Tag Archive for women who submit

Appearing at the WWS Submission Conference on Saturday!

The WWS Submission Conference is a one day, online event on Saturday, August 8, 2020, beginning at 10 am PT. I’ll be appearing on the panel entitled “Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads” at 2:15 pm.

This is a topic near and dear to me, as I’m a strong supporter in the importance of writer communities for keeping up motivation and perseverance in a writer’s career. To that end, I have been a chapter lead with Women Who Submit (WWS) for the past few years, running one of their Bay Area chapters.

What’s WWS? Well, they are the hosts of this conference and a national organization devoted to empowering women and nonbinary writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process.

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If you fit those criteria: a writer who identifies as a woman and/or nonbinary, you are welcome to attend this free conference! Tickets will be limited to 100 participants, and registration closes on Thursday. You can register by completing this Google form. Here’s the schedule for the conference!

  • 10am-11am: New Member Orientation with WWS Director, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
  • 11:15am-12:15pm: Demystifying Top Tier Submissions with Cynthia Guardado, Anita Gill, Hazel Kight Witham, moderated by Lituo Huang
  • 12:15pm-1pm: Zoom Lunch
  • 1pm-2pm: Magazine and Journal Editors Share Best Practices with Cassandra Lane, Raina León, Muriel Leung, moderated by Ramona Pilar
  • 2:15-3:15: Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads Desiree Kannel, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, and moderated by Ashaki M. Jackson

“What Scattered in the Wind” appears in Accolades!

I’m so thrilled that “What Scattered in the Wind” is reprinted in the Accolades anthology from Women Who Submit Lit. The anthology launches today at the AWP conference in San Antonio.

accolades, accolades anthology, women who submit, women who submit lit, publishing women, horror, what scattered in the wind, rebecca gomez farrell

“What Scattered in the Wind” first appeared in Little Letters on the Skin, a chapbook/anthology (more info here). It’s a flash fiction horror tale of an older woman who wakes to find unwanted, and long forgotten, visitors to her isolated desert mesa.

What makes this reprint so special is that Accolades is a celebration of the submissions, acceptances, and publications of members of the national Women Who Submit Lit organization, of which I run a local chapter.

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Every other month, I spend two hours submitting out my work for publication and encouraging other writers to do the same. Accolades is proof of how effective that support and time investment is, as all the works featured within it are reprints of writing WWSL members have had published elsewhere — all that perseverance pays off!

Accolades is available in print from Amazon for $15. Here are the leading lines into “What Scattered in the Wind”:

Hollow rasps of laughter pestered her to wakefulness. Any noise would have done the same, though she clamped her eyelids together in protest. For years, Ruth had heard nothing but the teakettle’s hiss or the slow scrape of her cane against the camper’s floor panels. The creaking sound of her voice rarely interrupted the silence. Unlike the other wayfarers, Ruth had never developed the habit of talking to herself. She didn’t care to hear what she’d have to say.

“Hee-hee, hee-he-heee!“

And a photo to set the mood:

what scattered in the wind, the gourmez, fiction, horror, trailers

Join me for the Women Who Submit Lit Reading 8/11!

This Saturday afternoon at 4 pm, I’ll be reading at the first ever Women Who Submit Lit Reading! What is Women Who Submit Lit (WWS)? Founded in 2011, WWS seeks to empower women writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging literary submissions, and clarifying the submission and publication process.

I helm one chapter of WWS in the Bay Area and primarily organize submission parties, where we get together and encourage each other to submit our work out for publication.  Dominica Phetteplace, who passed that duty on to me last year, decided it would be fun to have a reading for our chapter and thus, this reading was born!

Women Who Submit Lit Reading

Women who submit lit bay area

When: Saturday, August 11, 4 pm.

Where: The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St., Oakland

RSVP: Facebook Event

Who: Me, Dominica, Jennifer Ng, MK Chavez, and Simmi Aujli! Bios below.We’re all regular members of this WWS chapter, except MK, who’s starting her own chapter in Fruitvale very soon. Come for more details on that.

And just come! There may be an after party…

Becca Gomez Farrell‘s debut epic fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, was published in August 2017 by Meerkat Press. Her speculative short fiction can be read in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the Future Fire, and Dark Luminous Wings. Becca also blogs about food, drink, and travel at theGourmez.com.

Jennifer Ng is a writer in San Francisco. She recently published a nonfiction book, Ice Cream Travel Guide, and is working on a novel based on her grandparents’ lives in China, Peru, and the United States. Her work has appeared in Arkana, Havik, Cold Creek Review, Shut Up and Write! Zine, and Airplane Reading. In her writing, she explores identity and relationships. If she was asked about her favorite hobby at the age of 8, she would have answered “observing”, which is still a joy and an inspiration for storytelling. Read more at jennism.com or follow her on twitter: @jennism.

Simmi Aujla is an Indian-American speculative fiction writer based in the Bay Area. She is an alum of the VONA / Voices of Our Nation workshop, where she studied genre fiction. A 2018 fellow at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, in the fall she will attend an interdisciplinary arts residency at Marble House Project. Simmi is a Brown alum and former journalist, with experience at Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. Keep up with her at www.simmiaujla.com.

Oakland based Latinx writer Mk Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) She is a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her poem The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself Among the Ruins was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2017 Poetry Award. She is a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a fellow with CantoMundo, a writer in residence at Alley Cat Books, and this fall she will be the guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Dominica Phetteplace is a math tutor who writes literary and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld and F&SF. She has won a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Barbara Deming Award and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, I-Park, and Marble House Project.