Ida B. Wells: The Civil Rights Activist Who Used Writing to Fight Racism

loc.gov/resource/cph.3c07756/

By Piper Sartison, written May 2022

To honor Ida B. Wells, whose birthday just passed, Piper Sartison, Yellow Arrow’s winter marketing intern, wrote a short blog about her incredible accomplishments.

“The reason why I wanted to focus on this blog was that I wanted to tell the story and journey behind a monumental and historical journalist. Ida B. Wells used her skills in writing to become an advocate for the voiceless, as she sacrificed everything to fight against oppression. In relation to the current events that surround us today, I hope that this piece will reinforce the significance of journalism, as it has the potential to give a voice to people who are marginalized and need our support.”

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Ida B. Wells was a teacher, civil rights activist, journalist, and feminist. Born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, her parents passed away when she was young and so she spent her youth taking care of her siblings. Once she turned 16 (from most general sources), Ida started a career in teaching to provide for her siblings and spent her free time writing for newspapers. In 1882, she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she bought a first-class ticket on a train. The crew, however, attempted to force her into a cart that was reserved for African Americans only. Ida refused, and as a result, she bit one of the crew members, who was aggressively removing her from the train. Ida sued the railroad, but her claims were rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court. This situation influenced her passion for free speech, as she later started her career with the Memphis Free Speech newspaper.

Once Ida gained enough experience in writing, she became the co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech when she was in her 20s. Using this job as a form of advocacy for African Americans, she expressed her opinion on the oppression and racism in society for the public to read. During her time as a journalist, three of her friends got lynched in her community. Ida was outraged and published pieces that outlined the racist truth behind why her friends got lynched. In her piece, she told the people of Memphis to stop shopping at white-owned businesses and encouraged them to move to Oklahoma.

In 1892, Ida moved to New York, as she wanted to write for The New York Age. It was there that she published pieces on the cruelty of lynching, encouraging others to revolt against violence and racism. In 1895, Ida married Ferdinand L. Barnett and had four children with him while they resided in Chicago, Illinois. While also tackling the challenges of motherhood, Ida found time to support the suffrage movement and help found the first kindergarten class for black children.

In 1909, she gave her support to the National Association of Colored Women, based in Washington, D.C., which worked to promote equality and was one of the biggest organizations of black woman clubs in America. In her work with the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913, she encouraged women in the community to elect politicians that best represented the African American population. Her efforts with this organization ultimately contributed to women’s suffrage in Illinois.

She died of kidney complications in 1931 at the age of 69. Ida was posthumously given a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her bravery and advocacy against racism, violence, and sexism. The Ida B. Wells Barnett house, where Ida and her husband once resided in Chicago, is a National Historic Landmark.

Ida sacrificed her life to contribute to the civil rights movement, organizing rallies, creating an antilynching campaign, advocating for African Americans in newspapers, and willingly standing up against the system that deemed anyone inferior. Today, Ida B. Wells is remembered for her courage, strength, and immense intelligence. In her life, she stood up to injustices, and spoke up about systemic racism, invoking significant change within her community.

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Piper Sartison is a rising junior at Washington College. She is a competing member of the school’s tennis team, writes for The Elm, and is a major in English and a minor in journalism. Piper is from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and will be residing there for the summer, where she hopes to do some freelance writing. 

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Yellow Arrow recently revamped and restructured its Yellow Arrow Journal subscription plan to include two levels. Do you think you are an Avid Reader or a Literary Lover? Find out more about the discounts and goodies involved at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/yellow-arrow-journal-subscription. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

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

Craft Thoughts: Honoring the Poem’s First Draft

By Joanne Durham, written April 2022

I enjoy participating in groups with other women who come together to write and then share our first drafts. But too often we expect those drafts, from 30 or 40 minutes of writing (sometimes even less), to sound like finished poems. If not, we feel like we’ve failed and aren’t good writers. We can spend more time apologizing for what we’ve drafted than noticing what is working!

When I first started writing poetry, I thought that the first draft was supposed to be the final. I thought because I wrote poetry to get emotional truth on paper, I would spoil it if I revised it. I might fix grammar or a word here or there, but if the poem didn’t resonate, I just put it aside and forgot about it.

All that changed when I taught children in a writing workshop. I learned that by conferring with them about their intentions and teaching them some simple elements of craft, they could transform their first drafts into rich and meaningful poems for themselves and other readers.

In a marvelous section of her Living Room Craft Series on Revision, Ellen Bass shared the first draft of James Wright’s poem, “Hook,” from an interview released by his wife. I had loved this poem for a long time. I was so amazed that almost the entire final poem didn’t show up until the sixth verse in his first draft! It was by stripping away everything from the original that didn’t support the dramatic center of the poem that he gave the poem its intense substance and power.

So, I’ve come to think of my first draft as just scattering seeds. It’s the nurturing I give my poems over time that shapes them into something that might blossom. The crocuses in my yard will lift up through the dirt with no help at all from me. But lots of poems, like flowers, need the support we call revision. Often, it’s pruning, so what is lovely has room to flourish, and fertilizing to add richness to the language.

Pruning, as in Wright’s wonderful example, helps me let go of expectations and just let my writing flow. I know I can go back later and get rid of all the unnecessary verbiage. For example, in my poem, “BABY!” (RENASCENCE, Yellow Arrow Journal), I wrote about my joy and wonder at the sonogram of my first grandchild. My first draft of “BABY!” started:

Rachel texts the picture today

of what will become our grandchild.

Looks like a little island

in the midst of ocean whitecaps

and BABY! with a finger pointed

to the blob, so you know

where to look.

And a thumb

holding the picture

putting its size in perspective,

this is what 11.5 cm (what it says at the top)

is – the size of a few thumbs. Her name and birthdate

I recognize. The other numbers and letters

in language you just have to trust

to the midwives.

I wrote all that to get the details down on paper. But as the poem developed, I realized what I really wanted to explore was the connection between this unborn child and my Jewish ancestors, that this child would exist only because they had escaped the pogroms of Russia. The phrase “God willing” came up—a phrase my parents and grandparents would have used. Then I knew I didn’t need all those details before I got to the heart of the poem. So (over several drafts) I revised:

Rachel sends the sonogram today

of what will become (God willing)

our grandchild.

Looks like a bean

in a soup bowl. Someone

thoughtfully wrote BABY!

with an arrow pointing to it,

to tell us where to look.

God willing isn’t something

I’m known to say, but this child . . .

Pruning isn’t usually enough; fertilizing needs to happen as well. I often need to find a richer, more musical, more powerful, or more multi-faceted way of saying something I jotted down in the first draft.

“Sunrise Sonnet for My Son,” is the last poem in my poetry book, To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press April 2022). The poem was inspired by how my son and I both found our morning chore of unloading the dishwasher to be something meditative. My first draft ended,

I think of him each morning, this son I raised, who takes joy in putting away the dishes.

I got the idea on paper, but not the poetry of it (no blame, first draft!). It needed some fertilizer. I let it sit a while, let my imagination come up with specifics that would both sound musical and enhance the imagery of the poem, and days later wound up with

this man I raised, who hums as he sorts

the silverware, noticing how each spoon shines.

There are certainly some poets who can distill the poem on the first draft and dazzle us as they share in writing sessions. But I’m so glad I didn’t toss either of these poems because they didn’t fulfill my expectations on the first try. Realizing that I can nurture the poem over time—days, weeks, months, whatever—helps me enormously to believe that my first drafts can lead to something I’m happy with. In that sense, “BABY!” could refer to the embryo of the poem as well as the one in my daughter-in-law’s womb when I wrote:

. . . I’ll send something

resembling a prayer

that it thrives in that watery mix,

that it emerges, in its time,

whole and ready . . .

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Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022). Her chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press. Her poetry has or will appear in Yellow Arrow, Poetry South, Poetry East, Calyx, Rise-Up Review, Quartet, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a retired educator from Maryland, now living on the North Carolina coast with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Get your copy of To Drink from a Wider Bowl at eveningstreetpress.com/book-author/joanne-durham/. Learn more about Joanne at joannedurham.com or on Instagram @poetryjoanne.

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Yellow Arrow recently revamped and restructured its Yellow Arrow Journal subscription plan to include two levels. Do you think you are an Avid Reader or a Literary Lover? Find out more about the discounts and goodies involved at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/yellow-arrow-journal-subscription. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

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

Why I Write Creative Nonfiction

By Melissa Nunez, written December 2021

I will never forget the mix of anger and incredulity coursing through my body during my first fiction workshop. As the author, I sat silent as my peers debated not the style or form of my piece submitted to the class, but the credulity of my words. “There’s no way all this happened to one person,” spoken in various versions and on repeat. And I was peeved. It did all happen. It happened to me. The death of my best friend, the disastrous dissolution of my parents’ marriage (and the resulting familial fallout), the abortion, the love triangle, the abusive partner. As if the dramatic and tragic politely take turns in the timeline of your life, giving each event exclusive spotlight shine. I wanted people to believe all these things happened to someone, successively and simultaneously, but was unwilling to claim that someone as me. It took me a semester of battling this wariness, of defending the veracity of characters and probability of plots before finding my home in the Creative Nonfiction chapter of the MFA program.

This decision involved more than logical next steps, more than simple solution. It was not just hanging three letters, the n o n, in front of the word fiction. It was letting go of all the stigma that came to mind with putting my unfiltered self out into the world. And there was still the craft of it, the charge of engaging your audience, of giving them reason to read and heed your words. There was still deciding what to say, how and when to say it. Which experiences to detail, to what length or breadth, and how to organize them on the page. When you get right down to it, there are so many possibilities even with a single happening.

There should be a sense of truth in all writing but deciding to only write what is true was both liberating and distressing. I love the fact that everything around me is my possible next story. The words I speak and those spoken to me tumble around in my head and many end up in the notes app on my phone or the pages of my notebooks. Conversations with my children or husband, insightful lines from a book or television show that make a certain idea click into place. That part comes easy to me as a naturally introspective person. The hard part comes after. In having my thoughts and perspectives, experiences and emotions laid bare to be scrutinized by others. It is something I live so many times in my own mind as I write, on amplification when I’m actually getting feedback. I channel the strength of those before me who have told their stories bravely, stories that have impacted my life and the lives of others. Books like The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson (where she frames visceral vulnerability within a deeply insightful and moving metaphor), Paula by Isabel Allende (masterful amalgam of maternal missive, memoir, and elegy), and the collected essays of Samantha Irby (whose words are an homage to honesty and self-acceptance in the most raw, real, and hilarious forms).

 Every time I write, I learn something about myself and the world around me. Things I was previously unaware I needed or wanted to know. Because of creative nonfiction, I have gotten to better know family members, both close and further distant. I was introduced to my great grandfather for the first time and was shown pieces of my grandfather previously unshared in conversation with my great aunt. I have become better able to identify the plants that grow along the canal banks and nature trails close to my home, the birds and insects that dwell there. I plan to plant Turk’s Cap, a hummingbird favorite, in my yard this coming spring and make further strides towards de-lawning. I hope to include some nopales, set along the back fence to avoid accidents, as I have recently discovered that the prickly pear is one of my favorite fruits, seeds and all. Because of creative nonfiction, I am now too aware of the microscopic arachnids that make their homes in our skin, of the bacteria exchanged with those around us independent of physical contact. I have discovered the shared root of my most painful choices, listed among the “unbelievable” events above.

 I have come to love the act of self-discovery as art, as communion with the world around me, as conversation with others who also watch for wonder. With those who are willing to rethink everyday experience, to revisit rumination often dismissed as mundane, to combine and recombine these moments in novel ways—here Creative Nonfiction transforms, is made something more magical.

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Melissa Nunez is a homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas. She is a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. Her essays and poetry have also appeared in FEED, Lammergeier, and others. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook @MelissaKNunez.

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Yellow Arrow recently revamped and restructured its Yellow Arrow Journal subscription plan to include two levels. Do you think you are an Avid Reader or a Literary Lover? Find out more about the discounts and goodies involved at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/yellow-arrow-journal-subscription. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.

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

Confessions of an Unschooled Poet: Learning that Some Rules are Meant to be Broken

By Amy L. Bernstein

I first composed a poem as an adult around 1986. I read it out loud to my boyfriend at the time, my whole body shaking. Sharing an original poem handwritten on a scrap of notepaper, after several hasty drafts, seemed like a subversive act. I had never felt more vulnerable or exposed than when reading those lines.

That poem did not survive and neither did the relationship. All I can recall (about the poem, not the guy) is that I used metaphors involving textiles to express something about the act of creative writing itself. I think the last line went something like, “In the end, the poem sews itself.”

After that little experiment, I did not write another poem until early in 2019—three decades on. I didn’t know how. I didn’t think I should. I didn’t feel qualified. I assumed I couldn’t simply barge into the world of poets and poetry and find a berth.

After all, as an English literature major in college, I had read tons of so-called classic fiction, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Thackeray and Eliot. But I did not take a single poetry class (if you exclude Shakespeare) and I did not read poetry for pleasure.

Poetry struck me as an entirely separate branch of literature, off in its own corner, speaking to the cognoscenti. Either the cryptic lines yielded up their secret messages to you—invited you to decode their meaning—or they didn’t. Poetry had rules! So many rules! I knew how to write topic sentences and coherent paragraphs; I knew how to develop and support a thesis statement.

But poems snaked along the page like hieroglyphics, and I lacked the knowledge to decipher or unpack them. I didn’t know a sestina from a villanelle. I figured if I wasn’t willing to study the rules, then I couldn’t (and perhaps, shouldn’t) attempt any of the forms.

Which is not to say that I was totally immune to all of poetry’s seductive charms.

There were moments over the years when a poem (mainly from the traditional Eurocentric canon I was exposed to) briefly turned my head. “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .). T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.). Snippets of Walt Whitman (I sing the body electric—a great line in an otherwise not-so-great piece). Amiri Baraka’s chilling, incantatory “Somebody Blew Up America” (who WHO WHO . . .).

But I continued, for the most part, to hold poetry at arm’s length. I left the form to those who were perhaps more patient, more intuitive, or maybe just smarter, than I.

Then came 2019 and something shifted. Was the shift in me, as a writer finding my voice in different forms (playwrighting, novels, essays)? Was the shift occurring in the wider world, given rising levels of injustice, civil unrest, uncivil discourse? I believe it was both.

I sat down at my computer one day four years ago and recognized that a poem was the only form adequate to expressing what I needed to say, just then. I was in the grip of a mild depression, feeling raw—and feeling too much.

Paradoxically, poetry’s stringent economy of language is well suited to big emotions. Compression of form yields expansion of expression.

My subconscious must have understood that premise when I began writing poetry. I dove in because I wanted to, needed to. I cast aside self-conscious concerns about not knowing what I was doing. I wouldn’t let my lack of formal mastery get in the way of what I wanted to say.

First lines from a first poem:

Nothing is wrong with you / You are a glassine harbor on a windless day.

I wrote only free verse from then on (and still do), on the theory that I’m not equipped to compose in more formal forms. I still don’t know a sestina from a villanelle, but so what?

Now, I love making more with less; scraping words away until only the necessary ones remain; finding precisely the right metaphor to create both image and feeling. I love the look of a completed poem on the page, how the ragged lines and unpredictable line groupings keep your eyes moving and the rhythms flowing.

I love how a poem can’t be anything other than itself. Form follows function.

I’m still an uneducated poet. I don’t routinely read poetry, though I do listen to it on a semi-regular basis. I don’t expect I’ll ever grasp more about poetry as an art form than my own practice teaches me.

While others may fault me for my attitude, I’m okay with it. Writers should follow their muses, wherever they lead—or don’t lead.

The lesson I’ve learned from my late lurch into poetry, which I’d like to share with writers everywhere, is that you should always allow your creative heart to be your guide. There is no art form that is off-limits; no door that is closed to you; no club to which you may not belong as a writer, when it comes to the marriage of form and subject matter.

Even though I still hesitate to call myself a “poet,” I fully embrace the act of writing poetry. After all, the label is not what matters. In the end, it’s all about the work you create and share, in any form you dream up. Honor your calling, no matter what it’s called.

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Amy L. Bernstein writes for the page, the stage, and forms in between. Her novels include The Potrero Complex, The Nighthawkers, Dreams of Song Times, and Fran, The Second Time Around. Amy’s poetry leans heavily on free-form prose poems that address psychological and political states of mind. Amy is an award-winning journalist, playwright, and certified nonfiction book coach.

Visit her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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

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

The Publishing Dilemma

By Angela Firman, written March 2022

One of my favorite ways to start a writing session is to open unfinished documents I’ve saved to find a seed worth nourishing. I feel like a genius when a tangled effusion of words from the past awakens my muse, and I set to work. When a piece comes together, what’s next? Dare I share it with others? I created something I am proud of, but when my words go out into the world, they invite others in; specifically, other’s judgement. I don’t generally live in fear of what other people think of me, but when it comes to writing, I am as bashful as they come.

There are writers who do not grapple with the decision to publish or not. Maybe it is because they have thicker skin than I do; they can take an arrow right to the heart without shedding a drop of blood. I am of the kind that dramatically clutches their chest and staggers to the ground, spurting blood every which way. Yes, judgment can be both bad and good, but even if there is only one bad comment among hundreds of good ones, I tend to dwell on the unkind one. Fortunately for my thin skin, I do not have hundreds of comments trailing after my writing, but if I did, it’s not the strangers’ opinions that terrify me: it’s my loved ones’. I have the most to lose with them because something worth publishing is juicy. It is the vulnerable material we hide, the words that will resonate with someone who recognizes themself, and sighs with relief to learn they are not alone.

I recently shared a piece in a writers’ workshop about grappling with being an accomplice to racial injustice while growing up in a predominantly white suburb of the Midwest. The in-person feedback I received left an indelible impression as I watched tears flow from other white women’s faces and heard affirming words from women of color, urging me to publish the piece to contribute to the ongoing, painful conversation in our country. This is important to me but sharing it would be at the cost of my parents’ feelings. I don’t imagine they would enjoy reading a public account of the shortcomings of the community I grew up in. At no point do I call them out, but how could they not feel responsible in-part for the pain I feel? This is just one example of vulnerability. My mom-friends could read about my preference to work rather than stay at home with my kids, or my in-laws could read about my struggles with anxiety and depression. Is a connection to a stranger I may not ever hear about worth the potential negative judgment I could receive from the ones I love?

I don’t know.

But I do it anyway. It makes me feel good to see my words in print. It not only validates my writing, but also my feelings. The magic of the written word—and any art, really—is its ability to express the infinite ways the human condition is experienced. No two artists have the same background or beliefs, so their work is a testament to their unique worldview. What better way to learn and affirm than to see the world through another’s eyes?

When the ones I love, often unintentionally, share their opinions and pierce my paper-thin skin—I won’t lie—it hurts. But I let the blood gush, I wallow in it a bit, and as time does, it heals all things—including my wimpy, thin skin. Wondrously, after I heal, my skin is a bit tougher than it was before. Scar tissue can do that. The barb of criticism will have to dig a little deeper each time in order to wound me. And so, I submit, sending my experience into the wide world in search of those who need to hear it.

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

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

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

Everything is Practice

By Matilda Young

The great Brazilian soccer player Pele said, “Everything is practice.”

As both a writer and soccer nerd, this quote is dear to me. Over the years, it has come to mean different things: how honing a skill requires us to put the hours in, how every moment is an opportunity to learn.

These days, it helps to take some of the pressure off. When I’m out here taking a stab at a poem or an essay or a story, I’m just kicking the ball around, seeing what feels right, finessing my footwork.

Over the past four years, I’ve done my own version of NaNoWriMo, attempting to write a poem a day during April. I started out by participating in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project in April 2019. In the years since, I’ve been doing it on my own.

Well, not really on my own. In fact, the best part of the practice has been doing it alongside other writers. Every year, I invite writers I know to join me in a series of messy Google Docs, one per week(ish). It’s an open invitation for folks to forward along to others—my view is the more the merrier!—which has meant I get to write alongside some tremendous writers I’ve never had the pleasure to meet except on the page.

Every day, I’ll put a prompt in the Google Doc that people can respond to (or not). People can put their drafts in the Doc (or not). People can write every day or write whenever it makes sense for them.

It is such a joy to read what folks are writing throughout the month and to see what they create (we have some folks who are also visual artists). Everyone’s style is so different, and no one tackles the prompt in the same way. I am blown away by everyone’s talent, by these wonderful glimpses I get into their writing lives.

And especially during the pandemic, getting to be in community with these writers has been a lifeline. That first April, in 2020, when we were all so cut off from the world and from each other, writing together gave me a glimmer of hope.

This poem a day practice also paradoxically takes the pressure off for me. I can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The poem doesn’t have to be something that’s publishable or finished or more than a few scraps of lines; it just has to exist.

I haven’t figured out a way to carry this daily practice beyond April. I don’t know if I ever will. And that’s OK—I’m still practicing.

Everything is practice. For me, this is practice in the spiritual sense, too. Writing together every April reminds me why I love writing, why I love writers. And I think everyone who loves writing is a writer. Everyone who loves language is a writer. Everyone with a truth they need to put into words is a writer. And in some small way, in these Google Docs, I get to be part of a jam band of folks who are sharing their truth with the world.

I hope that maybe you and your friends, and fellow writers not yet friends, will give this a shot and make it your own. It doesn’t have to be April. The prompts don’t have to be longer than one word (cardinal, crunch, clasp). But it may be a practice that you will find meaningful.

If not, that’s OK, too! We’re just out here figuring out what feels right for us, finessing our footwork, kicking the ball around.

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“In Gratitude For Google Docs – April 2021”

This morning, I tried a new trick – wet rubber

glove across the blanket bringing away layers

of cat fur from four months of napping,

heavy battering even with the blanket surface

rotated in sections like crops. And it worked!

Thank you to the home ec sages of the internet

for this lesson, and who helped us get through

this past year of seeing what works with what we have:

frugal recipe hacks for pantry clean outs, the fruit

fly traps in soda bottles, baking soda and vinegar

for everything, crumble recipes I scanned

and riffed from like Beaker the science muppet

going rogue. And thank you to the free history

podcasts R & I listened to while he puzzled

& I colored. Thank you to the Pratt Library

for the audio book of Red, White & Royal Blue.

Thank you to the young person whose

youtube tutorial on braiding inspired me

even as I decided I needed to buzz it all off.

Thank you to V. for introducing me to TikTok,

with its sea shanties and camembert reviews.

Yes, messy, yes all consuming, yes ads that

won’t click out, yes creepy, yes, the worst of us.

But also fan fic and old friend zoom, poetry

podcasts, that video of the Archbishop

of Canterbury whose cat who creeps on screen

during a reading to steal the milk from a white jug

on his morning table, tentative paw dipping

like a fisher of delight. Yes to this digital

collaboration, this challenge, this gathering

of writers who jam in google docs, who give

me so much joy. Though I may not see you,

meet you, know you, I’m glad you’re here.

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Matilda Young is a writer with an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. She has been published in several journals, including Anatolios Magazine and Entropy Magazine. She enjoys Edgar Allan Poe jokes, sharing viral birding videos and being obnoxious about the benefits of stovetop popcorn.

You can follow her on Instagram @matildayoung28.

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

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

How I handle rejection

By Arao Ameny

I published my first poem “Home is a Woman” in The Southern Review in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic.

Before that, I sent the piece out to literary magazines 27 times for two straight years before getting an acceptance.

There’s something extremely humbling about getting out of an MFA program, head fat with ideas of who and what you’ll become, and it doesn’t quite turn out like you imagined.

I graduated from the University of Baltimore in 2019 in the prepandemic, mask-less days (which seem like a lifetime ago) when I had wild ideas of where I would be and what I would be. Although I studied fiction writing in university, I was also reading and writing poetry though I didn’t tell my cohort. In the writing program, we had to choose one discipline but I couldn’t imagine separating prose from poetry. So I asked my poet-classmates many questions, got screenshots of their syllabi, and started doing a poetry self-study alongside my fiction writing program. I also completed several free online poetry courses. I wanted to be a fiction writer and a poet, in that order.

When I graduated from my MFA program, I started submitting prose and poetry to literary magazines and the rejections started rolling in, sometimes three or four in one day. The first one stung so much I had to get a glass of water and sit down for about an hour. I also Googled “how to do breathing exercises” because I was convinced my heart would fall out of my chest that day. That’s when I knew I had to create a plan on how to handle rejection because I needed a way to deal with the rollercoaster of emotions of having something I’d worked on for years be rejected in matter of weeks or months.

I decided to start a journal, scribbling the many reasons I wanted to write. Sentences like “I write because I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old” or “I write because I love words and sentences and languages” are what I return to when I was down.

Sometimes I would write down 10 reasons and other times I would sit down for an hour and come up with 40 reasons why I write and jot them down into my worn notebook. When a rejection (or two or three) came in, I would immediately open my journal and read aloud the reasons until the sting of the rejection dulled with each repetition.

I remind myself why I write and that it’s okay when others don’t understand my work or find it hard to connect with my story or my voice. I go inward and remind myself that I would be writing even if I had no approval or no audience or any recognition. I do this until the first sentence of the rejection letter rattles less and eventually fades. Then a few days after reading the rejection letter, I commit to studying the story or the poem I’ve submitted, taking it apart, sometimes cutting it to pieces and rearranging those pieces on my floor. If there is feedback from the editor, I address it immediately, let the work sit for a few weeks, and come back again with fresh eyes.

That has been how I have handled rejection. I will continue this ritual until my journal is full of reasons why I write so that I have a compass to guide me when and if I doubt myself or lose my footing. It’s not perfect or pain-free but it helps me have a system and a routine on how to deal with constant and consistent rejection. I’ve learned that having a plan helps me regulate my reaction (and the amount of times I visit the ice cream shop). Having a plan on how to deal with rejection has also helped me put things into perspective. When my mother was alive, I enjoyed making mandazi with her, kneading the slightly sweet dough, rolling it, and cutting into squares before sliding them one by one into hot oil to fry. Whenever I failed at something, she would point to the dough and make me repeat “I rise like well-beaten dough kneaded with both hands.” A cup of tangawizi tea followed.

With each rejection, I rise.

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Arao Ameny is a Maryland-based poet and writer from Lira, Lango, Northern Uganda. She is a multigenre writer with a focus on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is currently a biography writer and editor at the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine. She earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Baltimore in 2019. She also earned an MA in Journalism from Indiana University and a BA in Political Science with minors in International Relations and Communications from the University of Indianapolis. She is a former fiction editor and copyeditor at Welter, a literary journal at the University of Baltimore. Her first published poem, “Home is a Woman,” won The Southern Review’s 2020 James Olney Award. In 2021, she was a finalist for the United Kingdom-based Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a nominee for the Best New Poets anthology (USA), and a winner of a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship. 

Arao is the recipient of the 2022 Mayor’s Individual Artist Award from the Creative Baltimore Fund, a grant from Mayor Brandon Scott, the City of Baltimore, and The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA). She is also a recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Open Door Career Advancement Grant for women writers of color. The workshops she has attended include Tin House and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her favorite writer is Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet Dambudzo Marechera. Previously, she worked in communications at New York City government and as a writer and social media editor at Africa Renewal magazine at the United Nations in New York City.

Follow Arao on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @araoameny.

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

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

The Composition of Ekphrastic Poetry

By Ellen Dooling Reynard, written November 2021

My husband, the French painter Paul Reynard (1927–2005), used to ask me to write about his art. I procrastinated, using the excuse that I was not well enough educated in the plastic arts to be a reliable critic of his work. Little did either of us know that we were so soon to be separated by his death. In addition to my grief, I regretted painfully that I had not taken up his suggestion.

A little more than a decade later, I began to write poetry. I joined several women’s poetry critique groups, and in that process, I came across the word “ekphrasis.” In Greek, the word ekphrasis loosely means ‘description in vivid detail,’ and ekphrastic poetry are poems written about works of art. I listened to the Iranian poet Rooja Mohassessy read her ekphrastic poetry about the artistic works of her late uncle, Bahman Mohassess (1931–2010). In hearing those evocative poems, it dawned on me that I might attempt that with Paul’s work, and finally write about his art as he had wished.

I then made it my practice to sit in front of Paul’s paintings, whose luminescent colors bathed the rooms of my house in a kind of benediction, and I began to write poems. It was as though I walked through the landscapes of those glowing colors, discovering the search for meaning that Paul most likely experienced as he put brush to canvas. I suppose everyone interprets art, especially abstract art, in his or her own way, and my approach to Paul’s work was certainly subjective. But I make no apologies for that.

For example, in my examination of “First Movement” (acrylic on canvas, 1982), pictured here, because I knew that Paul was keenly interested in creation stories, at first, I associated what I was seeing with the creation of the world as described in Genesis. I asked myself, as perhaps Paul did when he regarded the evolving composition on his easel, what was the source of creation, where and how did it all begin? I researched what scholars had to say and found that these questions have puzzled scientific minds for millennia. Was it a big bang, is it an ongoing process, or might it be something else entirely? A beginning of this magnitude is a question without an answer.

Then I looked more closely at the succession of rounded shapes in the painting and was reminded of the sensation of pregnancy. I realized that women have the unique opportunity to know, within their own bodies, the beginning and the developing growth of new life, and are not afraid of the unknown in this miraculous process.

The poem I wrote about “First Movement,” therefore, touches on the intellectual approaches of science and proceeds to the physiological experience of gestation, and includes it all as one great enigma. “First Movement” was published by POETiCA REViEW, issue 8 (Winter 2020).

Former men of science maintained

that the universe was born in a great

eruption of expanded forces.

They argued their theories

with passion and conviction

while inwardly fearing that in fact,

they did not know.

Current theories suggest that creation

is ongoing, but these new men of science

also fear that they do not know.

The woman gazes up at the night sky

and, spreading her palms

over her belly, she feels the first

flutter of the child in her womb.

A shooting star draws its silver path

across the sky, and the woman smiles.

She is not afraid to know,

the great beginning was as gentle

and as magnificent as this.

Each time I sit down in front of one of Paul’s compositions, I go through that same process of allowing myself to search for words for what is unsayable yet expressed so clearly in paint and graphite. Little by little, I recognized that the poems I have written so far about his art could form a chapbook of a very special kind, including high-resolution images of the paintings and drawings that would be on the facing page of each poem. And since the publishers of chapbooks do not have it in their budgets to create such a volume, I decided to pay for the expense of high-quality paper and have the poems and accompanying art published by a small independent enterprise, South Forty Press. That way I will be able to be certain that the color saturation and clarity of the images are appropriate. The book will be titled Double Stream and will be available in 2022.

For me, this has been and continues to be a project of immense creativity and pleasure. I am sure Paul would be happy that I have, at long last, written about his work.

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Ellen Dooling Reynard spent her childhood on a cattle ranch in Jackson, Montana. A one-time editor of Parabola Magazine, she is now retired and lives in Temecula, California. Her poetry has appeared in publications including Lighten Up On Line, Persimmon Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, Silver Blade, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Poetica Review. Her first chapbook, No Batteries Required, was published in 2021 by Yellow Arrow Press. Double Stream, a collection of ekphrastic poems based on the art of the French painter Paul Reynard, will be published in 2022 by The South Forty Press.

Happy National Poetry Month!

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

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

What Makes Poetry Special

By Rachel Vinyard, written December 2021

Poetry, in my opinion, is one of the most versatile art forms when it comes to writing. There’s little you can’t do with poetry. There are classical forms of poetry—poems with set rhythm and calculated linage—and more abstract forms of poetry—poems following no rhythm or math, free-flowing and experimental. Poetry is for everyone. It doesn’t exclude any experience or truth. Readers can easily find themselves in the poetry that speaks to them. 

One thing I love about poetry is how experimental it can be in terms of form. I’ve seen poets make shapes and elegant, well-thought designs on a page using word and line placement. Poems that can be read several different ways for different meanings are some of my absolute favorites. When I see a poem uniquely formatted in a way I’ve never experienced before, my jaw drops. The poem “Brick Lane” by Wendy Garnier, featured in Yellow Arrow Journal Vol VI, No. 1 RENASCENCE, is a poem constructed of nine fragmented phrases placed in a way that you can read the poem from several directions in multiple different ways.

Another example of interestingly formatted poetry is Hanif Abdurraqib’s blackout poetry. Blackout poetry is the act of taking a page of written work, coloring over the lines in black, and only leaving a few words still visible. The visible words are chosen specifically by the poet to form a short statement. In his collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, Abdurraqib creates a blackout poem from another poem he wrote, making the two poems a kind of call and response. Poets are artists, not just with the words they chose but with their placement of them. 

A couple of my favorite poets include Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver. Plath’s poetry acts as a window into her life and mind. This is evident in her poem “Elm,” where she states, “I am terrified by this dark thing /That sleeps in me; /All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” Plath’s works are interesting to me because they exhibit the vulnerability of the poet. Oliver’s poetry, on the other hand, offers encouragement and peace. My favorite poem of Mary Oliver’s is “Wild Geese,” which is about offering yourself forgiveness and focusing on the beauty of the world. Oliver talks about how special it is to be a part of the world and relish in the peace of union with the line “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, /the world offers itself to your imagination, /calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting.” 

Today, poetry can be found in all kinds of places. The lyrics of songs are a prime example of this. In my opinion, music artists such as Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift have created emotional lyrics worthy of being deemed poetry. I especially love the journalistic beauty of Lana Del Rey’s song “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman like Me to Have - but I Have It,” for the line “They write that I’m happy, they know that I’m not /But at best you can see I’m not sad.” Taylor Swift is known for her songwriting, and the recent rerelease of the song “All Too Well” displays her incredible talent. Swift’s line “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise /So casually cruel in the name of being honest” allows me to feel the deep pain Swift is trying to portray.

Poetry is an art that can be found everywhere and, in my opinion, does not have a set definition. Poetry is just whatever you make it. It’s whatever speaks to you on an emotional, personal level. Something that challenges your feelings or makes you feel heard. It’s a place to feel comforted and a look into someone else’s life. Poetry lets you be vulnerable and gives you something to relate to. It’s deep and moving and meaningful. It’s journalistic and experiential. I feel like Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” showcases this well, because, in her first few lines, she’s speaking directly about her depression: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, /And Mourners to and fro /Kept treading - treading - till it seemed /That Sense was breaking through -.” 

Poetry is important to me because I believe humans long to experience the beauty and art and raw emotion that comes from it. One of my favorite movie quotes regarding poetry comes from Dead Poet’s Society. Robin Williams’s character, John Keating states, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

There is no law when it comes to the subjects of poetry. It is whatever the poet deems meaningful enough to be talked about. Whether it be nature, a past love, the act of growing old, or the idea of sitting beside a cat, the subjects of poetry are powerful in the way they showcase the mind and heart of the artist behind them. I love Ute Carson’s poetry for this reason. She is able to take a simple thing and delve into the emotional framework that makes being human so special. Her poem “Sleeping Beside a Cat” from Listen emphasizes the little pleasures in life: “but he chose my hair as his favorite resting place. /Nose buried in my sparse locks, he purrs /as his soft paws massage the soft strands.”

We live and breathe poetry. Whatever we do, however mundane, can be reimagined, made purposeful, through the magnification lens of poetry. Poetry makes the ordinary something beautiful and important. It emphasizes heartache and love and the emotions behind the simplest of things. The best kind of poem is one that is able to change your perspective on something, one that shows something in a way you haven’t thought of before. This is why I love the poem “Topsoil” by Meg Crane, featured in Yellow Arrow Journal Vol V, No. 3 (Re)Formation:

megcrane.com/

Now I think

(maybe)

I might be an evergreen.

Now I think

(maybe)

that barren winter earth

could be the perfect place

to plant my roots.

To me, “Topsoil” is a poem about a transformation and a change of perspective toward oneself. Even when we feel hopeless that we aren’t getting far in life, there is evidence that we are still growing.

The amazing thing about poetry is that it’s for everyone. No one is excluded from writing and enjoying it. A poem that is moving is, in my opinion, one of the most meaningful, because it has the potential to change a part of you for the better. Poetry not only exposes the vulnerability of the poet but allows the reader to relate in the most intimate ways.

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

Happy National Poetry Month!

*****

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

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

The Power of the Right Story: Why Yellow Arrow’s Mission is Important

By Isabelle Anderson

The first time I was moved to tears by a book, Each Little Bird that Sings, I was in the third grade. I came into the reading class discussion with two crucial notes. First, this book had made me cry. Second, I wanted to learn how to do that with words. So at eight years old, I pronounced myself a novelist and my career took off one copy paper sheet of half-plagiarized story at a time, many of which I thrust the burden of reading upon any unsuspecting, too-nice person. The book, about young Comfort Snowberger whose family owns a funeral home, deals with loss in several forms: the death of a loved one, the end of a friendship, and aging out of childhood, topics that I could connect even to my eight-year-old life, having lost the first member of my family the year before. My uncle Ian, my mother’s brother had often eased the strain of my early fatherless years. Before his death, like many children, I could not fathom loss. Each Little Bird That Sings was a story that reached me at exactly the right time. What was most important about this reading experience was both the connection and the revelation; Deborah Wiles’ Each Little Bird that Sings made me cry then, once I was sold on the power of words, made me a writer.

The second time someone else’s words changed the trajectory of my life, I was 15, tearing through the young adult genre looking for words in the remote shape of my uncertain self. When I read Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You in a laundromat in the new town we’d just moved to, I found something I hadn’t known I was looking for. The book’s protagonist, Emi, is a young lesbian with a dream of working in set design. Emi’s queerness exists alongside her love for design, and the narrative introduces it neutrally, unaccompanied by a coming-out plot or a trauma-ridden backstory.

By then, I knew I was queer but didn’t know what that meant beyond the difficulties I might endure. I had read so many of those stories—some exploitative tales exhausted with pain or utilizing tropes that harmfully portray queer women, and many more truly beautiful and honest accounts of the challenges that come with embracing queerness—that I had not even considered the happy ones. Once again, the right story had found me. The lightness of Emi’s story was so tonally disconnected from how I had imagined my own future, but after reading the book, I knew the direction I wanted to take this lifelong commitment to writing. My stories could be those stories.

Yellow Arrow Publishing considers creativity “an act of service,” an idea to which I subscribe, believing the giving and receiving of a story to be one of the greatest tools in enriching human connection. The service that Deborah Wiles and Nina LaCour have done by putting out work that touched my heart—and I’m sure the hearts of countless others—is unquantifiable. Their words reaching me at exactly the right time in my life of truly miraculous, especially considering the challenges women face in the publishing world. To carve out a space for women-identifying writers to tell their stories means changing the culture of publishing altogether. My understanding of publishing has always been that only a certain kind of story gets published and that books with diversity don’t sell as well. This ideology centers publishing around money-making rather than honoring the heart of literature: to express and honor the human experience. Yellow Arrow does not shy away from difference, but celebrates it, publishing stories of women across age and experience.

My work so far at Yellow Arrow has shown me the ways in which a space is being made, not just for women writers, but for women in publishing as a whole because Yellow Arrow provides space on the board, in staff positions, and in learning opportunities in teaching and taking workshops. Yellow Arrow’s mission in publishing women-identifying writers, experienced and new to the craft, gets to the root of gender-based inequity in the publishing industry and applies action to the only real solution: publishing women.

That it took me so long to find happy stories about queer women tells me that so many of those stories simply haven’t made it through the rigamarole that is publishing. Yellow Arrow, one publication at a time, is making it possible for life-altering stories—some that can be as simple as someone like you experiencing and expressing joy—to reach the right people at the right time, and to ultimately change the landscape of publishing.

Every writer has a story, and every story is worth telling.

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Isabelle Anderson is a fiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. Isabelle is currently a senior at Washington College studying English and creative writing, and an editor for multiple campus publications, including the student journal Collegian. You can find Isabelle on Twitter @ibaspel.

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

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

Poetry is Life: How it Happened

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

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

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

So, how did it all happen?

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By Ann Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Groups: Why or Why Not?

By Angela Firman, written December 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it feel to share your words?

By Katherine Chung, written August 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foundations in Seeking: The significance of ‘Yellow Arrow’

By Gwen Van Velsor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Delicate Art Form: CNF Interviews

By Siobhan McKenna, written July 2021

from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series

In the artistic realm, structure often surprisingly enables creativity. Within poetry many iconic poems follow specific meters, famous painters learned the basics before venturing into abstract styles. And conducting an interview for a creative nonfiction piece is no different. The interview is a delicate balance between applying a clear form to your conversation while also allowing yourself, as the interviewer, to flow with remarkable or unforeseen information. Below, we dive into a few guidelines to conduct a successful and thoughtful interview.

1. Research

For an interview to go smoothly, a writer sets up the conversation for success through their preparation. Before the interview, a writer must be familiar with the background of their subject and understand the basic context surrounding the interview by conducting research on their subject. Within the Yellow Arrow community, research often looks like reading brief bios or the material of an upcoming chapbook to be published by one of our writers or poets.

2. Prepare Questions

When researching, it is helpful to take note of significant themes or intriguing sections and then form questions that you think would lead to an interesting conversation. Preparing questions ahead of the conversation is vital because they help outline how you would like your conversation to go. Still, if a conversation moves in a surprising way, it is beneficial to comment and ask follow-up questions rather than remaining attached to your script. In other words, be genuinely curious.

3. Be Human

Curiosity, as well as empathy, can transform a rigid Q&A session into an earnest and illuminating conversation. As the interviewer, responding with an emotional response—if moved—can shift the conversation to a more intimate place that may give rise to meaningful or surprising answers. While originally known for his outlandish questions and crude comments, Howard Stern evolved his interviewing style over the years to incorporate more empathy and to draw on personal experience. In a 2015 interview with Stephen Colbert, Stern asked Colbert about whether part of the reason that he became a comedian is that he felt compelled to “cheer up” his mother after his father and two brothers died in a plane crash (2). While hesitant at first, Colbert eventually comments, “There’s no doubt that I do what I do because I wanted to make [my mother] happy—no doubt” and follows up with a question for Stern:

COLBERT: How [did] you know to ask that question?”

STERN: Because I spent many years cheering up your mother, as well. I didn’t want to tell you this.

(LAUGHTER)

STERN: No, no. What happened—my mother lost her mother when she was nine. And my mother became very depressed when her sister died, and I spent a lot of years trying to cheer up my mother. And I became quite proficient at making her laugh and doing impressions and doing impressions of all the people in her neighborhood.

In the conversation that follows, Stern and Colbert discuss how their experiences with trying to make their mothers happy shaped their relationship with women and their careers. If not for vulnerability on both sides of the conversation, this insightful glance into how some people may process and transform tragedy as young children and their relationship to their parents could have been glossed over.

4. Build Rapport

Nevertheless, deeper conversations like the one between Colbert and Stern depend on the rapport that you have built with the interviewee. According to Terri Gross, “Tell me about yourself” are the only four words that you need to know in order to conduct an interview (1). Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, has been conducting interviews on the segment since the 1980s and insists that opening with a broad introduction allows the subject to begin telling their story without the interviewer posing any assumptions. Being broad can allow the interviewee to define how they view themselves and their work and lead to creating a safe space where they will feel not feel judged by their answers, but rather better understood.

5. Transcribe

Once finished, there are several ways to transcribe your discussion into a creative nonfiction piece. One method can be to write a brief introduction of your subject and conversation followed by a direct transcript, which alone can be very poignant. Another common method is to paraphrase your conversation and use direct quotes to emphasize certain points in conjunction with your own observations when conducting the interview. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s interview of Missy Elliot does an excellent job of showcasing how to include biographical information, her questions, and her reflections of her subject as she sat on set for one of Missy’s photoshoots (4):

Across the street from the photo studio, the Chelsea Piers are turning themselves over to the night. And Missy’s publicist and team are in a hurry to make sure I’m not taking up too much of her time, but Missy herself doesn’t seem rushed to go anywhere yet. If anything, she seems deliberate. She sips through a straw from a cup of fresh-squeezed juice, and then she holds the cup with both hands. Her baseball cap is cocked to the side, and her two-inch nails are painted iridescent blue. Her legs are open but locked at the ankle. She looks in command—even more so because she is smiling.

I want to know more about her absences from the spotlight. What is it like to reenter a world where Twitter can determine who becomes president, where music can feel like it was created to last for exactly for one minute and then disappear into the ether?

Yeah, it is a brave new world, she agrees. But she isn’t despondent. Not at all.

“One thing I won’t do is compromise.” She takes another sip of juice and thinks for a moment. “I will never do something based on what everybody else is telling me to do. . . . I’ve been through so many stumbling blocks to build a legacy, so I wouldn’t want to do something just to fit in. Because I never fit in. So. . . .”

I wait for her to finish her sentence, but she doesn’t. Her smile just grows into a laugh, a shy one, and then she shrugs. As if to say, take it or leave it, love me or leave me.

6. Final Notes

At Yellow Arrow, we love that as a style of creative nonfiction, the interview allows the writer to create a unique piece that not only tells us about the subject but can delve into deeper truths about our society through the conversation. We often use the interview when promoting new books to help illuminate the book’s themes and to gain a glimpse into the thoughts of the writer before releasing their work. Take a glance back at an interview with Patti Ross from February 2021, whose chapbook, St. Paul Street Provocations, was just published by Yellow Arrow. And make sure to read next week’s blog from an interview I did with Ute Carson (find her bio here!), whose chapbook, Listen, will be published by Yellow Arrow Publishing in October 2021. Presale begins next week!

Delve into Some Other Interview Styles:

Profile: Rachael Kaadzi Ghansah: Her Eyes Were Watching the Stars: How Missy Elliot Became an Icon, https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a44891/missy-elliott-june-2017-elle-cover-story/

Radio Show Transcript: Terri Gross. ‘Fresh Air’ Favorites: Howard Stern, https://www.npr.org/2019/12/31/790859106/fresh-air-favorites-howard-stern

Traditional Q&A: Jordan Kisner. tUnE-yArDs Made a Pop Album About White Guilt—And It’s Fun as Hell, https://www.gq.com/story/tune-yards-made-a-pop-album-about-white-guilt-and-its-fun-as-hell

(1) Kerr, Jolie. “How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross.” The New York Times. 17 Nov. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/style/self-care/terry-gross-conversation-advice.html

(2) Gross, Terri. “‘Fresh Air’ Favorites: Howard Stern.” NPR. 31 Dec. 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/31/790859106/fresh-air-favorites-howard-stern

(3) Friedman, Ann. “The Art of the Interview.” Columbia Journalism Review. 30 May 2013. https://archives.cjr.org/realtalk/the_art_of_the_interview.php

(4) Kaadzi Ghansah, Rachael. “Her Eyes Were Watching the Stars: How Missy Elliot Became an Icon” Elle. 15 May 2017. https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a44891/missy-elliott-june-2017-elle-cover-story/

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Siobhan McKenna was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She stumbled upon Yellow Arrow while living in Baltimore and has loved every minute of working as an editorial associate. Siobhan is currently working as a travel ICU nurse in Seattle and is loving biking and hiking throughout the Pacific Northwest. She holds a bachelor’s degree in writing and biology from Loyola University Maryland and an MSN from Johns Hopkins University. You can follow her on Instagram @sio_han.

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Thank you to everyone who followed along with our creative nonfiction summer 2021 series. Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Getting Personal with Personal Narratives

By Katherine Chung, written July 2021

from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series

We often forget how important events and celebrations can be. Sometimes we forget to write things down or take a photo of an event. Oftentimes, we do not realize how important something, or someone, is until we lose them. While this last sentence describes my life perfectly, it also sounds like something that we may hear from our parents or mentors.

Personal narratives are like short chapters of an individual’s complete memoir. This specific style of writing allows people to recall a memory and share a personal experience through writing. Such short stories can be about a specific experience and can be intense and hard to comprehend. And wonderful.

Typically, authors write in the first person when they are describing personal experiences. And by writing from their unique point of view, authors can use their five senses to vividly describe a scenario to their audience. This descriptive language also allows the audience to step into the authors’ shoes. Authors are able to set a rich setting so that the audience knows when and where (and why) the personal narrative took place. Some authors like to add quotes and photos to their narratives to make their stories feel more personal. And sometimes some authors use their photos as cover images while others may put a collage of photos at the end of the story. Each author who writes a personal narrative can be as specific or general as wanted to tell a story.

Most personal narratives are written in prose and are 1–5 pages long. They do not need to be exceptionally long since most events written about occur in a quick instance, such as a few hours.

The most common technique used for personal narrative writing is storytelling, which allows authors to retell a story that has made them who they are today or allowed them to overcome a life obstacle. It may even be difficult for an author to recall a memory from the past to write about, but the storytelling element allows an author to add a fictional aspect to a personal story. For example, some authors choose to change a person’s name for the sake of privacy. In another example, an event could be boring so fictional additions might spice things up.

By reading more personal narratives, readers can discover more about others, whether different or alike. Grow as readers and learn about new topics and events that they never knew about before. And as we know, it can sometimes be easier to read an excerpt or a chapter rather than an entire biography about an individual. No one’s life is ever happy and easy. Oftentimes, it is easier to read a person’s story in small, narrative doses.

As a writer, I believe that it is important to write personal narratives, even though they may not be for everyone. I have been through a lot in my short lifetime and believe that it is important to share the darkest (along with the brightest) moments so that others do not have to feel alone. I find it is difficult to write about the saddest and most tragic moments that have happened to me. It is also hard to read about those moments.

But writing personal narratives helps me gain a better mindset about how I want to share my story. And knowing that some people relate to my stories while others may learn something entirely new about themselves is incredible. That is the power of sharing memories and narratives, whether through a short vignette or a longer memoir.

Even the most famous writers struggle to write their own narratives. Here are a few of my favorite personal narratives and memoirs if you are interested:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (from The New York, 2018)

Disability Visibility: First Person Stories From the 21st Century edited By Alice Wong

Peach: an Exceptional Teen’s Journey for Universal Acceptance by Jenevieve Woods

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

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

The Mesmerizing Power of Literary Journalism

By Siobhan McKenna, written June 2021

 from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series

“Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in his private club in Beverley Hills he seemed even more distant. . . . Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight. . . . Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.”

~ Gay Talese, Esquire, 1966 (1)

I remember listening to the rich tone of Gay Talese’s voice as I walked between campus buildings during college. Through my earphones, This American Life played an entire podcast episode dedicated to Sinatra and had included Talese’s piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” As I listened, I puzzled over how a writer could incorporate so many intimate details about the subject into his piece. How did he know what the “fading blondes” or even Sinatra were thinking? After all, the piece came about because Sinatra wouldn’t grant Talese an interview because his agency kept claiming Sinatra had a cold, therefore Talese interviewed anyone he could find who knew Sinatra (1). Amused and fascinated, I loved being immersed in the world of Sinatra through Talese’s vivid descriptions; I thought, is this what writing can sound like? Later, in a creative nonfiction class, I would come to study the same piece and discover that Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is heralded as one of the most iconic examples of literary journalism.

Literary journalism is known by a variety of names including new journalism, narrative journalism, and literary nonfiction—to name only a few (2). Over the years, the exact boundaries of literary journalism have been subject to debate but broadly are described as nonfiction essays that employ fiction techniques to develop the reporting (3). Different techniques that literary journalists use include dialogue, first-person narration, and scene-setting for the piece to read like a novel (2).

Although literary journalism has been around for a long time with some scholars citing Mark Twain as an early example, the genre became more defined after Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson released The New Journalism in 1973 (2). The New Journalism was a collection of essays that included a piece the anthology was named for, by Wolfe, as well as 21 other works that fit Wolfe’s definition of literary journalism, by writers such as Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion.

One of my favorite contemporary writers within this genre is Jordan Kisner. I love Kisner’s essays because of her ability to glide effortlessly between reporting and self-reflection—one of the gems that make literary journalism separate from traditional “unbiased” journalism. In her essay, “Las Marthas,” Kisner describes a Martha Washington pageant in the Texas border town of Laredo all the while inserting bits about her struggle with racial identity in order to make the piece fit into a larger context of what it means to be White, to be Hispanic, to be American in our country today (4). Other essays of hers find the seemingly incongruent connections between subjects: the opioid crisis in an Ohioan county and her mortality, the history of tattoos, and the quest to encapsulate that which is indefinable (5).

Kisner’s writing runs on the notion that “subjectivity [can] foster credibility,” something that Joan Didion helped pave the way for as she reported on such events like the Manson Murders and the chaos of 1960s Los Angeles with a front seat view from her own couch and neighbors’ living rooms in the Hollywood Hills (6). Didion capitalized on the concept that not all journalism must be written without feeling. Literary journalism takes you to the scene of the crime and candidly inserts emotions because humans fail time after time to be dispassionate creatures. Literary journalism’s brilliance lies in the spaces where the writing can transport the reader as we all try to make sense of our own place in the nooks and crannies of the world. And perhaps Didion defines literary journalism best of all when she begins her essay, “The White Album,” with the words:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. (7)

Dive into some literary journalism:

Gay Talese: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”

Jordan Kisner: “Las Marthas”

Joan Didion: “Holy Water”

Rachel Kadzi Ghansah: “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof”

(1) Talese, Gay. “Frank Sinatra has a Cold.” Esquire. April 1966. www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_

(2) Masterclass Staff. How to Recognize and Write Literary Journalism. 8 Nov. 2020. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-recognize-and-write-literary-journalism

(3) Keeble, Richard Lance. “Literary Journalism.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. 30 July 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.836

(4) Kisner, Jordan. “Las Marthas.” The Believer. 1 Oct. 2019. https://believermag.com/las-marthas/

(5) Kisner, Jordan. Thin Places: Essays from the In Between. Macmillian, 2020. 

(6) Whitefield, Jack. “New Journalism: What Can the Media Learn?” The Indiependent. 9 Feb. 2021. https://www.indiependent.co.uk/new-journalism-what-can-the-media-learn/

(7) Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” The White Album. Simon & Schuster, 1979. eBookCollection. (HooplaDigital).

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Siobhan McKenna was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She stumbled upon Yellow Arrow while living in Baltimore and has loved every minute of working as an editorial associate. Siobhan recently began working as a travel nurse in Seattle. As she moves to a different city every three months to work as an ICU nurse, Siobhan looks forward to writing about all that this crazy, broken, and beautiful country holds. She holds a bachelor’s degree in writing and biology from Loyola University Maryland and an MSN from Johns Hopkins University. You can follow her on Instagram @sio_han.

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

Creative Nonfiction: Nature Writing

By Melissa Nunez, written June 2021

 from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series

Nature writing is fertile ground for a writer, especially a female writer, to examine through vivid imagery and powerful metaphor the beauty, vulnerability, and strength within and without us.

Mother Earth. Mother Nature. Motherland. Across cultures and time, the connection between the female body and nature is an enduring thread. 

I consider myself an amateur naturalist, but I wasn’t always this drawn to my natural environment. In my desire to instill in my children respect for our planet, for all its inhabitants, I found renewed wonder, fresh eyes with which to observe plants and creatures. After so much time as an observer, it felt very natural to make the leap from memoir and narrative nonfiction writing to nature writing, to take my words about myself (my body) and apply them to the natural world around me (earth body). I task myself with taking things that seem quite ordinary—an everyday blackbird perched on a car hood, the common daisy sprouting from the base of a stop sign—and approaching them from new angles, forming unexpected correlations. The surprise of discovering and sharing new information, a contrasting perspective.

Nature writing is also a medium in which to discuss oppression, exploitation, and inequality, considering how much habitat has been destroyed, how many creatures are endangered, have been erased. The importance of these losses is more evident in some areas of the globe than others, is considered more relevant for some people than others. Prejudices continue to inhabit our seemingly modern life, in both subversive and overt forms, adopted as norms inherent to the structure of day-to-day living. Many injustices are no longer so secret but are still susceptible to all manner of rug sweeping. Through ecological writing, we can explore how the actions we take, the choices we make, impact the world around us. Each decision has the rippling potential of exponential impact on the microcosms and ecosystems surrounding us. Poisons used to control populations of one creature marked pest (ants, rodents, coyotes) can damage countless others (raptors, reptiles, people). Trees mowed down to make room for cars and buildings displace countless animals who once dwelled there. Walls constructed to inhibit the migration of unwanted people inhibit the migratory movement of dwindling creatures—pollinators and wildcats.

We don’t always like looking too closely in the mirror, at times afraid of what we might see. This is where I find nature writing can function much like fantasy or science fiction, taking you to another world and showing you imbalances that seem so clear when presented with varying degrees of separation. You can take slices of your life and your environment and work through existing imbalances—those of sexism, racism, classism—connecting what is yours, what is mine to a more universal feminine (human) experience. Connecting what is happening with disappearing creatures to disappearing cultures, trampled bodies, and silenced voices.

With nature writing comes the potential to prompt reflection on and examination of our perspectives, our interactions with those around us—living things of human, plant, and animal kind. Our world isn’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, but we can be better. Taking a general reverence and respect for the natural world and making it a more personal experience can ignite a desire to do better. Nature-inspired writing can give a new voice to many who are fighting to be heard. It offers the opportunity for us to try, for even just a moment, to see the world from a different point of view.

The following works showcase the wide spectrum of the genre of nature writing, each author inspiring in their individual approach, style, and voice.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Smith Blue by Camille T. Dungy

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (see also Yellow Arrow staff member Siobhan McKenna’s review from Yellow Arrow Journal (Re)Formation)

You can find Melissa’s beautiful, nature-based essay “What is Mine” in Yellow Arrow Journal, Vol. VI, No. 1, RENASCENCE. Get your copy today.

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Melissa Nunez is an avid reader, writer, and homeschooling mother of three living in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas—a predominantly Latin@ community. Her essays have appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, The Accents Review, and Folio, among others. Follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.

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

The Significance of Memoirs

By Brenna Ebner, written January 2021

from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series

Did you know that Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a memoir as a narrative composed from personal experience? While this certainly describes the genre, Joan Didion, a well-known memoirist herself, summarizes the intricacies behind memoirs better when she explains, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” When we read a memoir we indulge in an unreliable narrator. Just as in fiction, where we have to sustain belief, we have to do the same to a memoir, trusting the narrator/author to tell their truth and believing it because it is theirs. But our memories are not always reliable and we can’t help our biases. Maybe what happened to someone didn’t play out the exact way they remember or certain details become lost to time. So a memoir may have more fiction than nonfiction, more embellishments than truths. But as it is what the author believes, does that make it false? This is where the controversy around the genre is found.

Opinions, feelings, and memories all change and that is something memoirists must keep in mind if and when they choose to recount their life or certain parts of it. But it is also why one could place the memoir under nonfiction. I think what keeps memoirs in the creative nonfiction category is how each is written by real people recounting real experiences and showing us how such experiences shaped them. We can’t necessarily tell them they are wrong because each piece of writing is their truth. Because of that, readers are drawn to them. Reading a memoir is an opportunity to:

• Relate to one another and gain validation when we’ve experienced our own version of the same tragedy or celebration

• See a new point of view and gain other experiences and live other lives when we are stuck living our own

• Be humbled by realizing the complexity of life and how so many individual worlds are out there, besides your own, that are filled with great ups and downs

• Watch authors grapple with the same large themes in life we must and try to make black and white of such themes in such a gray world.

Not only does this draw me to memoirs, specifically, but it also makes me grateful for those who write them. It can be difficult to relive moments in our lives and recount them for the sake of others and ourselves. It can be difficult to be vulnerable and open and invite judgment and criticisms.

I also think it’s significant that people are offering themselves to us so vulnerably because it sparks compassion, sympathy, and empathy. Although not always! Sometimes a memoir is good because it makes you upset. Not every life lived and decision made will be welcomed by readers. We are complicated, complex, and unique individuals, each of us. Regardless, I think even such controversial memoirs still remain important as they ignite discussion and exploration within ourselves and within our societies.

I’d like to argue that what makes a memoir good is its ability to do just that. When I can finish a memoir and leave with a new perspective and understanding, of either myself or the world around me (even just one aspect of it, because the world is very big after all), then I know it was a successful read. It may not happen with each and every memoir I read; both myself as a reader and the memoirist must be open to exploring outside ourselves and our limited aspects of the world. This process of reflection is refreshing to experience. With this in mind, it is very rare for a memoir to be a simple read, and for that reason, I recommend them as a genre to indulge in. 

For those interested in reading some memoirs, my recommendations include:

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson

Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Mean by Myriam Gurba

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (see also here)

Abandon Me by Melissa Febos

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Brenna Ebner is the CNF Managing Editor at Yellow Arrow Publishing and has enjoyed growing as a publisher and editor since graduating from Towson University in May of 2020. In between this time, she has interned with Mason Jar Press and Yellow Arrow and continues to pursue her editing career with freelance work.

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

Coming Together Across the Table (or on Zoom)

by Sandra Kacher, from March 2021

It takes courage to write, courage to reveal, and courage to hear what people have to say about your words. Brené Brown says, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

A poetry writing group is the perfect place to practice this courage.

When I was in my 40s, I promised myself I would write a mystery novel by the time I was 50. I did, but it didn’t go anywhere because the first time I heard the faintest criticism I shut down. Extreme, I know, but some of us are timid and way too vulnerable to other people’s opinions. When I picked up a pen again it was to write poetry, and I knew I had to toughen up if I was going to create anything worthwhile. 

I’ve heard people say, in response to change suggestions, “Well, I just write for myself.” I don’t understand why a person would write (or paint, or cook, or garden, etc.) just for themselves. I see creativity as a gift meant to be shared, and creations benefit from honest and compassionate responses from our peers.

Thus, the poetry writing group. Such a group is comprised of a small number (3–8?) of poets who come together regularly to read their work to each other and listen to the responses elicited by that work. My first rule for finding a group is “pick carefully.” I’ve been in competitive poetry groups where the feedback is harsh in the name of “just being honest.” I’ve also been in groups where the level of commitment and experience is less than mine. It has been important for me to find groups with the right level of skill (so I can trust their insight) and also with the right level of love. Love for poetry, love for the process, love for daring to believe we (I) have something to say in poetic form. I don’t have to be best friends with everyone, but I do need to trust that their intention is to be genuinely helpful.

I’m now in several writing groups and I’ve asked my writing buddies to share why they keep coming and keep working so hard.

Here is a summary of their responses:

Accountability: “Having to bring a poem on a predictable and regular basis heightens my commitment. It helps me keep going through the dry times.”

Quality Enhancement: “The others in a workshop often notice things (both positive and negative) in the poem that I have not and offer solid ideas to improve the poem.”

Networking, Identity, and Belonging: “I enjoy being with my tribe . . . others who share my interest in poetry . . . and often other important values. Others offer ideas [regarding] prompts, craft, readings, workshops, teachers, books, submission calls that enrich my writing life.”

Fun: “In addition to everything else, a sweet relationship with smart, perceptive, funny, beautiful women; one that deepens every encounter.”

How do we create such communities? I started with going to poetry meet-ups in my community (after procrastinating for several months. It does take courage!) and met several poets with whom I am now in groups. One group started with two of us who shared a love of San Miguel de Allende and Spanish, along with writing. We each invited others to join us. That group now has five wonderful women (a deliberate choice) who have been meeting and improving for several years. One of my groups grew out of a shared class—a common way to find compatible members. Two of us also tuned into Billy Collins’ podcasts and responded to a group of male poets who were looking for women to balance things out. 

We began with ground rules for listening and responding. We found that starting with sharing “the gold” we hear and finishing with a round of “rust” creates a balanced atmosphere and allows for building trust to hear critiques. In that same group we begin with a SPIRE check-in—how am I Spiritually, Physically, Intellectually, Relationally, and Emotionally? We aren’t rigid but we do cover those areas, and through this kind of check-in, we’ve come to admire, understand, and love each other. Another group I’m in is purely reading and critiquing, equally useful for improving our work but less warm and personal (however, I’ve found sharing poetry can’t help but lead to personal connection). The degree of personal sharing depends on the desires of members. It seems to me it takes at least six months, more like a year, to get into a really good groove together.

I am a better poet than I was three years ago, and I thank my group members for that. I encourage anyone who wants to be a better writer to find a tribe of writers and plunge in!

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Sandra Kacher comes to writing poetry after years of hearing about the inner lives of hundreds of therapy clients. She brings the same compassion and sense of irony to her poetry as she brought to listening to hundreds of therapy clients. Touched by Mary Oliver and heartened by Billy Collins, she brings a heart for beauty and an ear for music to her writing. She hopes poetry shares the ways she is moved by nature, human life, and all the flotsam that catches her eye. As an older poet, she is shaped daily by intimations of mortality, and most of her work is touched by loss—past or to come. Poetry keeps her open, fights off cynicism in a world that leaves her listless these days.

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