Yellow Arrow Vignette BLAZE 2025
Submissions for Yellow Arrow Vignette BLAZE were open May 15 - June 15. Now in its fourth season, Yellow Arrow Vignette is an online creative nonfiction and poetry series developed to better feature women-identifying writers and share their voices beyond Yellow Arrow Journal and our single-author publications.
If you currently live, grew up in, or recently lived in the Baltimore area and are a creative who identifies as a woman, read the guidelines and submit at yellowarrowpublishing.com/vignette/submissions.
This year, we are excited to work with a new team on Vignette. Catharine Robertson will be the managing editor of Vignette BLAZE and will have help from Sophia Graney, our summer Vignette intern, along with the incredible Yellow Arrow editorial team. Below, you can read more about Catharine’s views on blaze and why she is ready to see how other Baltimore-area creatives are getting fired up about their personal (and professional) values.
What are your values? How do you know?
As I step into the Managing Editor role of Yellow Arrow Vignette BLAZE, I’m asking myself these questions at least daily. It’s been a scant three months since the slow creep of authoritarianism suddenly accelerated to a methodical march. Books have been banned from school libraries. Universities and law firms have bent the knee. Propaganda is streaming from institutions we rely on to keep us from harm.
This week I had the privilege of coaching federal employees on how to declare their values to themselves and their director, whom they admire as their protector from unethical influence by the new political appointee who heads the agency. The director is a woman of color, widely esteemed by the staff for being the most approachable leader they’ve ever had. She has BLAZED a precedent of authenticity and compassion that was lacking in the agency. They love her for it. They trust her. And after helming the largest division in the agency for two years—the division that makes policy decisions affecting the daily lives of 130 million people—she now wants them to codify team values.
I posed the following conundrum to the employees I was coaching:
If there’s ever been a time to declare our values, it’s now. We all have to say them out loud and write them down, while we can. On the other hand, if we ask staff to document their values, and then they are asked to compromise their values, it’ll be demoralizing. Or worse.
Ultimately the employees concluded that the values proclaimed by the division should flow bottom up—from the staff to the leadership. Not the other way around. That team values come from the team. Not from the top down.
We in the United States are all facing the same conundrum: What are our values? How do we know? And what will we do when they are challenged, as a challenge currently feels inevitable for many of us?
In her 1961 essay “Self respect: Its source, its power” Joan Didion wrote, “In order to remember it, one must have known it.” Because I work alongside federal employees in leadership roles, I’m doubling down now on knowing my own core values. I may be called on to remember them if I’m asked to act in ways that don’t accord with them.
The core personal values I am writing down and carrying around, like my own mini Constitution of Catharine: Justice. Honesty. Creativity. Integrity. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised that these values are where, if violated, I’m most likely to feel moral injury. I might even postulate that integrity is my super value: If I avoid acting in ways that violate my values (justice, honesty, creativity), then I have acted with integrity.
How about you? It feels early in my relationship with you, the Yellow Arrow community, to ask very much of you. Maybe your own values are already shining through your writing. Maybe you’re the poet or the op-ed writer or the novelist or the essayist who radiates their values in their speaking and their actions. Maybe you already trumpet your values on the regular.
But I’m declaring that in 2025 there’s room to BLAZE an even clearer constellation of your values.
Know your values so that you can remember them. Write them down. Take an hour or an evening and talk it over with your loved ones. Then, like the writer you are, revise if needed. Hold on to your list of values. Post it up somewhere you’ll see it often. BLAZE it into your memory. Or maybe even into a tattoo?
What are your values? How do you know? What of them do you want others to know? What of them will you remember? How and where will you emblazon your values?
For Yellow Arrow Vignette BLAZE, we’re looking for creative nonfiction, poetry, and cover art by writers who identify as women and have a connection to the Baltimore area. For more about what this means and for information on how to submit, please visit yellowarrowpublishing.com/vignette/submissions. If you have any questions, send them to submissions@yellowarrowpublishing.com. The online issue will be released in August.
We look forward to reading the submissions for Yellow Arrow Vignette and sharing stories with you. Since its founding in 2016, Yellow Arrow has worked tirelessly to make an impact on the local and global community by advocating for writers that 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 and every story is worth telling.
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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we BLAZE a path for women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook or Instagram, or subscribing 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.