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

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.

Update! This reading and publication has been postponed until 8/11. All other details remain the same. Join me in August instead!

My next short story publication is coming up soon! And I will soon be taking part in a reading to celebrate the launch for the anthology/chapbook it will appear in: Little Letters on the Skin. I do hope you'll join me.

What? The Cleave: Bay Area Women Writers and the Liminal Center Release of the Little Letters on the Skin

When? Friday, June 9, 2017   Friday, August 11, 2017

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

Time? 7 pm.

Eight other writers and myself, who have been involved with Oakland's amazing creative space for feminists and womanists, the Liminal Center, will be taking part in the reading and small group Q & A afterward. The anthology will be available for purchase, with all profits going to help support the work of the Liminal Center, which I've written about before here and here. I will also bring along a few copies to sell of Typehouse Literary Magazine #9, which featured my humorous sci-fi story, "Mixed Signals, or, Learning How to Speak," last September.

"What Scattered in the Wind" is not humorous sci-fi, that's for sure. Rather, it's horror flash fiction done in a poetic prose style, and it's the first story I wrote upon moving to the Bay Area. I love the mood of it, and the angst within it, that of a woman struggling with her biggest regret in life and sentenced to forever re-remember it. The first lines?

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!"

What I am most excited about for this event, however, is the exceptional list of fellow writers reading with me, at least half of whom I've read with before and they are STELLAR:

Christine No is a writer, filmmaker and pitbull enthusiast based in Oakland, CA. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominee and the 2016 First Place Poetry Winner of the Litquake Writing Contest. Say hello at  www.christineno.com

Gina Goldblatt is the founder of Liminal, a writing center for women, in Oakland California. She is a writer, an educator and an aerialist.

Hannah Rubin is a writer and artist based in Oakland, CA.

Heather Schubert is a published author, visual artist, teacher, Priestess and mother of four.

Jasmine Wade is obsessed with the tumultuous, hilarious, heartbreaking, and never-ending process of growing up. Find a list of her short stories at www.jasminehwade.com.

Jeneé Darden is an award-winning journalist, public speaker, mental health advocate and proud Oakland native. Visit her podcast and blog CocoaFly.com where she covers issues related to women, race, wellness and sex.

Norma Smith was born in Detroit, grew up in Fresno, California, and has lived and worked in Oakland since the late 1960s. In  support of her writing, she has worked as a ward clerk in hospitals, as a radio producer, as a translator and interpreter, as an educator, and as an editor and writing coach.

Rebecca Gomez Farrell writes all the speculative fiction genres she can conjure up. Find a list of her published shorter works at RebeccaGomezFarrell.com, and find her debut fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, in August 2017 from Meerkat Press.

Ruth Crossman was born and raised in Berkeley and currently lives in Oakland. She is a poet and a songwriter who teaches ESL to support her writing habit.

Additionally, the anthology is edited by Dr. Raina J. León, who's an associate professor at Saint Mary's College and the founder of the Cleave reading series along with numerous other accolades. That's a stellar line-up that I'm glad to be a part of! I do hope you'll come out and join us, celebrating what women are doing in the literary arts in Oakland. Here's the Facebook event page, if you'd like to RSVP. I always like to know what friendly faces I'll see in the crowd!

About two weeks ago, my first guest blog for Localwise went up! Localwise, you say? What's that?

Well, my friends, it's a Berkeley-based start-up that's essentially a classifieds board for local jobs. They began with listings in Berkeley and Oakland only, but after six months of operation, they've expanded to Alameda, Emeryville, and San Francisco with more Bay Area locations in the works.  The site is easy to navigate and a much preferred alternative for local businesses and applicants over that other free classifieds site. You know the one.

That's great, Becca! But what does that have to do with you? You write about food, drink, and travel, not job hunting!

So true. But one of the most appealing aspects of Localwise is their commitment to building community in the Bay Area, because knowing your neighbor and neighborhood business owner generally tends to improve everyone's quality of life. As part of that goal, Localwise runs a blog that highlights local businesses, job profiles, and the food & drink scene. Why that last item? Because food industry positions make up around 2/3 of Localwise's job listings at any given time. That's right--2/3! We like to eat here, folks. We like to eat a lot.

[caption id="attachment_24878" align="aligncenter" width="500"] And drink. Definitely drink too.[/caption]

Perhaps you can see where I come in now? Along with a few other Bay Area food & drink bloggers, I'll be contributing short articles to the blog on at least a monthly basis. My first one touched on three of the newest food joints in Oakland's Temescal neighborhood.

[caption id="attachment_24877" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The chicken-cherry sausage at Rosamunde Sausage Grill.[/caption]

It started like this....

Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood has no shortage of restaurant options, and in the last six months, it’s added three more to its roster. Two of them are brand-new locations, and one is reimagined, but all three are worthy of your gastral attention. Ranked from fastest out the door to least likely to kick you there, here are Temescal’s newest eateries:

And you can read the rest of that article over at Localwise. I'll let you know at the Gourmez when the next one goes up!