward earning an Editing Certificate from the University of Washington in June 2022. I write and refine my work with a group of fellow breast cancer survivors each week. We met in a *Wildfire Magazine* writing workshop in early 2020, and we’ve continued to collaborate ever since.

Angela Firman is a Midwesterner at heart living a Pacific Northwest life with her best friend and their hilarious, sometimes demanding, roommates aged 4 and 8. Angela is an avid reader, a closet cross-stitcher, and a fervent writer. While she has always enjoyed journaling, writing became a source of healing for Angela after being diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer at the age of 33. She found a place in the literary world in a writing group for breast cancer survivors—women who have grown to be some of her dearest friends—and now at the University of Washington where she is earning a certificate in editing. Her nonfiction writing has been published in Wildfire Magazine, Open Minds Quarterly, You Might Need To Hear This, and Press Pause. You can find her on Instagram @angelafirman11.

Lisa Roscoe

Roscoe, Lisa.jpg — Lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
*YA position*: volunteer/reader, May 2021-present
*What do you do*? Offer support remotely by compiling and organizing an index of bookstores carrying Yellow Arrow publications, as well as reading poetry chapbook submissions.
*What are you currently working on*? I’m currently working on a collection of poems focusing on phenomenology as a theme.

Lisa Roscoe is an instructional designer, writer, and voiceover artist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has created educational content for global tech companies and international nonprofit Goodwill Industries. Outside of her nine-to-five, Lisa practices creative expression in the form of poetry and black-and-white photography.

Darah Schillinger

Schillinger, Darah.jpeg — Lives in Perry Hall, Maryland
*YA position*: publications intern, May-Aug 2021
*What did you do*? Created promotional images for social media, proofread, and copyedited.
*What are you currently working on*? I’m working on my next poetry collection, and I am currently in my last year at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I have also become president of my school literary magazine, *AVATAR*, and am overseeing the acceptance and formatting of student literary works for the fall publication.

Darah Schillinger is a senior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland working toward her undergraduate degree in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Philosophy. She has interned for EcoTheo Review before her summer at Yellow Arrow, and she has had poetry published in both her school literary journal, AVATAR, and in the Spillwords Press Haunted Holidays series for 2020. Darah currently lives in Perry Hall, Maryland with her parents and her dog, and when she’s not writing poems, she’s usually drinking tea. After graduation, she hopes to continue writing new work as she pursues a career in publishing.

Rachel Vinyard

Vinyard, Rachel.jpg — Lives in Pasadena, Maryland
*YA position*: publications intern, Sept 2021-present
*What do you do*? Copyedit and proofread, read journal and chapbook submissions, make Canva promo images and swag, organize documents and add to research projects, and write and research for blog posts.
*Did you go to Towson University*? Yes, I am graduating this December.
*Did you work for Towson’s Grub Street Literary Magazine*? Yes, I was the fiction editor.
*What are you currently working on*? I am currently finishing my bachelor’s degree at Towson and working on writing my own chapbook and various short stories. I’ve also rediscovered my love of reading, and I’m finding a lot of new genres I enjoy.

Rachel Vinyard is an emerging author from Maryland and the fall 2021 publications intern at Yellow Arrow Publishing. She is working toward a BA in English at Towson University and has been published in its literary magazine Grub Street. She was previously the fiction editor of Grub Street and hopes to continue editing in the future. Rachel is also a mental health advocate and aims to spread awareness of mental health issues through literature. You can find her on Twitter @RikkiTikkiSavvi and on Instagram @merridian.official.

Thank you to everyone who supports these women and all writers who toil away day after day. Please show them some love in the comments below or on Yellow Arrow’s Facebook or Instagram. If interested in joining us as an editorial associate or intern, email staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com.

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 11/9/21 Kapua Iao 11/9/21

How does it feel to share your words?

Screen Shot 2021-08-29 at 11.07.14 AM.png

By Katherine Chung, written August 2021

I have always found that the scariest part of being a writer is when you are allowed to share your writing with others whether it’s online or in person. I think that this is because I have not been in the correct mindset or environment to share my writing during this pandemic. Mostly, my writing was shared for school assignments or self-therapy, and recently I have used it as a coping mechanism for overcoming grief and other tragic events that I have experienced as a teenager.

The first time that I shared my writing with a group of people was when I was a sophomore at McDaniel College. I was taking a memoir and personal essay class and did not realize that I would have to share my writing with my classmates every other week. It was my first English class in college, so I did not know what I signed up for. Each week we were assigned a topic and were told to write a short personal essay, and then the following week we would share our stories and get feedback from other students on how to improve on the second or third drafts.

One week, the topic was to write about the worst or best day of our lives. I could not think of the best day of my life, so I wrote about the former, which was the day that my sister passed away when I was a junior in high school. My classmates applauded me for sharing that story and a few of them even said that they could relate to my experience of having a sibling with multiple disabilities. From that moment on, I always felt triggered, anxious, and scared to share my writing because I felt like the only stories I had to share post-grieving were the most tragic and most sad, centered on my experiences in college while feeling alone in my journey as a new only child (click here to read the piece that I wrote for my first writing workshop).

Most of my high school writing teachers were nice and understanding about my learning disabilities, which helped me overcome my fear of sharing my writing since I was at a school for kids who needed accommodations as I did. As I got older and moved on to college, it became harder to cope with my dysgraphia and rare energy deficiency disorder. It was hard for me to take notes in class and study them since I could not read my own handwriting most of the time; it was difficult to keep up with four or more classes. I also didn’t get a choice on which professors I would have at McDaniel because some classes only had one option for a teacher (also, notetakers were limited). This was a major disadvantage for me since I work and write better with teachers who understand students who have accommodations. Although McDaniel had a few setbacks for me, I still found a great creative writing teacher there who helped me get over my fear of sharing my writing by telling me how strong I was to share my unique stories.

During my Fall 2019 semester, I transferred to Towson University and discovered that some of the professors could be harsher about grammar and editing than the professors at McDaniel. I got over my fear of sharing my words by declaring an English major (you would’ve thought that I chose to study English at McDaniel College, but I studied Psychology and added English as a minor). Then, I decided to become a full-time student in Towson’s Liberal Arts Major since it was something I truly loved and was good at. And I got great encouragement from my new advisor and creative writing teachers at Towson. The larger and more positive environment at Towson has helped me to gain confidence in being a writer with disabilities.

I am now getting ready to go back to Towson University in the fall after the virtual school year. I will be taking the Advanced Creative Writing class where I can workshop and share my writing with other students again. Even though I have not actually shared my writing in person since my sophomore year at McDaniel, I think I am ready this time; I’ve even had opportunities to share my words during the pandemic. In fact, I’m kind of excited. Although I am still nervous about the experience, I think that it is something I have to face if I want to be a writer. And hopefully, there will be other opportunities for me to share my writing other than in class.

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Do you want to read more from Katherine? Check out her soul-searching creative nonfiction piece in our EMERGE zines, available for a small donation. And if you haven’t had the opportunity yet, please make sure to donate to our Turning the Next Page fundraising campaign. Yellow Arrow is able to share stories of writers who identify as women because of our incredible community of supporters. Your assistance contributes to the publication of our journal as well as our incredible chapbooks and zines.

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 11/2/21 Kapua Iao 11/2/21

Meet the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2022 chapbook authors

By Kapua Iao

In 2020, Yellow Arrow Publishing released its first two chapbooks: Smoke the Peace Pipe (Roz Weaver) and the samurai (Linda M. Crate). Learning how to navigate the world of single-author publications and getting to know the authors was truly rewarding, and we decided to publish three more in 2021:

No Batteries Required (Ellen Dooling Reynard)
St. Paul Street Provocations (Patti Ross)
Listen (Ute Carson)

Moreover, we knew early in 2021 that we wanted to publish chapbook authors in 2022 and opened up submissions during the summer. We then formed a committee to blindly read through our final 45 submissions. Every chapbook received was heart-filled and personal. And because we consider everyone that publishes with Yellow Arrow family, we spent much time really thinking about our decision.

From these initial submissions, we created a shortlist of 15 chapbooks, eventually selecting three to publish in 2022. It was rewarding and difficult to email every submitter letting them know our decision but the process is now done, and we are so excited to work with the three chosen.

So without further ado, let’s meet the 2022 Yellow Arrow chapbook authors!

Sharma, Nikita Rimal.jpg — **Nikita Rimal Sharma**

*The most beautiful garden*

coming April 2022

Nikita Rimal Sharma currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland with her husband and dog, Stone, and works at B’More Clubhouse, a community-based mental health nonprofit. She is originally from Kathmandu, Nepal. Nikita is a typical homebody who gets a lot of joy from slow running, short hikes, reading, and deep thoughts. She has always loved writing and started writing at the age of seven when she wrote a fairy tale titled “Star Girls.” Nikita wishes she had saved a copy of it.

Her journey with poetry started when she took the first class organized by Yellow Arrow taught by the lovely Ann Quinn. It’s such a beautiful way of playing with words while processing your emotions. Nikita’s first published poem was in Yellow Arrow Journal (Re)Formation from fall 2020.

The most beautiful garden covers themes such as family, her mother, mental health, South Asian culture, and immigration. These are the different aspects her life is made up of and it was her little attempt to put everything into words.

Darah Schillinger is a rising senior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland studying English Literature with a double minor in Creative Writing and Philosophy. She previously interned for the literary magazine EcoTheo Review in summer 2020 and has had poetry published in both her school literary journal, AVATAR, and in the Spillwords Press Haunted Holidays series for 2020. She was the publications intern for Yellow Arrow for summer 2021. Darah currently lives in Perry Hall, Maryland with her parents, and in her free time, she likes to write poetry and paint. After graduation, she plans to pursue an MA in Creative Writing and hopes to establish a career in publishing after its completion.

Her chapbook, when the daffodils die, is an assortment of love, loss, and wonder at the world that created us, compiled into a collection of 32 poems. Each poem has natural imagery, but the story line itself is about finding steadiness in our love of nature even if romantic love (the love we spend so much energy on) falls short. There are also feminist themes and body positivity incorporated throughout because Darah felt they best represent her and what she wishes to contribute with her work.

**Amanda Baker**

*What is Another Word for Intimacy?*

coming October 2022

Amanda Baker believes that we are more authentic as our childlike selves than we are as adults. We are more likely to share our truth and live our truth as children, but who says we have to stop. Amanda is a mental health therapist, 200-hour yoga instructor, and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. She attended the University of Maryland School of Social Work and James Madison University. She is a mother of her four-year-old son, Dylan, and enjoys time in nature. Amanda has self-published a poetry collection that includes written work from her early teens into her 30s. You may find her book ASK: A Collection of Poetry, Lyrics, and Words on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

She believes we all have the capacity to find our true selves by connecting back to our passions as children. Hers was and still is art, imagination, dance, and poetry. Amanda stopped writing around 18 and did not return until about two years ago, at age 31. We all have a story to share, and What is Another Word for Intimacy? is the heart and soul of a snapshot of her story.

Amanda started writing again. She wrote to fill the void. She wrote to create connections. She wrote to find intimacy.

Her writing has allowed her to escape detachment. Dissociation. Numbness. Amanda’s writing opened her eyes to imagination and an ability to form new relationships. She experienced existentialism. Confusion. Loss. Excitement. Lust. Love. Heartbreak. True vitality in moving from fear to vulnerability, to intimacy. What is Another Word for Intimacy? takes readers through emotions, connections, and memories, which resembles true fluctuations of intimacy in words and present mindfulness.

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. We are so proud of everyone we publish at Yellow Arrow. You can learn more about all our authors here and support them by purchasing publications in the Yellow Arrow bookstore.

Thank you again to everyone who submitted and to everyone who supports these women and all writers who toil away day after day. Please show these three some love in the comments below or on Yellow Arrow’s Facebook or Instagram.

Kapua Iao 10/26/21 Kapua Iao 10/26/21

Can Old Testament Stories About Women Sing to Us Today? A Review of Manna in the Morning by Jacqueline Jules

By Naomi Thiers

I think it’s fair to say the Old Testament itself is a character in Jacqueline Jules’ recent poetry collection Manna in the Morning. Bible stories and personages, including those lesser known, are the central element in so many poems that the Old Testament becomes a presence as we read—not oppressively, but in a way that probes freshly what’s going on with those old tales and weird, flawed characters.

This includes female characters beyond the usual Eve and Esther: Dinah*, Miriam*, Jochebed* and more (just for fun, throughout this review I’ve marked lesser-known female Biblical characters Jules write about with a * and there’s a key at the end!). Even poems that don’t focus on Old Testament stories or characters swirl around the author’s spirituality as a Jewish woman. They bring into Jules’ thinking about her life in the 21st-century metaphors or life lessons from people and situations in Genesis, Exodus, the prophets, etc.

Jules’s poems are built with straightforward statements and elemental images that lift from the ordinary through pithy lines and repetition. Her best poems use a touch light enough for the energy she’s drawing from old stories to come wrapped in mystery. Consider the entangling of modern marriage with Adam and Eve in “Prenuptials”:

Vows exchanged. Papers signed.

Will they bind me back to Adam’s rib?

To move from that day on

in synchrony, for fear

of ripping apart the flesh we share.

Eve was a bulge beneath the armpit

whittled when the first wife, Lilith,*

ran away. Must I leave the garden,

become a demon,

to preserve the person

who precedes the wedding?

Wonderful are those poems in which Jules lets in the darkness (which does flood many Old Testament stories) and probes deeper into tales of Biblical women who go almost unnamed even when they’re essential to a story. As “Wondering about Dinah and Leah” says, “Bible stories are skeletal, bones/fleshed out through exegesis--/ words, sentences, translations/ scrutinized, interpreted./ And most dwell on the men, on actions, not emotions.” Jules speculates on aspects of lives that are tiny footnotes in the Old Testament, such as (in the same poem), Dinah, whose rape sets off family vengeance:

. . . we don’t hear from Dinah

herself, only what was done to her.

And we hear nothing from Leah,

her mother, who should have been waiting,

worrying, ready to comfort.

Did Dinah find solace with Leah?

The woman remembered

as the unloved wife, the one forced on

Jacob instead of the sister he favored.

I wonder as I read the exploits of men.

Perhaps because I’ve chosen a faith (Quakerism) which holds to continuing revelation—that anything we know about God or our connection with God is forever evolving, being newly revealed. I love what Jules does in “Hannah’s Heart.” She shows the significance—in the journey of Jewish spirituality and Jewish people’s sense of how they relate to God—of a personal act, Hannah* crying out to God because she’s barren. A woman who can’t have children weeping—nothing to see there, right? But “Hannah’s Heart” implies that this ordinary woman’s tears were a turning point:

Before Hannah wept

in the sanctuary at Shiloh,

we didn’t believe it possible

to beseech the One above

without blood.

We burned bulls to please.

Men measured portions.

More for the fertile wife.

less for the barren one.

Unfortunately, some poems don’t let the implications a Biblical story may have for folks today float through the language and images—they stick up a signpost. Phrases point firmly to the “lesson.” “Esau’s Choice” considers why Esau forgave Jacob, who conspired to steal his inheritance, saying simply: “The Bible reveals no details, no reason/ why Esau kissed his brother and wept. // We can only imagine. . .” Before the reader has time to let that language lead them to ponder their own family betrayals, the poem preaches: “Hope that Esau’s choice/ will be the one we choose.” “Facing the Wilderness” follows a subtle description of two Israelites who were rewarded for having great faith with “An instructive tale for me,” and a poem musing about how much toil went into building a tabernacle, as told in Exodus 25, closes with “Inspiration for me/as I struggle to build/ a space inside my heart/ where holiness can dwell.”

As a person who takes a spiritual life seriously, I appreciate what Jules is doing. Bible stories, chewed on, can give us strength to build a space inside “where holiness can dwell.” Jules dedicates the book to “my Mussar group at Temple Rodef Shalom, Virginia” (Mussar is an ancient Jewish spiritual practice that explores how to live an ethical inner life, not just follow rules). She’s writing out of a deep-rooted tradition dedicated to exploring how contemplation of scripture brings us closer to our heart, to holiness. And many poems—like “Queen Esther”—do invite us to explore, without stressing a “lesson”:

“If I if I perish, I perish

The young woman tells the mirror.

Donning jewels and perfume,

she strides in silk gown toward her fate.

“If I perish, I perish.”

Is it really courage that lifts her chin?

A noble choice to swing from the gallows

rather than hide in silence?

“If I perish, I perish.”

Or does action offer its own rewards

when you’re likely to hang

by the neck either way?

I’ll end with my favorite poem, “Dialogue with the Devine”—a woman finding her way toward joy in the work of keeping the faith:

When I petition,

I’m on my knees, bruised,

by the hardness of the floor.

. . . obsessed by the squish

of mud under my sandals,

ignoring the Red Sea,

miraculously parted.

When I praise,

I’m on my feet, billowing

like clouds in the sapphire sky.

I’m Miriam*

holding a tambourine,

dancing in the desert, grateful

for the smallest excuse

to sing.

KEY: Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob was (the text implies) raped by a Hivite; her brothers took revenge on all the Hivites. Miriam, Moses’ sister and a prophetess, sang when Pharoah’s army was destroyed. Jochebed, Moses’ mother, placed him in a basket in the river to save him from Pharoah’s command to kill Jewish male babies. Lilith was Adam’s wife before Eve. Hannah gave birth late in life to Samuel, who became a Hebrew judge.

Jules, Jacqueline. 2021. Manna in the Morning. Kelsay Books. kelsaybooks.com.

Naomi Thiers (naomihope@comcast.net) grew up in California and Pittsburgh, but her chosen home is Washington D.C./northern Virginia. She is the author of four poetry collections: Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, In Yolo County, She Was a Cathedral, and Made of Air. Her poems, book reviews, and essays have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Grist, Sojourners, and other magazines. Former editor of the journal Phoebe, she works as an editor for Educational Leadership magazine and lives on the banks of Four Mile Run in Arlington, Virginia.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing. If interested in writing reviews about recent books written by authors that identify as women (largely from other small presses), email editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com.

Kapua Iao 10/19/21 Kapua Iao 10/19/21

Foundations in Seeking: The significance of ‘Yellow Arrow’

By Gwen Van Velsor

In the summer of 2014, I started to walk The Way. Life had completely crumbled back home in Hawai’i, and I’d hit bottom. So here I was, rising with the sun each morning to guzzle instant coffee and walk, one day at a time, one step at a time, 500 miles across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

For the first time in my life, one day at a time meant something tangible. I would walk from one village to the next, find a place to get food, wash the only set of clothes I had, take shelter in a crowded dorm, and most importantly, follow the bright yellow arrows emblazoned along the path.

Life became very simple. A little bread, cheese, and sunshine brought much happiness. Making tea by the side of the trail with foraged herbs and a little camp stove became ritual. The crunching sound of feet on stone a rhythmic prayer. Every day I left something behind to lighten the load: a shirt, a pair of sandals, a festering resentment, mistrust of my own body.

I walked the Camino del Norte (there are various routes pilgrims can take) along the northern coast through Basque country, Rioja, Asturias, and Galicia. In the city of Oviedo, I joined the Camino Primitivo through the mountains known for being rugged. I wanted it to be physically demanding, even punishing maybe, some version of penitence. For weeks I just walked all day into the sun, flopping down on a bunk each night. Along the way there were friendships, encounters with God, angels, love, cats, and lots and lots of yellow arrows. The arrows appeared on regulation cement markers, tree trunks, telephone poles, boulders, sidewalks, houses. After the first few days of anxiously looking for each one, I began to trust they would be there, I began to realize that all I had to do on this journey, the only task at hand, was to follow the arrows.

Everything else in life, my failures and anxieties, my plan for the future, my past hurts and pain, fell away as I walked, and walked some more. I gave all of these over to a higher power and trusted that one step at a time, I would get where I was going.

The ancient Way is worn smooth by the feet of millions of pilgrims. I thought, many times, of the seekers who came before me and those that would come after. I took my place as one of many.

I returned to the U.S. from this trip without a plan. Without the trail and yellow arrows in front of me, I had to lean on intuition, stepping toward the next right thing, one day at a time. I was eventually led to the mountains of Colorado later that year. I took a chance on a serendipitous opportunity and opened a coffee shop in the basement of a library. I named it Yellow Arrow Coffee. Oh my, what adventures were had and what amount of caffeine was made and consumed. I found deep grace and purpose in that basement, and met people, so briefly, who changed me forever. That journey, however, also came to an end and I found myself in Baltimore, Maryland by the end of 2015.

In 2016 I had just given birth to my baby girl and my first book (called Follow That Arrow, no less). Something was lingering in my heart and creative ambitions. I wanted to give back, to give voice to more creatives. Sam Anthony and Leila Warshaw helped turn this seed of an idea to start publishing others’ work into a full-blown, life-consuming passion. Kapua Iao came along, put wheels on it, and made the thing move. Ariele Sieling believed in me and this idea long before I ever believed it would grow the way it has. And you, all of you, saw something in our work and said, yes. I am tempted here to include a long section on gratitude for the multitude of women who have collaborated on what is now Yellow Arrow Publishing. But that is a story that stands on its own. For now, my love letter to all of you, as you stand on the smooth stones of women writers and artists, taking your place among all those who have come before and will come after, is to follow the arrows wherever you are and wherever you go.

As my own arrows take me away from this work, please know that it is one of the great joys of my life to see how Yellow Arrow Publishing is unfolding in your beautiful hands.

Gwen Van Velsor writes creative nonfiction and pseudo-inspirational prose. She started Yellow Arrow, a project that publishes and supports writers who identify as women, in 2016. Raised in Portland, Oregon, Gwen has moved many times, from sea to shining sea, now calling Bosnia her home. Her major accomplishments include walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, raising a toddler, and being OK with life exactly as it is. She is the author of the memoirs Follow That Arrow (2016) and Freedom Warrior (2020), both published by Yellow Arrow (but sold out in our bookstore!) and available on Amazon.

*****

Thank you, Gwen, for all that you started and for showing us the way. We at Yellow Arrow are still just following the arrows, supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. Show your support of such a great mission by purchasing one of our incredible publications or donating to Yellow Arrow today. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Kapua Iao 10/12/21 Kapua Iao 10/12/21

Listen by Ute Carson: Exchanging Stories

Carson Listen cover_back, spine, front.jpg

Yellow Arrow Publishing announces the release of our latest chapbook, Listen, by Ute Carson. Since its establishment in 2016, Yellow Arrow has devoted its efforts to advocate for all women writers through inclusion in the biannual Yellow Arrow Journal as well as single-author publications, and by providing strong author support, writing workshops, and volunteering opportunities. We at Yellow Arrow are excited to continue our mission by supporting Ute in all her writing and publishing endeavors.

Listen spans the life cycle: birth, parenting (and grandparenting), aging, and dying. Images of nature and our connections to it abound throughout because nature is our habitat. The cover further invokes this symbiotic relationship. The poems within Listen run a full gamut of human emotions—wonder, doubt, pleasure, regret, love, loss, enchantment, and more, all woven into the fabric of lived experience and of experience imagined.

Ute Carson, a German-born writer from youth and an MA graduate in comparative literature from the University of Rochester, published her first prose piece in 1977. Ute has since published two novels, a novella, a volume of stories, four collections of poetry, and numerous essays here and abroad. Her poetry was twice nominated for the Pushcart Award.

Paperback and PDF versions of Listen are now available from the Yellow Arrow Bookstore. If interested in purchasing more than one paperback copy for friends and family, check out our discounted wholesale prices here. You can also search for Listen wherever you purchase your books including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. To learn more about Ute and Listen, check out our recent interview with her.

You can find Ute at utecarson.com or on Facebook, and connect with Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram, to share some love for this chapbook.

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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. To learn about publishing, volunteering, or donating, visit yellowarrowpublishing.com. If interested in writing a review of Listen or any of our other publications, please email editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com for more information.

Kapua Iao 10/5/21 Kapua Iao 10/5/21

Lunchbox Moments: A Zine to Emphasize the Importance of Community

By Rachel Vinyard

We aim to provide a platform for AAPI voices to express:
1.     anger and shame roused by racist microaggressions we may have experienced in relation to our cultural foods,
2.     pride, joy, and other emotions relating to our cultural foods, and
3.     how we have integrated deeper practices emerging from these experiences to honor those emotions.

When I was first introduced to the Lunchbox Moments zine and its mission, I was ecstatic to learn more. I was excited to know that there was a zine that gave the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islanders) community a platform to speak their truths and talk about very real issues that haven’t been widely discussed until recently. When I sat down to read Lunchbox Moments, it felt as though I were experiencing a world that was unique from mine. A world of fear, shame, and hurt brought on by ignorant, unapologetic people. Diversity is important for storytelling because every story is worth being heard.

Food is an especially important thing to immigrants because it keeps them connected to their culture. Lunchbox Moments is a zine that eloquently and beautifully portrays real stories about the struggles and xenophobia in the AAPI community regarding their food culture. Created by Anthony Shu, Diann Leo-Omine, and Shirley Huey, this zine showcases 26 AAPI writers, including Christine Hsu whose creative nonfiction piece “Mother Tongues of Confusion, Shame, and Love” appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. IV, No. 1, Renascence. The zine is a compilation of a variety of different experiences regarding food in the AAPI community. Lunchbox Moments also supports Chinatown’s Community Development Center (CCDC) in San Francisco.

Anthony, Diann, and Shirley recently took the time to answer some questions for us.

Please introduce yourselves and tell us how you decided to work together to create Lunchbox Moments. Why Lunchbox Moments?

Anthony: We met at the San Francisco Cooking School’s Food Media Lab in 2019 and had always wanted to work on a project together. Lunchbox Moments was born out of the pandemic and discussions of race and inequality that dominated 2020. As we went through various ideas on how we could collaborate, we witnessed increased attention on Anti-Asian hate crimes in early 2021. For me, this time period reinstated the importance of uplifting Asian American voices because our stories often go untold. How can we address discrimination against AAPI communities when our country lacks a shared discourse or knowledge of who this group encompasses/our history/our struggles? The theme of lunchbox moments was a way for us to combine our interests in food/food media with sharing Asian American experiences.

Diann: Lunchbox Moments came about because of the perfect storm, really. Food media is still overwhelmingly nondiverse, even as discussions on cultural appropriation and who can make whose culture’s food have begun to take shape. Asian Americans have also long been silenced or perceived as apolitical, so creating this platform was our “lane” in the activist sense.

Shirley: From our first moment of connecting in 2019, Diann, Anthony, and I have been talking about our respective and mutual interests and experiences in food and cooking—personal and professional (we each have worked in some capacity in restaurants/food), writing, and the political and cultural intersections of those subjects. We each love food deeply and find personal meaning and joy in cooking. Everything starts there. It’s a bit of a cliché to say this, but I do believe that important conversations often begin at the kitchen or dinner table. Our story is no different: we started talking about our experiences with/in food and our respective interests in food and writing over several lunches (a memorable one at Sai Jai Thai in San Francisco).

On Lunchbox Moments, I wanted to work on something that would, hopefully, be meaningful to readers, relevant to the moment, and also doable. We had real-life constraints of various kinds, but we also wanted to make this work. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t thinking about a platform; I’ve never been particularly quiet about where I stand on political issues. What I did want, though, was to do good work in line with my values, help create a platform for others to tell good stories, and raise money for communities affected deeply by the Covid-19 pandemic.

What was the most challenging part about putting the zine together? How did you address the challenge?

Diann: From a logistics angle, we conceptualized and executed the project entirely remotely. In fact, the first time we were all able to gather in person since meeting in 2019 was only recently. We staked ourselves to an ambitious publication date (about seven months from concept to execution). From an emotional angle, the increase of violence against Asian Americans came to a heartbreaking crescendo with the Atlanta and Indianapolis shootings, not to mention the media’s sudden reportage of violence against Asian elders and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were editing the selected pieces during that time period, and the editorial process was both a cathartic way to process the communal grief but also simultaneously traumatizing. The challenge was keeping ourselves motivated, remotely, when sometimes I think all we wanted was to fall apart or hide underground when our communities were under attack, but we pressed on because we knew the work had to be done.

Shirley: We came together to work on this project because of what we observed during (and before) the pandemic—the negative rhetoric and physical violence directed at Asian Americans. As the pandemic went on, the relentless news coverage of what was happening affected each of us deeply. We were editors, yes, but we were also people observing and experiencing what was happening in the world around us and to our communities, processing the collective grief and also our own individual personal griefs, which were real and deep.

How did we deal with the challenge? I think the most critical thing was that we really trusted each other and held each other through it as colleagues/collaborators. We had weekly meetings to keep us on track, and at certain points, one of us would say, “Hey guys, I just can’t manage this right now.” And the others of us would say, and we meant it, “No problem, you take a little time away from the project. We’ll hold it and keep it going.”

How was Lunchbox Moments conceptualized? What inspired you most to create the zine?

Anthony: When we first thought about this theme, we learned from articles in NPR and Eater that challenged the value of stories about lunchbox moments. These articles argued that the traditional lunchbox moment narrative excluded many AAPI individuals who never have these moments and overemphasized feelings of shame. In response, we broadened our language in our call for submissions. It was inspiring to see the various pieces that came in and how people interpreted the lunchbox moments theme. We heard from writers and artists who had always been proud of their lunch, who felt their lunch hadn’t been Asian enough, and who shared about lunchbox moments in fields beyond food like language and familial relationships.

Diann: Yes, we wanted to shift focus from the stinky food narratives that have been so pervasive that lunchbox moments have become a trope. We sought out narratives that we found most interesting was how many people had lunchbox moments within the community or within themselves. On a personal note, I lost my grandmother and gave birth to my first child in the midst of our short, but ambitious publication process. For me, the zine became a sort of driving force tribute to both my grandmother and my child—of memories past and future.

Shirley: What inspired me the most at the very beginning was the opportunity to showcase stories featuring Asian American writers, to have some creative control over the project, and to do so in a way that was in service to the larger Asian American community. This was a remarkable opportunity to work with my really talented coeditors and friends, to work on compelling subject matter, and to uplift the work of our wonderful writers and artists. It was also an opportunity to learn about what it takes to bring something like this into being.

What do you hope that your readers take away from Lunchbox Moments?

Anthony: I hope people recognize the diversity in the stories told, especially in the range of emotions shared. These aren’t just stories about lunchbox moments focused on shame that elicit rage, guilt, or sadness. To me, this isn’t a collection of stories about Asian Americans being victims of discrimination. Instead, each piece complicates our definitions of being Asian American.

Diann: I hope readers come away with more questions than answers regarding Asian American identity. The Asian American identity has long been boxed in by the “model minority” myth and is not a monolith, and disparities abound between ethnicity, class, color, and generation. Even rereading the stories again today, there are different meanings I pick up every time.

Shirley: What Diann and Anthony said. And also, for some readers, I hope that they come away with a sense of recognition and connection to the stories told. I’ve just been asked to speak to a college-level class on Asian American women writers about Lunchbox Moments and feel so gratified to know that students are reading this work. I hope that readers can see the power of sharing their personal experiences—whatever they are and however they fit into or don’t fit into a particular trope around what it means to be Asian American. And honestly, I really hope that readers come away with a hunger for new food experiences as well as a recognition that meaningful stories about our lives can come in many forms, including about something as seemingly mundane as our everyday interactions with food.

How did you know that storytelling through and about food has power?

Anthony: Food is an important way for immigrants and their descendants to connect to their cultures. In the collection, I witness the different ways this connection is interpreted, lost, or reinforced, often across generations. I feel that many people can connect to this idea of food traditions changing over time. Also, since announcing the zine, I’ve spoken to many people, not just AAPI individuals, who have strong memories about school lunch and the cafeteria. A common theme has been being bullied for receiving free or reduced-price lunch. It seems like there is something formative in those childhood meals.

Diann: With the popularity of platforms like Instagram and Yelp, foodie culture relegates food for its consumptive value. There’s an adrenaline rush in waiting in line for three hours for the next hottest food trend, of taking so many photos the meal gets cold, and then getting your followers to obsess over the geotag location. In our stories, however, food is a character. Food is symbolic, food is catharsis. Food inspires all types of emotions.

Shirley: There are moments in our lives that we never forget—the big moments—the weddings, the births, the deaths, the loves, the trials and tribulations. And then there is the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The sweetness of ripe summer strawberries encased in soft whipped cream. The pungent smell of savory salted fish and chicken fried rice. But the two—the big moments and the smaller moments—are not unique and separate. As Diann says so beautifully, food is a character, yes. Food and our interactions with it reveal things about ourselves as characters that are meaningful. This is especially true for some who grow up in families that are not particularly verbal or direct in communicating about emotions and feelings—except about food. When this is so, I think showcasing food in the storytelling can be particularly powerful.

Why did you choose to partner with San Francisco’s CCDC?

Anthony: To clarify, we are not partners with the organization. We just named them as our beneficiary. They operated two iterations of Feed + Fuel Chinatown over the last year and a half, which was a program that combined supporting Chinatown’s residents and its businesses, especially its restaurants. We wanted to respond to the xenophobia that has hurt Chinatown businesses since the start of Covid-19 (and before shutdowns in the U.S.).

Diann: People may not be aware of the racist, segregated history that allowed for the creation of Chinatown and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese were thereby limited in what occupations they could take, and cooking was one of them. Chinatown and Chinese people have long been synonymous for immigrant communities and Asians, so when [then-President Donald] Trump spouted vitriol like “Kung Flu” and “Chinese virus,” it undoubtedly felt like an invisible history was repeating itself. Yet that time period is not that long ago, as my parents were both born in Chinatown and would have benefitted from an organization like the CCDC if it existed back then. So our decision to donate funds to CCDC was a way of giving back to those historical immigrant roots.

Shirley: We actually put a lot of thought and research into it, knowing that whatever organization we chose needed to be one that the three of us each connected with and supported. Diann and I both grew up in San Francisco, with ties to Chinatown. Anthony grew up in the South Bay, with less of a personal connection to San Francisco Chinatown. We also conceived of the project as having a national focus; we were looking for diverse contributors, not just in terms of cultural identities, but also regional location. So we initially set out to find a beneficiary that contributed to the needs of immigrant restaurant workers, supported Asian American communities, and had a national focus. We looked at entities doing direct service and doing other kinds of more capacity building work. We didn’t want to default to a San Francisco Bay Area based organization just because we happened to be located here. We ended up choosing CCDC because of its long-standing work in San Francisco Chinatown and its tremendous work on the Feed + Fuel program, feeding low-income folks living in Chinatown single room occupancy hotels. We recognize that San Francisco Chinatown-based organizations have been at the forefront of advocacy on behalf of Chinese Americans and Asian Americans nationwide since the beginning of Asian immigration to America.

In what ways can readers support the Asian American community during the pandemic? After the pandemic?

Anthony: Over the last year, I was shocked to have discussions with individuals who never or rarely thought about discrimination against Asian Americans. I hope we can learn more about both the history/legacy of discrimination against AAPI communities and also the parts of these cultures that inspire pride and celebration.

Diann: During and after the pandemic, readers can support the community by patronizing Asian American businesses and following Asian American creators on social media. Of course, the issues are systemic and deeper than capitalism or social media algorithms. Readers can, as Anthony suggested, dig into the history/legacy of discrimination—read anything by Helen Zia or Ronald Takaki and watch the Asian Americans documentary on PBS.

Shirley: Good question. There are many ways in which readers can support the Asian American community during and after the pandemic, some of which Anthony and Diann have already touched on. I think reading about history and discrimination and patronizing Asian American owned businesses are important. I would also add a few more things: slow down and listen. The experiences of Asian Americans (if we can still use that term—a conversation for another time) are multiple and diverse, and we must make space to hear about them. Also: history is now. So when you go to read about the history of Asian Americans, remember to look for sources about what is happening now—and not just about shootings and violence perpetrated against us. Try reading Hyphen magazine, Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins. See what’s happening at sites like Asian Americans Advancing Justice—Asian Law Caucus and Asian Prisoner Support Committee. Stand up for people if you see them being bullied or harassed. I recommend the Hollaback Bystander Intervention training.

Have you experienced any lunchbox moments of your own as Asian Americans in a workplace or school setting?

Diann: I’ve experienced my own lunchbox moments from outside but particularly within the Asian American community—from the expectations of me being able to fold immaculately crimped dumplings or steam a perfectly tender whole fish. I never learned to use chopsticks the proper way, and I got called out recently about that—I retorted back to the person that, well, at least I knew how to eat. Even for someone who has cooked professionally, this idea/ideal of perfection while performing Asian identity is stifling, and cuts into complex memories of family, language, and diaspora. It’s something I’m still grappling with to this day.

Shirley: I have experienced lunchbox moments mostly in the workplace or private context from people who would never identify as racist in any way. They were microaggressions—for example, expectations that I would know something about a particular kind of frozen dumplings “because you’re Chinese, you should know” said with absolutely no irony. Another time, the person in charge of ordering a work lunch refused to even consider Chinese food “because it’s so greasy.” She clearly had never had beautiful, nongreasy, delicious Chinese food. I don’t know if this relates to lunchbox moments, but I definitely relate to Diann’s grappling with internal perfectionism and its relation to creation of food. Also, even the notion of perfection could be subject to greater scrutiny. What is perfection in light of differing experiences of what is authentic and real, both in terms of food and in terms of identity?

Will there be a follow-up publication?

Anthony: We are undecided at this time but thank everyone for their generous support.

Diann: (laughs) We had joked that maybe we could start a podcast themed around current events in food media. Stay tuned. In all seriousness, as Anthony had said, we are undecided at this time.

Shirley: Ha, Diann. I would just add that we are undecided, but you know, if someone chose to fund our working together and you know, perhaps help mentor us on the next publication, that might help move us in a certain direction.

Shirley Huey (she/her) is a Chinese-American writer, editor, consultant, daughter, sister, friend, collaborator, cook, music and theater lover, cat mom, and former civil rights attorney. She believes that place and race matter and that we can make the world a better place from wherever we are, right at this moment. Born and raised in San Francisco, Shirley’s writing can be found in such publications as Berkeleyside, Catapult, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, The Universal Asian, and Endangered Species, Enduring Values, an anthology of San Francisco writers and artists of color. She has received fellowships from VONA, Kearny Street Workshop, SF Writers Grotto’s Rooted and Written, and Mesa Refuge, and is working on a memoir in essays about food, family, and social justice.

Diann Leo-Omine (she/her) is a culinary arts creative and writer rooted in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land) and the colorfully boisterous Toisanese diaspora. She now resides in the North Central Valley (Nisenan land), in between the ocean and the mountains. Her writing can be found in The Universal Asian and the Write Now SF anthology Essential Truths.

Anthony Shu’s (he/his) first experience in the culinary world came as a breakfast cook at a nonprofit summer program where the “kitchen” consisted of a Presto griddle set up outdoors. He graduated from Princeton University in 2016 and after a brief career in more professional kitchens, Anthony started working at Second Harvest of Silicon Valley and has been focused on client storytelling and multimedia production for the last few years. Also a freelance food writer, his work has been published in Eater SF and the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Rachel Vinyard is an emerging author from Maryland and a publications intern at Yellow Arrow Publishing. She is working towards her Bachelor’s degree in English at Towson University and has been published in the literary magazine Grub Street. She was previously the fiction editor of Grub Street and hopes to continue editing in the future. Rachel is also a mental health advocate and aims to spread awareness of mental health issues through literature. You can find her on Twitter @RikkiTikkiSavvi and on Instagram @merridian.official.

*****

Thank you to Anthony, Diann, and Shirley for taking the time to thoughtfully answer Rachel’s questions. Please visit the Lunchbox Moments website to learn more about this initiative and purchase a PDF copy of the zine today!

Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing. Visit yellowarrowpublishing.com to learn more about submitting, volunteering, and donating.

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