Yellow Arrow Publishing Blog

Kapua Iao 9/26/23 Kapua Iao 9/26/23

Review of Por La Sombrita by Barbara Perez Marquez

By Vickie Tu, written July 2023

What does “Por La Sombrita” mean? That is the question I was left pondering when I first came across Barbara Perez Marquez’s collection Por La Sombrita (2023), now available from Bottlecap Press. Upon further research, I was met with three different answers. One, “Por La Sombrita” is an idiom that literally means “handle with kid gloves” but figuratively means to be careful or quietly. Two, although a different translation, “for the shade,” it figuratively means the same as to be careful or not to worry. Three, when I asked a Spanish speaking friend of mine, she translated it to “in the shade” but had never heard the saying before. After exploring Barbara Perez Marquez’s version of the translation, I came to the conclusion that in this collection, “Por La Sombrita” means to stay in the shade as a way of not hurting yourself through exposure to the sun. The saying transforms into a symbolic message from Barbara’s own reflection on her experiences through childhood and family life that caused her burns.

Por La Sombrita is broken up into two parts: “Growing Pains” and “Family Matters.” With these two parts, Barbara separates her perspective from learning mature subjects from her childhood experiences to examining familial events through a mature lens. Each part works itself to be a beautiful articulation of significant moments of her life that stem from memories that seem simple but are actually much more complex.

With the first part, “Growing Pains,” Barbara explores her life from the perspective of herself as a child but with the mature realization of adulthood. Most notably, in the poem “11 or 12,” she explains the memorable experience of lying about her age to benefit her family. She says, “That if I was eleven I got to stay for free, therefore they had to pay for one less to make the vacation possible.” Her memory resonates strongly with something I recognize from immigrant culture. She perfectly describes the occurrence of lying about your age at the Chinese buffet to eat for free that I underwent but through her own lens that made sense for her childhood. With the way that Barbara notably echoes her childhood memories through her pieces, it showcases her relatability to a reader like me as well as displays the small simple moments in one’s life that are simply overlooked but could be used to explore a deeper dive into culture, adulthood, and maturity.

With the second part, “Family Matters,” she connects segments and pieces of her life to create a larger whole of a complex story that shaped the story of her identity. Although some moments are relatable, others are unique incidents that frame her self-reflection. Where we see her true individuality is through two striking memories. The first is in the piece “Playing Doctor” where she describes a traumatic assault event and the second is in the piece “The Weight of Parenting” where she carries a gun for the first time. With both events, Barbara displays very isolated and uncommon occurrences in her lifetime that sets her apart from other translations of childhood. The weight of the topics is heavy and become the most notable because of their mature and taboo nature.

It is a surreal experience to see the images of her and her family with their old photos. With each image, you see pieces and bits of her life that allow a glimpse into the perfect life seen from the outside, but the cracks seen within her writing and memories. We are able to see the woman who disciplined her through these pieces and the man who protected the household. Being able to imagine her mother, father, sister, grandmother, and herself through the photos creates a raw and genuine realization of one’s life through this collection.

Overall, Barbara’s collection is a noteworthy work of art that conveys a person’s life through remarkable segments of memories. This collection left me examining parts of my own life that seem simple but perhaps could allow me to reflect further on who I am. It is a cluster of blurred, imperfect memories that when put together, show the life of one woman, her family, and own identity.

Vickie Tu is a rising senior at University of Maryland, College Park, studying English with a minor in Classics. She was born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, and plans to move to New York City after graduation to start her career in the publishing industry. When she is not reading or working in her campus’ bookstore, she enjoys attending hockey games for her favorite team the Washington Capitals. You can find her on Instagram @vickie.tuuu.

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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 SPARK and sparkle this year: 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 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 9/19/23 Kapua Iao 9/19/23

Meet a Staff Member: Kait Quinn

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to introduce editorial associate Kait Quinn (she/her). Kait is a poet and professional shower singer born and raised in Texas. She earned her BA in English writing from St. Edward’s University. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her work has appeared in Reed Magazine, Watershed Review, Olney Magazine, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in the League of MN Poets’ 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize and honorable mention in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. She enjoys repetition, coffee shops, tattoos, and vegan breakfast foods. Kait currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her partner, their regal cat (Spart), and their very polite Aussie mix (Jesse). Find her at kaitquinn.com and on Instagram @kaitquinnpoetry.

Kait says, “As a reader first and a writer second, I’m excited for the opportunity to read submissions to Yellow Arrow Journal. It’s always fun to read other writers’ creations, especially for themed open calls that every writer interprets in a different way. I’m also looking forward to practicing and growing my copyediting and proofreading skills in a professional environment. I love immersing myself in the details and while I have experience proofreading legal documents and web content, I haven’t had much opportunity to proofread creative writing beyond my own work.”

Tell us a little something about yourself.

I’m a Texas-born poet currently living in Minneapolis. I’ve self-published four poetry collections, including a book in which all the poems were inspired by Taylor Swift’s folklore album. Yes, there is a manuscript inspired by evermore in the works. I love October, mermaids, marine life, tattoos, and oat milk lattes.

What do you love most about where you live?

Growing up in two-season southeast Texas, I love experiencing four seasons in Minneapolis, especially fall. There are also so many parks and lakes in and around the Twin Cities—so much nature to explore! There’s a creek with walking/bike trails just a block away from my house, and sometimes I forget that I’m in the middle of a city.

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

I first came across Yellow Arrow when I was looking for poetry classes. I was surprised to find out that Yellow Arrow is both a press and a resource for women-identifying writers AND publishes print and online journals. I love sharing resources and what I’ve learned about writing, self-publishing, and submitting to journals with other writers, and it’s cool to see a press that’s kind of doing it all. As an editorial associate, I’ll be reading submissions for Yellow Arrow Journal as well as copyediting/proofreading for publication.

What are you working on currently?

I’m currently working with an editor on a poetry manuscript inspired by the television series Twin Peaks. I’m also gathering potential poems for my next full-length collection, which will feature mostly narrative poems I’ve written over the past two years.

I’m also learning Spanish! My goal is to eventually translate poems and other written work from English to Spanish and vice versa

What genre do you write (or read) the most and why?

I mostly write poetry because I love to write lyrically and play with words/sounds. Poetry also allows for a unique blend of creative freedom and restraint, and it’s fun to push the boundary between those two qualities.

My favorite genres to read are poetry and memoir, especially memoirs that read a little like poetic prose. I’m fascinated by other people’s experiences and love the connection between reader and writer that poetry and memoir foster. I’ve also been really into young adult fantasy lately.

What book is on the top of your to-be-read pile?

My friend Emily Perkovich is a brilliant and creative poet, and she has two books coming out later this year that I’m excited to read. One is a chapbook of poems on the traumas that cause eating disorders and body dysmorphia and their effects. The cover, which Emily designed herself, is a Barbie doll with replicas of her tattoos. Her creativity never ceases to amaze me!

Who is your favorite writer and why?

Mary Karr. I love how painfully honest her memoirs are and how her poet voice often slithers into them. She uses such visceral, vivid imagery (usually reserved for poetry) in her prose that really brings you into her memories and experiences in a way that makes you feel both her aches and joys as if they’re your own. She also writes the kind of lines that tattoo themselves to your brain. One such line from her memoir Lit still sticks with me: “It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my face: Frankenstein-monster green.”

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

My partner, Carlos, is my biggest supporter. He even formatted my first self-published book and helped me learn the software to format the next three on my own.

My wonderful friend and fellow poet Amy Kay has inspired and supported me in so many ways, I can never quite thank her enough. I first met her via Instagram during National Poetry Writing Month in 2019. She had the most inspiring prompts—not just words or phrases but in-depth prompts, many of which were inspired by poems. That month, I wrote in styles and on topics I never thought I would. I had so much fun growing as a writer that month, I ended up writing a poem a day for a year. She still regularly shares prompts via Instagram and her Patreon, and they continue to inspire. I absolutely would not be the poet I am today without her challenging me with prompts I’m always so sure I can’t respond to until I do.

What do you love most about writing?

I have so much fun playing with sounds and words, making up words, and finding fresh ways to write about the same experience/emotion/image.

What advice do you have for new writers?

Write a poem or freewrite for 10–15 minutes every day for a set number of days. This could be seven days, 30 days, 90 days, or a whole year. The biggest thing I learned from challenging myself to write a poem a day for a year is that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. What feels like writer’s block is often just self-censorship or our good ol’ friend perfectionism. Other things I learned: I don’t HAVE to write a poem every day, but I CAN write a poem every day; I can write a poem about anything; there’s no such thing as a perfect first draft and most of my creativity comes during the editing process.

What’s your vision for Yellow Arrow in 2023?

Coincidentally, the word of the year in my household is “action,” which relates a lot to Yellow Arrow’s 2023 value SPARK. We’ve taken time to rest, recover, toss around ideas. Now it’s time to take flint to steel and watch those ideas grow into flame. I envision a similar expansion for Yellow Arrow: more resources for writers, the sense of community sparked by in-person events, and feeding wood and oxygen to Yellow Arrow Vignette.

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Kait, we are so excited to continue to work with you this year. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we SPARK and sparkle this year: 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 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 9/12/23 Kapua Iao 9/12/23

What Matters: A Conversation with Swimming in Gilead’s Cassie Premo Steele

Every sound from my mouth
is sacred, holy prayer.
I am the priest and the power.

“Declaration”

Cassie Premo Steele is a passionate ecofeminist writer and seasoned author who holds a PhD in comparative literature and women’s gender and sexuality studies. She currently resides in South Carolina but enjoys connecting with other writers and audiences by participating in events and readings across the country both virtually and online. You can find video clips from several events on her website cassiepremosteele.com.

Cassie’s poetry chapbook Swimming in Gilead will be released by Yellow Arrow Publishing on October 10, 2023, and is now available for preorder (click here for wholesale prices)! Follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram for Friday sneak peeks into Swimming in Gilead. This collection of poems deals with themes of identity and relationship, the creative witness to collective trauma and healing, and respect for the seasons of ourselves and our world. The incredible photograph used on the cover of Swimming in Gilead is by Sofia Tata (sofiatata.com). According to Cassie, “The combination of sea and land formation creates an image of a woman in silhouette and draws readers into an intimate dialogue with the poems.”

Cassie engaged in a dynamic conversation through email and over Zoom with Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow author and interviewer, where they bonded over a shared admiration for powerful feminist writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and the call for restoration and balance in the world.

Can you share some of your writing background and your journey to writing Swimming in Gilead?

I went to an all-female Catholic school called Immaculata for high school. I know many people hate high school, but I actually loved it. I would consider the nuns and the teachers there as feminists who were really empowering. They saw us as intellectual women who would make a difference in the world.

I was the president of the student council my senior year, which was the same year the bishop announced that he was going to close the school. His reasoning was to blame the girls for not becoming nuns after graduating, but that was a form of scapegoating, blaming the victim, gas lighting, all of that.

When the announcement was made, I called everyone to the auditorium, and we literally took over the school. I said, “This is not OK. We’re gonna fight back against this.” We created a plan for letting the media know what was happening. We lost in the end, but it was really an example in contrast for me showing that feminist community is possible. We felt that connection as had the generations of women who had gone there before. We also experienced how it can be destroyed with one flick of the pen. This experience, which generations of women, and immigrants, and people of color, are all too familiar with.

This experience stayed with me. I went on in my life. I got a PhD, I taught at the university level, I became a stepmom and a mom. I came out and married my wife. I went through a lot of changes. But always that idea of that Gilead-type community stayed with me, like a seed.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a sense that we needed to do the things that were really important to us. I enrolled in a class taught by Natalie Goldberg (who has also been a mentor to me in terms of reading her work). It was mostly recorded lessons, but there were some big group sessions that were live with her, which was wonderful. It had people from all around the world in it. They randomly put us into small groups of like six or seven people. Her method is that you get a prompt, you write for 10 minutes, you read your work, and your group listens but does not comment. So, it’s not really a writing workshop, but more a witnessing to each other. And there was a woman in that first small group who was sobbing while I was reading, and she individually messaged me and invited me to join a writing group. And I said, yes.

I ended up in a group with six women. Three were from Canada and three from the United States. If you remember that summer the killing of George Floyd had happened, then there were unmarked black vans rounding up people in Portland, Oregon, our COVID rates were through the roof. We started meeting weekly and as we were sharing, we realized those of us in the United States couldn’t really even feel what was happening to us. I realize as a trauma scholar that you can’t really know the trauma until it’s over, and as we were living through a collective trauma at that time, people from the outside could have the emotions for what was happening in a way that we couldn’t here in the U.S. Many of the poems in the collection were written during these group sessions with these women, the Sisters of Gilead, which is what we started calling ourselves as inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale.

Everything matters.
No matter how light or slight,
all matter weighs something.
You matter, too.

“Six Things the Feather Taught Me”

Which women-identifying writers inspire you?

I think of myself as having a poetry team made of women such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Sexton, Louise de Salvo, Joy Harjo, and Marilou Awiakta. All these women, whether here on earth still or not, are very much alive and active in my mind and body and soul.

Audre teaches me the creative power of difference when we break the many silences that try to teach us to be afraid. Gloria tells me the spirit is an animating and healing force in both individual and collective trauma. Anne allows me to cherish my sexual power and the power of laughter. Louise reminds me to keep some things secret because they are too sacred to be shared. Joy sings of the joy of the land, in the land, and in our bodies, which are also land. And Awiakta, who goes by her chosen Eastern Cherokee name, reminds me of the Native, indigenous, and female roots of our national government, which we are still coming to terms with as a continent and as a world.

How did you connect with Yellow Arrow Publishing?

Poets & Writers Magazine did a feature on the press, and I looked it up immediately. There seemed to be something speaking to me about the mission, the vision, the ethos. I’d recently typed up all the writings I’d done with my writing group called the Gilead Sisters over the course of the pandemic, and I went back into that document and, like a block of marble, began to chisel out what felt like the right shape for this book. I sent the manuscript to several writer friends for feedback, listened to them, made changes, and kept shaping until I was sure this was the book I wanted to send, and then I sent it.

Yellow Arrow was the only place I sent the manuscript. And I got the email of acceptance a few months later, on October 15, which is my grandson’s birthday.

Do you have any writing rituals you routinely follow?

Most mornings after making tea, I light a candle on my altar, which holds an arrangement of stones and feathers and spiritual objects depending on the seasons and cycles in the natural world, and I meditate, and write in my journal, and watch the sun come up with that delicate blue light on my skin and on the fur of my dog, Lenny, sleeping next to me as I write. By the time my wife begins to stir in the kitchen, putting away dishes and making her coffee before work, I feel my most important work of the day is done. Everything else—emails, paperwork, scheduling, revision, submission—all the work of being a writer is just gravy, is easy, and flows smoothly because I’ve had this time with my pen in my hand moving on the page, making a sacred circle with my belly and my heart.

My hand with a pen.
Writing it down.
Rhythm.
Calm in heart and limb.

There is no end.
The story keeps going.
One word at a time.
Beyond mind.

“Writing”

Can you speak a bit on the ecofeminist perspective and how it informs your writer’s voice?

Ecofeminism is a word I use as a shorthand to describe what I do as a writer, but it’s beyond words, this sense I’ve always had, even as a child, that the world is alive and “alove,” a breathing, living, knowing, speaking being that loves us and created us and is connected to us and actually, deeply, is us.

We have, in the west, in the patriarchal and global capitalist, linear world, mostly forgotten this. And it’s why we’re dying. Our physical and mental and emotional and environmental illnesses—these are all warning lights flashing and beeping and sounding the signal for us: Remember! Remember! Remember!

My intention with all my writing is to help us do just that. This book is a reminder of the balm in Gilead, too.

I love nature imagery and am drawn to writers that include it. These images can be perceived as universal but utilized in ways that are very specific to each author. How is the natural world reflected in your work?

Because of my sense that the world is “alove,” I would say that the natural world is not just reflected in my work but speaks in and through it. I remember the morning after my wedding when I heard the flowers singing to me in the voices of goddesses like Juno and Hestia and Demeter, the ancient female figures who still carry the memory of what it means to be a woman and a wife and a mother.

It’s there in the flowers and in the beautiful petals of our own flowering female bodies.

It’s in the mother daughter tulip poplar trees in our backyard who told my wife and me, “You are home now. Unpack your pasts and stay. We will shelter you.”

We discovered later that the ancient names of these trees are connected to the names Susanne and Lily, which are the names of my wife and daughter. The names are still there. We need to remember to listen.

Can you elaborate on the moon as symbol in your poetry?

The moon is my witness and companion. As I said, I wake early most mornings, and I greet her in the dark. She teaches me about change and staying consistent through the changes. Sometimes she is increasing as I am working toward a goal or the completion of a writing project. Other times she is full and says, “Sit. Light a fire in the backyard with other women. Celebrate.” And then there are times when she decreases and I’m reminded that I need times of rest, too.

When my daughter was in elementary school, I enrolled her in an aftercare program, even though I had no clients to see or classes to teach in the late afternoons, so I could take a nap if I wanted to before picking her up. I once admitted this to an audience at a women’s and gender studies conference, and there were gasps. We’re not supposed to take care of ourselves like that as women, as mothers. And there’s something very wounding about that—not only for the women but for the children.

The sun bleeds peach tea,
and the mother tree lights
her leaves and drips yellow
sweet from cups as the day
goes belly up . . .

“Tuesday Night”

Many of the poems in this collection involve movement and growth. Are these important themes for you as a woman and as a writer?

Everything in nature is always moving and growing in the right seasons. If a tree stops putting out leaves, it’s either winter or something is wrong. But our economic system has taken this beautiful proficiency and abused it, so we feel we always have to be producing. This is injurious to our bodies, minds, and spirits, especially as creative people who must maintain our ability to be sensitive in order to do our most important work.

The metaphors of movement and growth in my poetry are reminders that we don’t really have to try and push and strive as much as we think we do. The wisdom of the woman’s body and the natural world teaches us that periods and seasons and cycles happen whether we try to control them or not. I’m talking about a kind of surrender that is not a loss, not measured in economic terms, but is a gathering and an embrace. A profit that profits every living being.

One theme that comes across very clearly in this collection is that of woman wisdom. What would you tell your younger self?

I would tell my younger self one thing:

Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.

No matter what you think you’re failing at, you’re doing a good job.

What woman wisdom are you hoping to dispense in these poems?

I would hope that one thing a person reading the poetry collection could do no matter what their identity markers would be is to ask themselves: Where is my power and how am I free?

I do think that there is an essential freedom of consciousness that we each have as human beings. I would even go so far as to say that a lot of nature also has this kind of consciousness, but in reference to humans in this context, I think sometimes we focus too much on the horizontal plane of existence.

And what I've learned from teaching writing with women over the years is that when we focus externally, we give away a lot of our power because the deep voice of creativity and wisdom comes from that vertical alignment with who we are that changes over the course of our life. It is separate from external circumstances. It must come from inside us. As much as we might ask the external world to grant it to us, it must exist within us first.

When readers encounter the poems in Gilead, I hope that they feel that very deep strength and faith in themselves and who they are.

We speak.
We listen.
We survive.
We survive.

“No Certainties”

What writing or publishing advice would you share with other women-identifying writers?

When my stepdaughter was seven years old, she came home from school and asked me, “Do you know how many elections Lincoln lost before he won one?” I stared at her because I knew she wasn’t asking me to show off her newfound knowledge or to engage in trivia with me.

She was saying, “Keep going. All the rejections you’re getting now are preparing you for what is to come.”

I loved that kid with all my heart then, and still do. She taught me so much about the love lessons we can learn as stepmothers—about loving those who are in our families that we did not choose—and the fact that she and her wife with their two children live near my wife and me means that, like Lincoln, I feel I’ve won the really big election of life.

What I’m trying to say is that you let the writing come and you work and love with all your heart and you send the writing out for publication and it’s a long game. You’re in it for life.

Did you want to share some of your experience in attendance of the Woody Guthrie Poetry Festival? Do you do a lot of speaking events? How important do you think they are for a writer?

I just returned from Oklahoma where they hold this music and poetry festival each year, and I have to say that just physically being with other writers is so powerful now that we know what it's like not to be together. I think it reminds us that we have bodies and that these bodies are important and connected to the environment. They’re probably more important than our minds really. If we start to really care for the body and see it as sacred, as something that needs to be healthy and in balance, then we can see our connections between what’s happening here and what’s happening in the earth.

I am really comfortable in front of a crowd. It’s actually easier for me to get up on a stage than to do small talk at a party. I tend not to know what to do besides talk about the weather. I want to go very deep right away and not everybody wants to do that. If I have a microphone, I can go there. I know they wanted to be here, to listen to me and my poetry. I think I have always been kind of bossy and a teacher and it’s easy for me to lead. I love giving readings. I love teaching workshops. I love feeling like I’m helping to create a safe space for people to listen, to think, to feel, to write. When I give a poetry reading and I see people in the audience crying, I feel like I hit a home run because that's really what I want. Not for them to be sad, but to feel so moved and so safe that they can feel whatever is coming up for them and express it freely.

Do you have any future projects you’d like to share?

In November, I have a novel called Beaver Girl coming out. I’m excited about this because it takes a lot of the themes from Swimming in Gilead and puts it into a narrative format. The main character is a 19-year-old girl who has been through a pandemic and climate collapse. She wakes in her house to wildfires that are encroaching upon her neighborhood, and she goes into a national forest to try to escape the wildfires. There she befriends a beaver family. The reader learns about beavers as a keystone species for our environment. For example, most of Texas and New Mexico, which we think of as desert areas now, were lush green forests before the Europeans got rid of all the beavers for the fur trade. Beavers create these wetland areas and even after an individual family has moved on those beaver ponds become part of the water table, which can help us during times of drought in later years. So, it’s a bit of a morality tale about what we have done to help bring about climate disaster. It is also set in the kind of postapocalyptic time and shows what beavers and humans could do together to restore faith and strength and a sense of family and community. That will be out on November 15th.

You can follow updates on Cassie and her writing on Twitter @premosteele and her website cassiepremosteele.com and can order your copy of Swimming in Gilead from Yellow Arrow Publishing.

Melissa Nunez is a Latin@ writer and homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley. Her essays have appeared in magazines like Hypertext and Honey Literary. She has work forthcoming in Lean and Loafe, Fahmidan Journal, and others. She writes an anime column for The Daily Drunk, interviews for Yellow Arrow Publishing, and is a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.

Cassie Premo Steele, PhD, is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist and the author of 18 books. Swimming in Gilead is her seventh book of poetry. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the Archibald Rutledge Prize named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife.

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Thank you, Cassie and Melissa, for sharing your conversation. Preorder your copy of Swimming in Gilead today.

Kapua Iao 9/5/23 Kapua Iao 9/5/23

An Interview with Corridors Editor-in-Chief Samantha Dickson

By Natasha Saar, written April 2023

I’ve been a member of my university’s (Loyola University Maryland) literary magazine, Corridors, for just about two years now. Corridors publishes original student work, including pieces of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, art, and photography. For years, Forum and Garland, two of Loyola’s student-run literary arts magazines, operated as two separate staffs. While the former solicited, reviewed, and published submissions of nonfiction and art, the latter did the same with fiction and photography. They were joined together as Corridors to even better share the talents and passions of Loyola University writers with the university at large. It’s been a great time sifting through submissions, selecting them, editing them, and just about everything you can think of when you hear the title of editor.

While Corridors Editor-in-Chief Samantha Dickson is not in charge of looking through submissions, she’s in charge of just about everything else. Normally, I can hardly see past her veil of managerial woes, but one interview later that has changed. Now, you, too, can see what a leadership position in a publishing house looks like, even if said publishing house is confined to the university level.

Can you give a quick introduction about you, Corridors, and your role with the literary magazine?

I am a graduating senior at Loyola University, [and] I am majoring in writing and philosophy, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief for Corridors . . . I joined my freshman year.

We actually have two Editors-in-Chief. Grace Perry works with the design, text, and actually puts the final product together—my role is that I take on a more managerial position. I develop a schedule and make sure that the Corridors team is following it, that everything is as punctual as possible, and that all communication channels are open. I also keep a pulse on any potential problems my staff might have to see how I can help out.

Me and Grace [are] also working on choosing staff members for next year, since we’re both going to be graduating.

How long have you been Editor-in-Chief?

I’ve been in my position for two years, but I’ve been with Corridors since I was a freshman. I spent my first two years as a nonfiction editor. At the end of my sophomore year, I applied to be the head of editing fiction/poetry. On our application to be a staff member, we have it set up that you number your preferred positions one to five. On a whim, I put Editor-in-Chief as my number two option. I ended up in that position!

What’s the most difficult part about being Editor-in-Chief?

When I first started, it was the managerial aspect because prior to Corridors I had no experience managing people on any sort of scale. Unfortunately, my predecessor didn’t give me much instruction. It was getting thrown in the deep end.

Since then, I’ve become a lot more confident with—for the lack of a better term—ordering people around. Experience and practice made me a lot more comfortable in my position! At this point, the worst part is the email anxiety.

Which issue of Corridors that you’ve worked on has been your favorite and in what way?

Well, last year [2022] was my first year as EiC, so it was already stressful and a huge learning curve. We had an issue with the printer where we didn’t have the paper type we usually use. We had a big discussion on what the book should look like. Normally we have an off-yellow, sort of white color to have a sort of older look to it. But the printer didn’t have that so we came up with a sort of cityscape for the cover (above), and just leaned into the modern, sleeker feel. It’s my favorite look of a piece I’ve worked on, so I’m happy for the trouble.

How is the current issue of Corridors coming along?

We have our mockup! It just arrived, our next move is to look it over and look out for some more glaring mistakes. Once it looks good, we give the okay to the printer. In two weeks, we’re going to have 300 copies.

Are you a writer yourself? If yes, what are you working on currently?

Like most graduating seniors, my goal is to get a job. Thankfully, Corridors has turned out to be a really great experience and I’m asked a lot of questions from my employers about it. How we set it up is surprisingly similar to indie publishing houses, so it’s been a big help in the process.

In terms of personal work, I am a writer. I’m on-and-off on a bunch of different projects but have been very busy. After graduation I hope that I’ll have some time to put my work out there on a more regular basis.

What do you love most about writing? Where do you find your inspiration?

I love fiction and fantasy especially—I grew up on dragons. So when I talk about fiction, I talk about how it’s a gateway to reality that can safely explore often very tense and difficult situations that we face every day. It lets us face things in a way that doesn't directly feel like we’re facing our problems. So, to me, it’s more than entertainment, even if I approach writing with that in mind.

Who is your favorite writer and why?

This is a hard one! With school, it’s been hard to read or write as much as I would like . . . I’m currently reading Stephen King’s The Stand, as well as Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series. Though the first series that always comes to my mind is Christopher Paolini’s The Inheritance Cycle. It was an establishing force in my love for the fantasy genre.

What do you like about Baltimore?

I didn’t grow up in a big city, so I was really excited when I was coming to school that I was going to have access to one. There’s always something to do here and that’s probably something everyone says, but if I’m looking for something I can always find it. I’ve found park spots I love, natural spots that I like if I need a break . . . there are lots of great spots outside for inspiration.

What are your plans after graduation?

I really enjoyed publishing. I’m not very particular about the medium so I’ve been keeping my options open. I’ve also been dabbling in the news industry, editing and writing articles for a Los Angeles-based company, so I’d also be happy to work in that industry as well. It’s influenced me as a writer a lot.

Thank you, Samantha, for taking the time to talk to Natasha about running Loyola University’s literary magazine Corridors.

Samantha Dickson is a senior at Loyola University Maryland, majoring in philosophy and writing. She’s the Editor-in-Chief of her university’s literary magazine, Corridors, and is currently an intern at MXDWN Entertainment.

Natasha Saar is also a senior at Loyola Maryland University, majoring in English literature with minors in writing and classics. She’s Yellow Arrow Publishing’s spring 2023 publications intern, works on her campus as a resident assistant, and is a genre editor at Corridors.

*****

Kapua Iao 8/29/23 Kapua Iao 8/29/23

The Ultimate Barbie Reading List

By Cecelia Caldwell

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably become enamored with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which has been simultaneously delighting and outraging viewers since its record-breaking release on July 21. After three trips to the theater to watch Barbie, during which I not only relished in the bubblegum pink setting and Ryan Gosling’s outrageous portrayal of Ken, but also the strong themes of female solidarity and the power of sisterhood, I decided to compile a list of 10 books that I think exist in harmony with and expand on the ever-important ideas explored in the movie.

Queenie (2019) by Candice Carty-Williams (Simon & Schuster, get your copy here)

I adored the first few pages of this novel, expecting a snappy, witty comedy about a dysfunctional 20-something going through a breakup. I was surprised, as I continued reading, to find so much more. Feeling lost after getting dumped by her boyfriend, Queenie Jenkins throws herself into an array of failed sexual encounters with racist, sexist, fatphobic men. Also struggling at work and with her friendships, Queenie only burrows deeper into her toxic relationships, subsequently unraveling her life and the lives of those around her. At once hilarious and heart wrenching, Queenie is the ultimate celebration of self-love, independence, and embracing female joy in a male-dominated world.

The Second Sex (1949) by Simone De Beauvoir (Penguin Random House, get your copy here)

Published in 1949, this groundbreaking work by French philosopher Simone De Beauvoir explores the treatment of women both in her current moment, as well as throughout history. Beauvoir identifies the positionality of women as that of an “other,” and recognizes that women seem to exist only in relation to men, as opposed to the strong and independent group they actually are. For anyone looking to deepen their understanding of feminist history while at the same time reading something dazzlingly engaging, I’d urge you to give this one a try.

We Should All Be Feminists (2014) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Penguin Random House, get your copy here)

For those left wishing that Barbie focused a bit more on issues of racial justice and the intersectionality between gender and race, this one’s for you. In this deeply personal and moving essay, Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who also writes stellar fiction) offers us a 21st century definition of feminism that is deeply rooted not only in her own experiences but also in practices of inclusion and awareness. In this book, Adichie sets out to explore what exactly it means to be a woman now, and why we should all (yes, that includes you, Ken) be feminists.

Know my name (2019) by Chanel Miller (Penguin Random House, get your copy here)

In this universally acclaimed memoir, Chanel Miller writes candidly about her experience being sexually assaulted in 2015, as well as the court case that followed, in which she was identified anonymously as “Emily Doe.” In this brave and heart-wrenching account, Miller writes about the culture of misogyny and slut shaming (both in the world and in court), her personal experience of dealing with trauma, and—most importantly—Miller tells the world her name.

Nightbitch (2021) by Rachel Yoder (Penguin Random House, get your copy here)

In this absurd novel, we follow an unnamed narrator—a stay-at-home mom—as she becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog. Having pushed aside her dreams of working in the art world to care for a young child, Nightbitch (as our narrator eventually christens herself) slowly breaks free from the confines of domesticity and gives in to a myriad of wild impulses (raw meat is involved). Nightbitch, grotesque and unsettling at times, ultimately celebrates femininity gone wild, all while exploring ideas of art, motherhood, and friendship.

Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (2023) by Ann Weil (Yellow Arrow Publishing, get your copy here)

In her poetry chapbook Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, former professor and special education teacher Ann Weil beautifully captures the quiet power of women and the simultaneous beauty and rage that come with existing as a woman. In a short collection, Weil is able to illustrate both the quotidian and the grand, and explores themes of aging, family, love, lust, and what it means to be an artist. Bonus points for the very Barbie-fied pink stilettos on the cover.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2001) by Ann Brashares (Delacourt, get your copy here)

In this widely popular and endlessly fun novel, four teenage girls form an unbreakable bond after buying a pair of jeans that magically fit all their (very different) bodies perfectly. The girls split up for the summer, but stay connected through the pants, which they ship to each other along with updates on their lives, budding romances, and family struggles. This book, while lighthearted and fun, takes time to unpack life’s serious moments, too, and it is, ultimately, a roaring celebration of girlhood. (Plus, this book is perfect if seeing America Ferrera in Barbie triggered memories of the 2005 film adaptation of the novel.)

Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her (2010) by Robin Gerber (Harper Collins, get your copy here)

For those interested in the story of Ruth Handler, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants who went on to invent only the most iconic 11-inch plastic doll in 1959, this book is for you. Gerber, in addition to telling Ruth’s story, documents the ways in which Barbie sparked a (still) ongoing debate about women’s roles, body image, and more.

The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men (2023) by Manuel Betancourt (Catapult, get your copy here)

For all my Kens reading this—don’t worry, we included one for you, too. In The Male Gazed, queer Colombian-born writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt explores masculinity in all its staggering complexity. Half-memoir, half-cultural criticism, Betancourt explores thirst traps, drag queens, and telenovelas (just to name a few) to expose the ways in which our culture shapes perceptions of masculinity, and the toxicity, frailty, and anxieties that ensue. Bonus points for the cover art giving major Kenergy.

Convenience Store Woman (2019) by Sayaka Murata (Grove Atlantic, get your copy here)

Keiko Furukura, at 36 years old, has been working at the same convenience store for 18 years. Unmarried and without kids, Keiko faces endless pressure from her family, friends, and society to settle down and start her life, or at least switch to a “proper” career. In this short but powerful novel, translated from Japanese, Keiko embarks on a journey of self-discovery in which she ultimately realizes that, although her life and career don’t fit into society’s expectations of success, doesn’t mean her choices are wrong. Diving into the intricacies of the role of women in Japanese culture and the true meaning of happiness, Convenience Store Woman reminds readers that it’s okay to break the mold and choose whatever lifestyle brings the most joy.

We’d love to hear any Barbie-esque books you read! Let us know in the Comments.

Cecelia Caldwell is a rising junior at Middlebury College studying English on the creative writing track. She is minoring in Anthropology and Spanish. An avid reader and lover of words, Cecelia is passionate about publishing, editing, storytelling, literacy, and the diversification of all of these fields. In her free time, Cecelia enjoys writing satire, working out, cooking, and tending to her garden. She lives in western Massachusetts with her mom and two dogs, Ollie and Ernie.

*****

Yellow Arrow 8/25/23 Yellow Arrow 8/25/23

Her View Friday

Yellow Arrow Publishing supports women-identifying writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes us stronger. Women’s voices have historically been underrepresented in literature, and we aim to elevate those voices and stories through our programs, publications, and support.

Part of our mission in supporting and uplifting women writers is to promote the Yellow Arrow community’s individual accomplishments. We’d like to further expand that support and promotion outside of our Yellow Arrow publications. Twice a month, we’d like to give a shout out to those within the Yellow Arrow community who recently published:

single-author publications
single pieces in journals, anthologies, etc. as well as prizes/awards

You can support our authors by reading this blog and their work, sharing their news, and commenting below or on the blog. Congratulations to all the included authors. We are so proud of you!

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling

“the becoming” by lucy M. Logsdon from illinois

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: Rogue Agent

Date published: August 1, 2023

Type of publication: online

rogueagentjournal.com/llogsdon

Find Lucy on Facebook @LucyLog64.

Yellow Arrow (past and present) board, staff, interns, authors, residents, and instructors alike! Got a publication coming out? Let us help celebrate for you in Her View Friday.

Single-author publications: here.

Single pieces and awards/prizes: here.

Please read the instructions on each form carefully; we look forward to congratulating you!

*****

Kapua Iao 8/22/23 Kapua Iao 8/22/23

Meet a Staff Member: Beck Snyder

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to introduce editorial associate Beck Snyder (she/they). Beck, a Yellow Arrow intern in fall 2022 and spring 2023, is a recent graduate of Towson University and is currently figuring out where they’re going in life. When they’re not knee-deep in their own writing endeavors, you can usually find them playing video games, reading, or making stupid jokes with their friends. You can find them in the tiny town of Clear Spring, Maryland, on Instagram @real_possiblyawesome or on Twitter @PossiblyAwesom if you’d like to hear the thoughts that pop into their head at three in the morning.

Beck says, “I am super excited to read all the submissions that come in for the journals and other publications. The pieces we get at Yellow Arrow are always incredible and it’s so much fun to read them all (even if it gets pretty hard deciding who to [publish])!”

Tell us a little something about yourself:

The first award I ever won for writing was in first grade where I wrote a spin on The Cat in the Hat for a Dr. Seuss week contest. I still have the Fox-in-Socks plushie that was the prize.

What do you love most where you live?

I live in a small town in Washington County, and I love the fact that it’s a very walkable place and that I know so many people within the community. It feels much more tight knit than other places I’ve visited before.

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

I got involved with Yellow Arrow through their internship program and then loved the mission so much that I wanted to stick around and help them put together their amazing publications. I’m really glad to have the opportunity to read and edit the fantastic submissions all of the amazing writers send in!

What are you working on currently?

I’ve currently got a fiction novel of my own in the works, and aside from that, I’m looking into getting a job and moving out since I just graduated college in May of 2023. Real life’s coming at me fast, and I’m doing my best to meet it head on!

What genre do you write (or read) the most and why?

I adore fiction. Something about getting to create your own entire world, put a spin on this one, or dive into the worlds [that] others have created is so fascinating and exciting to me. I love character writing especially, and getting to explore different situations through the eyes of people who are very different from me but also relatable.

What book is on the top of your to-be-read pile?

Right now, I have my eye on Six of Crows, as many of my friends have read and loved it and also have been watching/loving the show!

Who is your favorite writer and why?

Rick Riordan. I think his comedic style of writing and well-paced adventures are incredibly entertaining, and he has incredibly strong character writing that makes every character memorable, no matter how small. I also admire his drive to constantly add more diversity to his books, and his dedication to make sure that all representation is well-thought-out and well researched, instead of just attempting to throw in minority characters haphazardly for diversity points.

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

There are countless people who have supported and inspired me on my writing journey, but the one who comes to mind most often is my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Thomas. She encouraged me to submit my writing to competitions and was the first person in my life who made me feel like this whole writing thing could be something I was really good at. I’m honestly not sure if I would have recognized writing as a passion of mine if it hadn’t been for her.

What do you love most about writing?

It can often be the hardest part, but taking something that exists only in your mind and putting it on the page to where other people can read it and see what you’re seeing is something I love about writing. I love being able to share all the crazy adventures in my mind with the people around me.

What advice do you have for new writers?

Do not fear the terrible first draft! First drafts are made specifically to just get ideas on the page to be refined later. I’m a perfectionist myself and often struggle with the temptation to try and make everything I write perfect the first time around, but that’s an impossible task that will no doubt turn you off of writing forever. Also: don’t be afraid to have fun! Writing something weird just because you want to. There’s no such thing as the correct way to write.

What’s your vision for Yellow Arrow in 2023?

I think that with Yellow Arrow’s missions, publications, workshops, and other programs, there’s so many opportunities to inspire women-identifying authors and give them the confidence they need to nurture the passion they have for writing.

*****

Beck, we are so excited to continue to work with you this year. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we SPARK and sparkle this year: 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 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 8/15/23 Kapua Iao 8/15/23

Where to Submit: Fall Edition

Part of our mission in supporting and uplifting women writers is to promote those around the Yellow Arrow community with like-minded missions. We’d like to show our support by highlighting submissions open by sister presses throughout the year. This blog will list fall submissions from September to December, 2023, for:

journals/anthologies
chapbooks/zines
full-length manuscripts
online publications

We searched for submissions that have similar beliefs about inclusivity and diversity; they don’t necessarily only publish women but advocate for women-identifying authors in their own way. All listed include submissions for poetry, creative nonfiction, and/or hybrid work.

We hope you find the list useful and good luck!

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. If you know of a publication or publisher that we missed, please send an email to editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com. This is the first time we put this list together so we’re sure we missed a few!

Journals/Anthologies/Zines

Abandon Journal: theme Abandon Earth; accepts flash, short stories, CNF, graphic novels, poetry, craft essays, book reviews; submissions open August 1 to September 30; no reading fee; payment $15

CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women: accepts poetry, short fiction, visual art, essays, reviews, interviews; submissions open October 1 to December 31; $5 general fee & $3 student/low income fee; payment copy of issue & one volume subscription

Decolonial Passage Literary Magazine: accepts essays, CNF, short stories, flash fiction, poetry; submissions rolling for fiction & CNF, open for poetry January, March, May, July, September, or November; no reading fee; no payment

diode poetry journal: accepts poetry (and book reviews, interviews, essays about poetry); submissions open year round; no reading fee; payment unknown

Five South: accepts poetry, fiction, flash, humor, nonfiction; submissions open year round; fees range $0 to $4.50; payment unknown

Literary Mama: accepts CNF, fiction, poetry, essays, book reviews, profiles; submissions open year round; no reading fee; no payment

Raising Mothers: accepts experimental and traditional fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, book reviews, photo essays, comic/graphic narratives; submissions open year round; no reading fee; no payment

Chapbooks/Zines

Alabaster Leaves Publishing: accepts poetry chapbooks; submissions open year round; reading fee $12

backbone press: accepts poetry chapbooks (haiku only); submissions open October to December; reading fee $20; payment $100 + 20 copies

Full-length manuscripts

3 Mile Harbor Press: accepts poetry manuscripts; submissions open through January 2024; reading fee $30; payment $500 & publication

Alice James Books: accepts poetry manuscripts; submissions open from March 1 to October 16; reading fee $30; payment $2,000 plus publication & distribution

Apprentice House Press: accepts all genres except poetry and children’s; submissions open through February 2024

BlazeVOX: accepts poetry & fiction manuscripts; submissions open year round; payment unknown; payment 10% royalties

she writes press: accepts all genres except children’s; submissions currently open for spring 2025 publication; reading fee $35, payment unknown

Online Publication

Black Sun Lit digital vestiges: accepts poetry, prose, essays, translations; submissions open year round

Scarlet: accepts poetry, fiction, nonfiction; reading fee unknown; payment $80

*****

Kapua Iao 8/8/23 Kapua Iao 8/8/23

Embers Glowing Hope in a Very Dark Time: The Spark that Began Swimming in Gilead

By Cassie Premo Steele, written in February 2023

I love fire.

As an Aries, the first sign in the Zodiac, I am a fire starter, a lead taker, a fast beginner.

I love the spark.

The kindling of wood in the mind that means a new idea, a new poem, a new book is on the way.

And I especially love the way that when I’m writing, the fire begins to feed on itself, as page after page is lit by word after word.

Some people call it flow.

That’s too watery for me.

It’s a conflagration.

During the collective quarantine portion of the pandemic, I began taking a writing course with Natalie Goldberg that included sitting and writing and listening sessions by Zoom with people from all around the world who were attending the course.

Hundreds of people, strangers, ordinary humans in their homes, connecting through the light of video conferencing.

Like embers glowing hope in a very dark time.

I attended the first large group meeting on a Wednesday afternoon. We started out by sitting together, silently meditating with hundreds of people from all over the world. Then we were given a writing prompt and we wrote for 10 minutes in our journals.

After silently writing, we were divided randomly into small groups of six or seven people, where we were supposed to read our writing to each other, and more importantly, listen.

Natalie Goldberg says 90% of being a writer is listening.

I mentioned this little lit coal of wisdom in my book Earth Joy Writing, which I’d published years before, but I never really felt its blaze in my belly before listening to strangers from around the world during a pandemic.

During that first small group session, there was a woman who listened so hard to what I was reading from my journal that she cried.

I wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary. Just talking about the virus and how my wife and I had both been sick in March after our daughter came back from visiting New York City and how cases were spiking in our very red and southern state and how Trump wanted to take our marriage away and our grief and anger at the death of George Floyd and how we cut out brown and black letters spelling Black Lives Matter and taped it up in our front window and what it means to live as married lesbians in the south.

Ordinary topics to me.

The prompt had been, “I don’t know . . .”

The woman, a few seconds later, reached out to me in the chat and told me she was very moved by my writing. I wrote back, giving her my email address to contact me, and as soon as the class was over, she did. Something was kindled.

It turned out that we were both lesbian mothers of daughters and that our daughters were around the same age, and that she was an American, but she was living in Canada.

“I just feel so sorry for you there,” she said. “It’s horrible what is happening.”

I had not had anyone from outside the United States express this to me: how sorry they were.

It fired up something deep inside me.

She then asked if I wanted to be part of a small listening group with a few other members of the class. She said she could post something on the course board (which I’d visited once but felt overwhelmed) to see if others wanted to join us.

I said yes.

She asked if I thought it would be a good idea to focus the invitation on LGBTQIA people.

I said yes.

In addition to being a lesbian and a mom and a writer, she was a teacher and a leader, too, and I was able to sit back and allow her to do this.

Her listening fire had started all this.

A couple of weeks later, the two of us met with four other women by Zoom. We used the same structure as Natalie did in her classes. After checking in briefly, introducing ourselves and saying where we were geographically, we sat for five minutes, wrote for 10 minutes, and then read what we wrote.

No comments. No evaluations. Just listening.

And as Natalie said in that initial large group meeting, “Listen without judgment so you can allow the other to be free. And in so doing, you can gain the courage to be free yourself.”

Ironically, three of the women were in Canada and three in the United States.

A few weeks into our meetings, one of the women in Canada started crying during her check-in, saying she’d been watching what was happening in Portland, protestors being rounded up in unmarked vans by an unmarked, and violent, police force.

The three of us in the United States were not crying about this. We knew about it. Two of us were even women of color. We were concerned, of course.

But it took someone from the outside to bring the ignition we needed to see and feel what was happening.

When you’re inside something, it can be hard to see clearly until someone else brings in a light.

We started calling ourselves Sisters of Gilead.

Gilead is the name of the nation that the United States becomes after it is taken over by a misogynistic, totalitarian regime in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which became well-known in the years of the Trump administration because it aired on streaming services and was watched around the world.

I first read the novel when I was in graduate school. It wasn’t assigned for a course. I don’t remember many books by women ever having been assigned when I was doing my undergraduate and master’s degrees.

I read it the summer between my two years of getting my master’s degree, and I remember feeling like my mind was on fire.

The woman’s body, I realized, is a powerful thing. So powerful that men fear it and hate it and want to control it.

Because it has a power that they can never possess.

The power to give birth.

But as I began reflecting on the power of women throughout history, and the power of that one novel to ignite women from all over the world to their own present condition, and the power of our tiny group of women and the deep compassion that we were sparking for each other and in ourselves, I also became curious about the word Gilead itself.

And I learned that in Hebrew, it means “a heap of stones of testimony.”

It is an actual geographical space, yes, but it is also about what happens when we testify, when we speak and write and read and listen and tell the truth about the stories of our lives.

What we know. What we don’t know.

What we feel. What we cannot feel because the heat is too great, and we must wear protective gear.

Gilead first appears in the Bible in the Book of Genesis when Jacob and Rachel seek refuge there: “Thus he made his escape with all he had. Once he was across the Euphrates, he headed for the highlands of Gilead.” (Genesis 31: 21)*

It was there that Rachel hid the images that were sacred to her faith, now being overtaken by a new faith: “Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them inside a camel cushion, and seated herself upon them. When Laban had rummaged through the rest of her tent without finding them, Rachel said to her father, ‘Let not my lord feel offended that I cannot rise in your presence; a woman’s period is upon me.’ So, despite his search, he did not find his idols.” (Genesis 31: 34–35)

The woman’s role in Gilead is to keep safe what is under threat.

And she uses her body and reproductive power to do this.

“A woman’s period is upon me.”

She was menstruating.

It meant she could isolate.

Stay safe.

It was the red fire of blood within her that saved her.

And the stories of it survive.

This is how we survive during times of fire: isolation, deep connection with the body, adherence to a women’s custom, gathering with other women, speaking our truths, and listening so deeply that our tears water the ground so we can plant seeds and start over.

*Both quotes from the Book of Genesis come from the Catholic Bible, Oxford University Press (1995).

Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist and the author of 18 books. Swimming in Gilead is her seventh book of poetry and is being prepped for release by Yellow Arrow in October 2023. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the Archibald Rutledge Prize named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife. Find out more at cassiepremosteele.com.

*****

Kapua Iao 8/1/23 Kapua Iao 8/1/23

Yellow Arrow Journal (VIII/02) EMBLAZON Submissions are Now Open!

Yellow Arrow Publishing is excited to announce that submissions for our next issue of Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VIII, No. 2 (fall 2023) is open August 1–31 exploring the power and ephemerality of life’s fleeting moments. Guest editor Leticia Priebe Rocha states,

“As we navigate the turmoil of daily life and the heaviness of what lies beyond our control, it takes an intentional effort to nurture [life’s fleeting] moments into existence and to sustain the life they bring us. For me, this effort is often driven by introspection: What makes you feel alive? What connections have shaped your being? How do you tap into the well of love and hope within you? The act of creation through poetry and art has been a blessing toward answering these questions, empowering me with an openness to receive the ephemeral and inscribe it not only in memory but on the page.”

This issue’s theme will be EMBLAZON

: to conspicuously inscribe or display
: to depict (a heraldic device) on something
: to celebrate or extol publicly

And here are some questions to consider when choosing or writing for this issue:

What are the experiences that inscribed themselves onto your being and made you who are? Who are the people who adorn your life? Whose lives do you adorn in return? What are the places and contexts that you inevitably herald in all of your interactions?
Of the ephemeral instants that have embellished your existence, what marks and stays with you? What are the sensations, emotions, and images that anchor you in your own aliveness?
What is your relationship with time? How do you view its nature, particularly in relation to the fleeting moments that make up the human experience?
What are the sparks that you strive to ignite during your time on this Earth? How do you hope to illuminate the world when your time comes to an end?

Yellow Arrow Journal is looking for creative nonfiction, poetry, and cover art submissions by writers/artists who identify as women, on the theme of EMBLAZON. Submissions can be in any language as long as an English translation accompanies it. For more information regarding journal submission guidelines, please visit yellowarrowpublishing.com/submissions. Please read our guidelines carefully before submitting. To learn more about our editorial views and how important your voice is in your story, read About the Journal. This issue will be released in November 2023.

EMBLAZON’s guest editor, Leticia Priebe Rocha, earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University, where she was awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she immigrated to Miami, Florida, at the age of nine and currently resides in the Greater Boston area. For more information, visit her website at leticiaprieberocha.com. Leticia’s poem “Lost In” was part of Yellow Arrow Journal PEREGRINE, and she was our .W.o.W. #46 (March 2023). We are excited to work with Leticia over the next few months.

The journal is just one of many ways that Yellow Arrow Publishing works to support and inspire women through publication and access to the literary arts. Since its founding in 2016, Yellow Arrow has worked tirelessly to make an impact on the local and global community by advocating for writers who identify as women. Yellow Arrow proudly represents the voices of women from around the globe. Creating diversity in the literary world and providing a safe space is deeply important. Every writer has a story to tell, every story is worth telling.

*****

Annie Marhefka 7/31/23 Annie Marhefka 7/31/23

Meet the 2023 Yellow Arrow Publishing Writers-in-Residence

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. Since 2019, Yellow Arrow Publishing has been proud to offer a residency program that enables us to support, uplift, and amplify the voices of women-identifying writers residing in the Baltimore area. We continue to evolve the program and are delighted to share our 2023 writers-in-residence with our community.

First, a note of thanks. As our programs and community continue to grow, we consider our team tremendously fortunate to have received such a diverse and talented group of applicants. We are reminded again of the passion and storytelling that surrounds and charms us. Our deepest gratitude to all those who applied or took this opportunity to learn more about Yellow Arrow.

For 2023, we are thrilled that Bird in Hand café and bookstore is partnering with us to provide an inspiring location from which our writers can work at their craft! Bird in Hand has provided Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood the perfect blend of coffee, books, and community since 2016.

Please join us in congratulating our 2023 writers-in-residence: Kat Scott and Tramaine Suubi.

Kat Scott is an MFA student at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and holds a Master of Arts from Indiana University. As a writer, Kat likes to explore the places where meetings occur, between humans, animals, nature, etc. In some small way, she hopes to open a questioning of the boundaries we place that lead to othering, embracing instead the idea of a congeries. Kat lives in Remington and works as an assistant editor for The Hopkins Review.

Kat will be the Writer-in-Residence for August and September.

Tramaine Suubi is a multilingual Bantu artist who was born by the Nile River and raised by the Potomac River. They earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Their poems live in Solstice Literary Magazine, Prompt Press, Protest Through Poetry, Plantin Magazine, Kiwi Collective Magazine, and other spaces. They were a contributor at the Tin House Summer Workshop and they are officially represented by the Creative Arts Agency. Their forthcoming book debut will be published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Tramaine is in love with all things water.

Tramaine will be the writer-in-residence for October and November.

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Yellow Arrow 7/28/23 Yellow Arrow 7/28/23

Her View Friday

single-author publications
single pieces in journals, anthologies, etc. as well as prizes/awards

You can support our authors by reading this blog and their work, sharing their news, and commenting below or on the blog. Congratulations to all the included authors. We are so proud of you!

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling

“gray” by Sara Palmer from baltimore, maryland

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: Ekphrastic Review

Date published: June 2023

Type of publication: online

ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/gray-by-sara-palmer

Find Sara on Facebook @sara.p5455 and @sara.palmer.5455.

“Tamales on Mars, The Optics of Space Travel, Regarding the Memory of Earth: Speculative poems” by angela acosta from Gainesville, Florida

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: 2023 Rhysling Award Anthology

Date published: July 1, 2023

Type of publication: print

sfpoetry.com/ra/pages/23rhysling.html

Find Angela on Instagram @aaperiquito.

“No Whimpering” by Ute carson from Austin, texas

Genre: hybrid

Name of publication: SAGE-ING

Date published: summer 2023

Type of publication: online

sage-ing.com/Sage-ing45.pdf

PRIZES/AWARDS

“Tamales on Mars, The Optics of Space Travel, Regarding the Memory of Earth: Speculative poems” by angela acosta from Gainesville, Florida

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: 2023 Utopia Awards finalist

Date published: July 2023

clificon.com/nominees-voting

Find Angela on Instagram @aaperiquito.

Yellow Arrow (past and present) board, staff, interns, authors, residents, and instructors alike! Got a publication coming out? Let us help celebrate for you in Her View Friday.

Single-author publications: here.

Single pieces and awards/prizes: here.

Please read the instructions on each form carefully; we look forward to congratulating you!

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Kapua Iao 7/25/23 Kapua Iao 7/25/23

Gratitude is a Divine Emotion: Yellow Arrow Interns

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 (see our growing list of partners here).

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 copyediting and proofreading as well as writing blogs and press releases. They create promotional material and images for our authors and create marketing campaigns. They help at live and virtual events and readings. 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 the summer 2023 interns. Each has my appreciation.

Cecelia (Cece) Caldwell

From Pittsfield, Massachusetts
*What do you do*? I do all sorts of things. Often, I work with the submissions we receive. I format, proofread, and copyedit chapbooks and short pieces. Additionally, I help work on social media campaigns, blog posts, and chapbook promotions.
*Where do you go to school?* I go to Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. I’m a rising junior!
*What are you currently working on*? I’m back home in Massachusetts for the summer and am enjoying spending time with my family. Aside from interning with Yellow Arrow, I’m working at a gift shop at a local historical museum, tending to my garden, and planning my upcoming semester abroad in Spain.

Cecelia Caldwell (she/her) is a rising junior at Middlebury College majoring in English and minoring in anthropology and Spanish. An avid reader and lover of words, Cecelia is passionate about publishing, editing, storytelling, literacy, and the diversification of all of these fields. In her free time, Cecelia enjoys writing satire, working out, cooking, and tending to her garden. She lives in western Massachusetts with her mom and two dogs, Ollie and Ernie. Find her on Instagram @ceceliacaldwelll.

Why did you choose an internship with Yellow Arrow?

I knew that I wanted to work in the publishing/editing industry to some extent, as those are the areas I’m interested in exploring after I graduate. After lots of searching, I came across Yellow Arrow, which fulfilled both my desire to gain practical experience in a field I loved, and my desire to work with an organization whose mission I supported. To be able to support a small, independent house dedicated to uplifting the voices of women is something truly special.

Vickie Tu

Lives in Silver Spring, Maryland
*What do you do*? I assist Yellow Arrow with various editorial, marketing, and publishing responsibilities. I serve as a reader and proofreader of manuscripts and produce social media content for publishing events and promotions. I also compose book reviews and author interviews for the Yellow Arrow blog and create monthly newsletters.
*Where do you go to school?* I go to University of Maryland, College Park and plan to graduate Spring 2024.
*What are you currently working on*? Outside of Yellow Arrow, I work two part time jobs and attend school. Additionally, I am working on creating my own literary blog and website where I can share my adoration for literature with fellow bookworms.

After graduating, she plan on finding entry level jobs in publishing and working her way up to be an editor or literary agent.

Why did you choose a second internship with Yellow Arrow?

I chose an internship with Yellow Arrow because the morals and values that the company upholds are very similar to mine and the publications interested me. Yellow Arrow presented itself to be a strong company that aims to empower and inspire women identifying creators and that was something that intrigued me the most. Additionally, I was particularly fond of the publications that Yellow Arrow produced and it was a genre that I desired more knowledge and experience in.

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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, fill out an application at yellowarrowpublishing.com/internships.

Kapua Iao 7/18/23 Kapua Iao 7/18/23

Embracing the Ephemeral Nature of the Human Experience

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to announce the next guest editor for Yellow Arrow Journal, Leticia Priebe Rocha. Leticia will oversee the creation of our Vol. VIII, No. 2 issue.

This next issue of Yellow Arrow Journal will explore the fleeting moments in life that anchor the human experience. Think about the flash after a spark is lit, before a fire burns big and bright . . . the flashes, the sparks, are ephemeral, just like life’s fleeting moments. They make us who we are. To learn more about this idea, read Leticia’s words below. And mark your calendars: the theme will be announced next week, submissions open August 1, and the issue will be released in November.

Leticia earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University, where she was awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she immigrated to Miami, Florida, at the age of nine and currently resides in the Greater Boston area. For more information, visit her website at leticiaprieberocha.com. Leticia’s poem “Lost In” was part of Yellow Arrow Journal PEREGRINE, and she was our .W.o.W. #46 (March 2023).

Please follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram for the theme and submissions announcement. Below, you can read more about Leticia’s perspectives on the ephemerality if life. We look forward to working with Leticia over the next few months.

By Leticia Priebe Rocha

“Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant.”
Clarice Lispector

I was born in the fourth most populous city in the world, São Paulo, Brazil—a beautiful, bustling place rich in culture and architecture. I have few but precious memories of the grand metropolis that raised me. The São Paulo Museum of Art, for example, fostered a lifelong love of art museums that compels me to add these institutions to my itinerary in any place I travel, no matter how brief my stay.

A particular memory that I have held dear since I was seven years old unfolded a few hours away from my city, in the countryside town of Santo Antonio do Pinhal. My little family (mom, dad, baby sister who was a few months old) and I were spending a weekend in the midst of greenery and waterfalls, a lushness that is profuse in many regions of Brazil. As we were winding down for bed on our first night there, my mom called me to step outside with her for a minute. I was struck immediately by the symphony of crickets that enveloped us, my body blanketed in an awe intensified as I looked up and witnessed the unwavering glow of the cosmos pulsing above in every direction. The sheer abundance of stars unknown in my typical urban setting cradled my seven-year-old frame with an acute awareness of my own smallness for the first time. It was at once terrifying and thrilling—I felt myself blossoming alongside the universe, an inseverable connection that I ground myself in to this day.

A few years later, when I was nine years old, we immigrated to another major city, this one on an entirely different continent—Miami, Florida, United States of America. I remember nothing of packing decades of my parent’s lives or my sister and I’s brief time on Earth in a few suitcases. I have no recollection of stepping onto the plane that would bring us to a new reality, and inevitably, new versions of ourselves. The only piece of the journey that I remember is walking through Miami International Airport and being entirely dazzled by the sky visible outside. There was not a cloud in sight, only a blueness punctuated by the relentless sunlight that is signature to Miami in the middle of June. A fleeting image that I still carry with me as a remnant of the child that I was and a beacon of who I would become.

I spent nearly a decade in Miami before parting ways with my first home in this country. I landed in Medford, Massachusetts, to attend university and stuck around ever since. I often joke that I knew Massachusetts was my new home when I flew to a conference in San Francisco and my primary preoccupation while getting off the plane was where I could find the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts (the answer was a definitive “not on every street corner” like you’d find in Boston). It was in an Uber navigating the streets of Boston at 2:00 a.m. that I realized I was in love for the first time. I had just said goodbye to my beloved, the feeling of being held like their one and only anchor to this world lingering over me as I hopped in the car. As I greeted the driver, Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” started playing on the radio, a gorgeous sonic accompaniment to the surrender of my heart. Though I had no certainty of what would come next, a door had been unlocked inside me to a fundamental, profoundly, and exquisitely human experience.

The fleeting moments I described here are inextricable from the person I am today, each instant a spark in forging the fire of the self. As we navigate the turmoil of daily life and the heaviness of what lies beyond our control, it takes an intentional effort to nurture these moments into existence and to sustain the life they bring us. For me, this effort is often driven by introspection: What makes you feel alive? What connections have shaped your being? How do you tap into the well of love and hope within you? The act of creation through poetry and art has been a blessing toward answering these questions, empowering me with an openness to receive the ephemeral and inscribe it not only in memory but on the page.

As Clarice Lispector so eloquently put it, “Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and surrender when I paint.” Being alive is a messy, heartbreaking, and beautiful thing. I hold a deep gratitude for the people and places that have inscribed themselves into my essence and for every moment of grace that has granted me the space to grow into myself. I cherish the thought that I have done the same for others in this existence where we are so deeply entangled. May we all find the strength to embrace the transience of this life and adorn the world with sparks far beyond our time here.

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Thank you, Leticia, for your beautiful words. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we SPARK and sparkle this year: 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 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 7/11/23 Kapua Iao 7/11/23

Magic in the Air: Black girl magic & other elixirs by shantell hinton hill

Yellow Arrow Publishing announces the release of our latest chapbook, Black girl magic & other elixirs, by shantell hinton hill. 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 Yellow Arrow Vignette, and by providing strong author support, writing workshops, and volunteering opportunities. We at Yellow Arrow are excited to continue our mission by supporting shantell in all her writing and publishing endeavors.

Black girl magic & other elixirs is an important poetry collection about the embodied experiences of a ‘90s Black girl growing up in the American South and how those experiences shaped her becoming a Black woman. Within, shantell recalls moments of playing hide and seek as a means of survival, trauma attached to bologna, the essence of her mother embodied in a fragrance, and even a favorite moment with her first and forever homegirl, her grandma. She weaves together stories from her childhood with current events, juxtaposing the cultural term ‘Black girl magic’ with her personal struggles to show how she became the ultimate Renaissance woman who embraces both the magic and the mundane of her surroundings.

An engineer turned pastor, shantell, a native of Conway, Arkansas, situates her work at the intersections of social justice, public theology, and Black feminism/womanism. shantell builds upon and pays homage to the revolutionary work of Black women authors, poets, leaders, and culture bearers. This collection bears witness to the often unspoken truths about the survival, wit, and skill Black girls and Black women develop in a world dominated by a myriad of interlocking oppressions. For shantell and Black girls everywhere, Black girl magic & other elixirs illustrates how justice, storytelling, ethics, and Black women’s spirituality weave together on the page to show how we can find ourselves “truly in love with who we’d become.”

Cover design was by Alexa Laharty, Yellow Arrow Creative Director. According to shantell, “The roller skates, cassette tape, and perfume all communicate a certain essence of ‘being’ that one can feel, smell, and hear. Likewise, the pictures of my younger self and my present-day self represent much of my journey of becoming and self-possession—signifying the power in reclaiming the little girls that live inside of us while empowering the women we have fought tooth and nail to belong to ourselves.

Paperback and PDF versions of Black girl magic & other elixirs 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 Black girl magic & other elixirs wherever you purchase your books including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. To learn more about shantell and Black girl magic & other elixirs, check out our recent interview with her.

You can find shantell on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or on her website at shantellhhill.com and connect with Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram, to share some love for this chapbook. You can also share a review to any of the major distributors or by emailing editor@yellowarrowpublishing.com. We’d love to hear from you.

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Kapua Iao 7/4/23 Kapua Iao 7/4/23

Meet a Staff Member: Meagan Gamble

Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to introduce editorial associate Meagan Gamble. Meg (she/her) is a writer and bookseller living in Boulder, Colorado, for some reason, despite the fact that she is terrified of heights. She graduated from City University of London with an MA in creative writing and publishing in 2016 and now works in academic publishing. She is an editor, writing tutor, and her dad says she’s “Amazing, Beautiful, and Smart.” She hopes to keep working in books in some capacity for the rest of her career, either behind the scenes or as a novelist herself. You can find her on Instagram at @mgnface or on Twitter at @megelissag.

Meg says, “I’m excited to be involved with a creative community that values women’s voices and to help produce some interesting work!”

Tell us a little something about yourself:

Well, usually the first thing I tell people is that I love to read, but I feel like that’s pretty obvious here (naturally)! I’m the eldest of four, so my siblings’ habits have migrated over the years into mine: I love art (art history especially), music, going to watch movies alone in an empty theater, painting, long circular walks (preferably with a dog), Sunday Morning on CBS, redoing my hair a million times before ultimately settling on the same hairstyle I wear every day, etc. I’ve been lucky enough to live in a lot of different places, both here and abroad, and so one thing I do value about myself is my ability to adapt quickly and find meaning in anxious or scary experiences. Good for writing! I also love tattoos. (Don’t tell my grandma.)

What do you love most about where you live?

I live in Boulder, Colorado, at the moment, which is a very strange, vibrant, eclectic little mountain town. Yesterday I saw someone giving a tarot reading at the bus stop outside my office if that gives you idea. (I know her, actually—she charges a fair price!) It’s a college town and a tech hub for the Western slope, so there’s a real eclectic mix of people from all walks of life, most of which are pretty weird. I like it a lot, honestly—there’s a real character to this town that I hope they’re able to preserve and defend against the incoming onslaught of gentrification because it would be a real loss to Colorado to turn this funky little place into your typical slick, expensive suburb. (#KeepBoulderWeird is the slogan if you’re so inclined.)

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

I was looking for opportunities to keep me connected with creative writing (as opposed to academic writing, which is what I deal with in my current job), and I was attracted to Yellow Arrow’s mission of amplifying women/women-identifying creatives! I will admit to the somewhat uncool trait of being really into weird grammar questions, so I was also looking for something where I could practice and develop my formal copyediting skills. So that’s what I’ll be doing, for the most part—proofreading and copyediting as well as voting on submissions to certain publications! Exciting stuff. :)

What are you working on currently?

Right now, I am primarily working on some creative nonfiction attempts. It’s been a difficult year with a lot of changes for me! Writing is a good way to work through stuff, so it’s been very helpful. I would like to get back to fiction soon, but I’m in no rush. It will come when I’m ready for it, I think.

What genre do you write (or read) the most and why?

I do read prose primarily because that’s what I write, it’s what I’ve always loved, and it’s where I’m most comfortable. Most people would call my tastes “literary” (some would call them “pretentious,” others, “eclectic,” perhaps depending on which part of my bookshelf they’re looking at) so I suppose that’s what I would say in terms of genre. I do love reading poetry, but I think the disconnect is that I really cannot write it (my brain simply does not work that way) and so naturally I gravitate towards novels for the most part. There are just too many good ones, and I only have so many hours in my life to read them. It’s tragic.

What books are on the top of your to-be-read pile?

I’m having a moment with nonfiction, which may or may not be because of the 75% off sale at Princeton University Press back in February, but that’s between me and my bank account, thanks. I’m reading Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy by C. L. Barber, a somewhat famous piece of literary criticism about the influence of Elizabethan seasonal holidays on Shakespeare’s comedies. (I love a good social/cultural history of Shakespeare, man, I really do.) But that’s a book from 1959 so I suppose it doesn’t really count—as far as new releases go, I cannot describe to you my excitement about Lorrie Moore’s newest, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, coming out at the end of June. And I’m also about to start my first Tessa Hadley novel, and I’m rather excited about it.

Who is your favorite writer and why?

Ruth Ozeki, all the way. I’m primarily a prose writer, and I grew up reading stuff I could actually get my hands on in my very small Iowan town (this was presmart phones, you see) so it was a pretty weird mix of “women’s fiction” (Alice Hoffman! Maeve Binchy!) and “stuff my grandpa gave us when he was cleaning out his house” (Tom Robbins! Kurt Vonnegut!). It was somewhat of a revelation to grow up and discover an entire wealth of fiction that was sort of a combination of both—grounded in a female perspective, engaging and readable, but stylistically experimental as well. Ozeki is such a pleasure to read, with a light touch to her prose that is so warm and inviting—but she deals with heavy subjects and takes big narrative swings, which I respect. I will forever remember sitting in a cafe reading A Tale for the Time Being in one sitting, while the very nice manager kept coming over to check on me and ask gently if I wanted a more comfortable chair to sit in. It was 2016, I was 26, and I’m pretty sure I was crying. (She was very nice about it.) Books like that only come along every once in awhile, and I treasure them for a long time when they do.

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

Forever my family, specifically my brother Taylor. He passed away recently, very suddenly, and we were very close, so everything I do is in his honor, really. He was absolutely my biggest hype man. He loved everything I read, and he didn’t even have to read it to love it. He’d just see me writing something and say some goofy thing like “oh, that’s GREAT! I can TELL!” (He usually could not see my screen. Sometimes what I was writing was an email.) I think everyone deserves a person like that, but specifically writers, who can sometimes get so buried in their own rooms that it’s difficult to step outside onto the balcony and look back in and say, “well yeah, I am cookin’ something in there.” He was wonderful and I miss him very much. Everything I’ve accomplished in life, and everything I will accomplish, will be because he made me believe it was possible.

What do you love most about writing?

What a gigantic question! I’ve been doing it for so long I suppose I haven’t thought about it indepth at any point because it’s always just been the way that I process myself and the world around me. It’s a natural instinct I have, and a compulsion also. I enjoy the way I can sink into it to the point where it becomes almost meditative. My brain goes smooth, and I stop thinking about my problems and I just coast on it—and that’s true for both writing and reading for me. I enjoy the way it connects people and infuriates people. And I love the feeling when you finish something and you’re mostly happy with it, and then you put it in the drawer and think, okay, what next? It’s beautiful, frustrating work. I could do nothing else with my life.

What advice do you have for new writers?

Read! Read widely. This is a cliché, but it’s true. Reading is a skill which is different from writing, but you still need both! From a practical angle, also, you need to know what’s being published! I cannot tell you how many writers I met as a bookseller who had never seriously considered their market: what it looks like, what people want to read, how they discover books, what similar titles already exist. It’s extremely valuable, both from a creative perspective and a very pragmatic perspective, especially if you’d like to publish your work eventually (traditionally or not).

Read bad things, too. Read things that challenge you. Read genres you know you won’t like, won’t write, or both. And try to read critically—when you finish something you didn’t like, ask yourself why. “Oh, I absolutely loved this, I couldn’t put it down” —great! Why? Be specific! Assign yourself book reports. But like, in a fun way. I swear it helps.

What’s your vision for Yellow Arrow in 2023?

I think it’s hard nowadays to keep your focus on your creative life, with the world being what it is, and real life getting increasingly harder. There’s a quote from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that I love: “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.” Art is what connects us and sustains us in a world that often can seem cold and hostile. Keeping that flame burning is an act of courage, and a necessary one, and whatever small part Yellow Arrow plays in that, I’m happy to be involved.

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Welcome to the team Meg! We are so excited to work with you this year. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we SPARK and sparkle this year: 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 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.

Kapua Iao 7/3/23 Kapua Iao 7/3/23

What Ignites Your Spark? The Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK Online Series Begins

By Siobhan McKenna

Welcome to the second annual release of Yellow Arrow Vignette, Yellow Arrow Publishing’s online creative nonfiction and poetry series. For this issue, we aligned with our 2023 yearly value and chose the theme of SPARK. We will publish the SPARK pieces on Mondays and Wednesdays from today through September 11, ending with a reading from our 2023 Vignette authors on September 13 at 8:00 p.m. EST.

yellowarrowpublishing.com/vignette/spark-2023

As writers it can be difficult to articulate the reasons for creating a word map to navigate the beauty, guilt, loss, and nuance in this world. There are writers who need to write even though it is a challenging, arduous process and there are writers who easily sit down in front of the page daily to unpack their thoughts. I fall somewhere in between . . . although more often on the scale of procrastination until the words burst through my sweaty and overly caffeinated fingertips in a large swell and then I edit and edit. And edit again.

Whichever writer you are, you are a writer.

This mantra was instilled in me by one of my favorite writers, Laurel Braitman. Over the last few years, I’ve participated in several of her writing workshops which she would often begin by reminding everyone that it didn’t matter if we had written last year or that morning. If we had shown up to write, we were writers.

This sentiment resonates with me as someone who doesn’t feel called to write every day and yet, when I do find myself needing to untangle my thoughts through words—everything else falls away. Laurel’s reminder also helps soften the nagging voice that says: you are not writing, submitting, editing enough.

These thoughts are exhausting and don’t help me write more. Don’t we already live with enough self-judgment? Let’s not add this judgment to our writing and instead simply bask in the pleasure of ideas that we weaved together and applaud those who spun an image depicting that feeling we could not communicate.

These past few months, I’ve been harnessing my SPARK for writing by taking in the words of other writers—mainly women (although David Sedaris did slip in quite often). I sped through memoir after memoir: Laurel Braitman, Ashley C. Ford, Brandi Carlile, and Stephanie Foo; and realized I was in a state of seeking. Seeking inspiration on how to write well, but mostly seeking to remember that these contemporary women had celebrated great joys and tremendous losses and survived; were still surviving.

Outside the page, I also found inspiration on my commute through New York City’s boroughs; from stumbling upon tulip laden pocket parks to watching in amazement as a little girl slumbered soundly against her father’s shoulder on the subway. The car lurched and screeched, still her eyes never fluttered. Even now, there’s a poem unfurling in my synapses about her. About that beautiful sleep, that trust.

During this time, I didn’t do as much writing as I wanted. Perhaps, that’s always the case? And yet, I don’t feel as guilty as I usually do when this happens. Instead, I feel like this phase of soaking in and seeking inspiration was exactly what I needed to write.

Since leaving New York City for my next travel nurse assignment, lines and ideas have been emerging in the quieter moments of my day. As I was walking home along the Puget Sound in my current city of Seattle, the sky pink and the leaves breathing, the hazy outline of a poem formed in my head. And yesterday, a glorious string of words sat next to each other in an email; I scribbled them on a sticky note as a title for an essay.

In this summer’s Vignette, the theme SPARK takes on a variety of forms from the literal to the meta. C.D. Jones’s poem “this time machine” recalls the tangible heat and heartache of young love while Veronica Wasson’s essay “On Clothing (Five Pieces)” ponders how clothes were the catalyst needed for her to explore her authentic self.

Some of the Vignette writers use the theme of SPARK to explore the influences in their lives that have ignited their creative pursuits. Angela Acosta praises poets Concha Urquiza and Ernestina de Champourcín among others as a guiding life force in her poem “A Centennial for Herstory,” and in “To be Frank (or Why I Write),” Laurel Maxwell invokes the sentiments of Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolf as she deliberates on why writing is her creative medium.

You’ll also discover meditations on the necessity (and struggle) to write from authors such as Marisa Victoria Gedgaudas in her poem “Colygraphia”:

I must try to find the words. I must keep this promise to myself. I must pay the debt even if there is no one coming to collect it.

And writers who discuss the “unseen cloud” and “electric current” that guides our writing such as in “Zeitgeist,” a poem by Elyse Welles that kickstarts our series:

It taps us on our shoulder

Zaps us in our dreams and waking thoughts

It asks us,

“does this fit?”

Fit what? It’s baseless needs and wants.”

Thank you to all the writers who followed that glimmer of inspiration and kept their promises to write. I am amazed by the breadth of our collection and hope that a SPARK ignites in you as you read each published piece.

Thank you, Kapua Iao, Editor-In-Chief, and Annie Marhefka, Executive Director, for supporting me throughout this series. Thank you also to the Yellow Arrow Publishing board for their continued support on this endeavor. Thank you also to our wonderful editorial associates, readers, and interns: Sydney Alexander, Cecilia Caldwell, Angela Firman, Meg Gamble, Melissa Nunez, Mickey Revenaugh, Beck Snyder, and Andrea Stennett. These folks diligently read through submissions, worked on edits, and contributed amazing feedback for every single submission we received! Finally, thank you to every writer who submitted to the series and gave us the opportunity to read a slice of your story. We are delighted. We are grateful.

Since January 2020, Siobhan McKenna has worked for Yellow Arrow as an editorial associate and interviewer, among many other roles. She is now the Vignette Managing Editor. Siobhan earned her bachelor’s degree in creative writing and biology from Loyola University Maryland and a master’s degree in nursing from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her work at Yellow Arrow, Siobhan is a travel nurse and is currently located in Seattle, Washington. Her writing can be found in Canthius, Intima, throughout the Yellow Arrow blog, and with Next Level Nursing.

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Yellow Arrow 6/30/23 Yellow Arrow 6/30/23

Her View Friday

single-author publications
single pieces in journals, anthologies, etc. as well as prizes/awards

You can support our authors by reading this blog and their work, sharing their news, and commenting below or on the blog. Congratulations to all the included authors. We are so proud of you!

Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling

“rebirth” BY tess kay from minneapolis, minnesota

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: Flora Fiction

Date published: Spring 2023

Type of publication: print and online

florafiction.com/literary-magazine

Find Tess on Facebook @tess.dajc.

“I am, you are” BY Rebecca Brock from leesburg, virginia

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: Split Rock Review

Date published: Spring 2023

Type of publication: online

splitrockreview.org/rebecca-brock

“Poetry Translation Folios with Work by Chinese Poet Zhang Zhihao” BY Yuemin He from chengdu, china

Genre: poetry translation

Name of publication: Copper Nickel

Date published: March 2023

Type of publication: print and online

copper-nickel.org/journal

“How Can a Culturally Responsive Discussion of the Five-Paragraph Essay Help Asian American Students Write Well?” BY Yuemin He from Chengdu, China

Genre: nonfiction

Name of publication: Inquiry

Date published: April 18, 2023

Type of publication: print and online

commons.vccs.edu/inquiry/vol26/iss1/6

PRIZES/AWARDS

“Scientists Determine Time Perception Varies in Animals” by rebecca brock from leesburg, virginia

Genre: poetry

Name of publication: 2023 Sweet Lit Poetry Contest finalist

Date published: June 2023

Type of publication: online

sweetlit.org/rebecca-brock-2023-poetry-contest

Find Rebecca on Twitter @wordsbyRB and Instagram @rebecca_brock.writer.

Yellow Arrow (past and present) board, staff, interns, authors, residents, and instructors alike! Got a publication coming out? Let us help celebrate for you in Her View Friday.

Single-author publications: here.

Single pieces and awards/prizes: here.

Please read the instructions on each form carefully; we look forward to congratulating you!

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Kapua Iao 6/27/23 Kapua Iao 6/27/23

Crying in Great Wall: The Simplification of the Asian-American Experience in Asian-American Media

By Sydney Alexander, written May 2023

Recently, I sat down for lunch with one of my good friends at college, and she mentioned that her mom had said to her that Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red were essentially the same movie in different fonts. Both movies are about Asian Americans wrestling with their two identities, which are invariably at odds with another—being too Asian for America and too American for Asia—as well as the typical tiger-mom/rebellious-daughter conflicts, which are explored through some fantastical element, whether it be through red panda magic or Marvel-movie type action scenes. As I thought about it, I realized my friend’s mom was right.

I realized that there seems to be a reservoir of Asian caricatures that frequently emerge in popular movies. The fierce and overbearing tiger mom is mitigated by a goofy, quiet father-figure. A rebellious daughter is balanced out by the softer momma’s boy, as depicted in the short film Bao by Domee Shi. Take any combination of those caricatures; that book or movie probably exists.

I want to differentiate Asian American literature from Asian Americans writing Mainland literature. When Asian Americans write genre fiction about Asians, it frequently takes place in Mainland Asia. Asian American Literature itself—stories about Asian Americans in America, I feel, are what fall prey to caricatures and tropes.

I also realized that this pattern isn’t just limited to the movie screen; it is also pervasive in popular books. In the short story “Crying in H-Mart,” Michelle Zauer and her mother have a less strenuous relationship than the mother-daughter pairs in movies, but still the story centers around Zauner’s feelings of inadequacy and disconnectedness: she is not Asian enough, and losing her mother exacerbated those feelings. This is not to say I fully dislike these Asian-American narratives. Of course, “Crying in H-Mart” resonated with me; I’m half Chinese, but I don’t speak Mandarin. I grew up eating Chinese food but could never order it for myself. I just think that these being the only narratives about Asian Americans that seem to “make it” in mainstream media is detrimental. Yes, the dual identity is something Asian Americans face, including myself. But at the same time, I believe that the Asian American experience is much broader and richer than it is made out to be in mainstream media. I wonder, are Asian American writers and creators pigeon-holed by these depictions? If these narratives are the ones that sell, why write anything else?

One of the issues with 5th Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong was how it portrayed Chinese immigrants as the “model minority,” and I see today’s caricatures as just another box into which Asian American writers may package themselves for consumption by today’s society. In the 20th century, Asian Americans leveraged their being a “model-minority” to whites in pop culture; today, Asian Americans find purchase in mainstream media by writing about the same, tried and true narrative, pulling from the same toolbox of tropes and caricatures. More broadly, there is a market now in pop culture for media about marginalized identities, but I feel like it is reductive for the same Asian American story to be told, over and over, as my friend’s mother put it, “in different fonts.”

I wanted to create a reading list and added authors writing both Mainland and Asian-American literature. It was quite difficult for me to put this together.

Crossings (1968) by Chuang Hua
The Poppy War (2019) by R.F. Kuang
How Much of these Hills is Gold (2021) by C. Pam Zhang
Minor Feelings (2021) by Cathy Park Hong
Beasts of a Little Land (2022) by Juhea Kim (juheakim.com)
Various poems, fiction, and nonfiction by Grace Shuyi Liew, see graceshuyiliew.com

C Pam Zhang succeeds the most; her novel follows two Chinese siblings grappling to survive in America’s 19th century wild west. I included a couple of writers who have a lot of material published online, which I believe speaks to the Asian-American experience without subscribing to the traditional narrative discussed above. This includes Grace Shuyi Liew and Juhea Kim. The Poppy War is fantasy that pulls from Chinese history; I would classify it as mainland lit, but I still believe it’s worth a read. RF Kuang also released a new book recently that is thematically more related to this blog, titled Yellowface (see a March 2023 Yellow Arrow blog from Natasha Saar here). Cathy Park Hong’s book is a collection of essays in which she dissects the treatment and experience of Asian-Americans further.

Sydney Alexander is a sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont studying English and geography. She grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, but enjoys the fact that she has lived all over the country, including North Carolina, California, and Wisconsin. Her work has been published online in Hunger Mountain Review.

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Kapua Iao 6/20/23 Kapua Iao 6/20/23

Community Building–Community Love: Reflections on KINDLING by Matilda Young

By Matilda Young

For Yellow Arrow Journal Vol. VIII, No. 1, KINDLING, we asked our authors to share what the idea of “kindling” means to them, and how it’s reflected in their work. We posted some on our Facebook/Instagram stories in May, but here are a few of the amazing responses we received:

Kathleen McTigue: One of the core values of our immigration justice network here in Boston (BIJAN) is this: “We fight for one another as family, because we are.” Though my activism for justice has always been driven by strong convictions, what has sustained and inspired me all these years is the love I’ve received from others. We are family and how we treat each other matters more than we sometimes know.

Al Kelly: I was drawn to the idea of the beginning of something. The idea that, before the fire, there is a spark, a thought. It takes those initial steps of gathering the wood and putting it all in one place which allows the person that comes behind to start the fire.

Thomasin LaMay: What drew me to this is that I spend lots of time with people, especially women/teens in southwest Baltimore, who are such beautiful folks with a huge capacity to care and love. They are overlooked in so many ways, and one of [the ways] is that they are too messed up to care and be involved in community. Honestly I have met some of the most loving and good people in hard places. Kindling for me is a way to startle some (more empowered) folks into taking another look: at how they think, who they find lovable, who is worth helping. And really, as a poet, to just celebrate what love is in all its messy and beautiful ways.

Sarah Piper: “CALLING” came to me in a moment of self-determination, of realizing no one’s answers outside of myself could resolve the questions I had. And even if I didn’t have those answers yet, I could incubate the uncertainty into something beautiful and powerful. And when I saw the issue theme of KINDLING, it evoked that same awakening, a return to the self as a beginning, a new start to build communities of our own ideals from the raw materials we already have available within us. And to set loose a freeing fire in the world.

I love all these answers, and how each of us are drawn to our content and to this theme by connected yet disparate things. We each have our own take, and we each found our way to one another.

Kindling to me is recognizing that we are all capable of creating and sharing light. The light you give touches lives in ways you may never know. I know that my life has been touched by the work shared in KINDLING, by our authors and artists, and by everyone who shared their work with us. It has been touched by the incredible Yellow Arrow staff and volunteers working tirelessly behind the scenes to make this journal a success. And it has been touched by everyone who showed up in support of the creators and the work, whether by attending the reading, or buying a copy, or telling the people in their life they should give KINDLING a read (and you should!).

I hope that the writing and cover art provide shifts in perspective, discoveries and challenges, stories to hold on to, encouragement to go out and keep doing the good work—whatever that means to you.

This is my first time guest editing a journal and from what I’ve seen from all the individuals who made this issue possible, it is truly an act of community building. It is a collective labor of love by people who share a common passion for writing and giving that writing a home. I could not be more grateful to be part of this community, and I hope we can all find connections here for years to come.

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). 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 with this blog, the reading—Scorching, Speaking: A KINDLING reading—is available on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/GEygfG8v2XI. Make sure to subscribe to our channel and show everyone who read some love in the comments.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to KINDLING, and to the many wonderful submitters whose pieces we couldn’t fit into this issue.

Matilda Young (she/they) is a poet with an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland. She has been published in several journals, including Anatolios Magazine, Angel City Review, and Entropy Magazine’s Blackcackle. She enjoys Edgar Allan Poe jokes, not being in their apartment, and being obnoxious about the benefits of stovetop popcorn. Matilda’s poem “This Yes, This” was part of Yellow Arrow Journal FREEDOM, and Matilda was our .W.o.W. #7.

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“the becoming” by lucy M. Logsdon from illinois

Journals/Anthologies/Zines

Chapbooks/Zines

Full-length manuscripts

Online Publication

“gray” by Sara Palmer from baltimore, maryland

“Tamales on Mars, The Optics of Space Travel, Regarding the Memory of Earth: Speculative poems” by angela acosta from Gainesville, Florida

“No Whimpering” by Ute carson from Austin, texas

PRIZES/AWARDS

“Tamales on Mars, The Optics of Space Travel, Regarding the Memory of Earth: Speculative poems” by angela acosta from Gainesville, Florida

Cecelia (Cece) Caldwell

From Pittsfield, Massachusetts

What do you do? I do all sorts of things. Often, I work with the submissions we receive. I format, proofread, and copyedit chapbooks and short pieces. Additionally, I help work on social media campaigns, blog posts, and chapbook promotions.

Where do you go to school? I go to Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. I’m a rising junior!

Vickie Tu

Lives in Silver Spring, Maryland

Where do you go to school? I go to University of Maryland, College Park and plan to graduate Spring 2024.

What are you currently working on? Outside of Yellow Arrow, I work two part time jobs and attend school. Additionally, I am working on creating my own literary blog and website where I can share my adoration for literature with fellow bookworms.

“rebirth” BY tess kay from minneapolis, minnesota

“I am, you are” BY Rebecca Brock from leesburg, virginia

“Poetry Translation Folios with Work by Chinese Poet Zhang Zhihao” BY Yuemin He from chengdu, china

“How Can a Culturally Responsive Discussion of the Five-Paragraph Essay Help Asian American Students Write Well?” BY Yuemin He from Chengdu, China

PRIZES/AWARDS

“Scientists Determine Time Perception Varies in Animals” by rebecca brock from leesburg, virginia

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