Fall 2014 Orlando Winners & Finalists
Congratulations to our Winners & Finalists, and thank you to all who submitted! It was a privilege to read the audacious, compelling, and beautiful work of so many talented women. We hope you will join us in celebrating the success of the selected winners and finalists, chosen by an extraordinary panel of finalist judges! Each winner will receive $1,000 and publication of her winning piece in Issue No. 17 of The Los Angeles...
Working in Silence
Silence is your treasure. Do not exchange it for an easy life. This is my revision of a sentence by Zen-Getsu, which I came across as an epigraph and am keeping as my watchwords for these next few months up in my room. The original subject is poverty. What I understand to be at the heart of the counsel is the worth of the difficult thing. Difficult gifts–poverty or silence, possibilities for greatness, whatever your own...
Already Making Waves
Thank you to all who submitted Proposal Applications for the 2015 AROHO Retreat! The quality and quantity of responses we’ve received is a testament to the strength of our community, an acknowledgment that together we are creating something vital whose impact will be felt well beyond the time and space of the Retreat week. It is our hope that, through publication, we can engage even more women in the Waves Discussion Series...
Shakespeare’s Sister, Round 1!
Thank you to all who submitted to the inaugural Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship for Women Playwrights! We received an amazing response, with almost 1,000 submissions. Semi-finalists will be notified on September 2nd and invited to submit to the second application round, due September 12th. Each semi-finalist will submit the full play from which her initial 30 page application was excerpted and her response to the following...
Vertical Answers
At the 2013 Retreat closing ceremony, Bhanu Kapil, writer of paradigm-shattering poetry and prose (and 2013 Retreat Small Group Facilitator; Mind Stretch and Desert Delight Contributor) shared her immense talent for creative alchemy by compiling, over the course of the week, words from the approximately 100 women in attendance. What resulted was “Vertical Answers,” a poem whose generative and synergistic energy clearly...
“Bus Ride to the City,” by Marsha Mathews
Afghanistan, 2013 Father’s beard twitches whenever my older sister, Mezhgan, comes into the room. His eyes glaze the way they do when they fall on a flower in the snow. I have tried and tried to elicit that same response. I have trimmed my dark brows like Mezhgan’s, I walk slow and purposefully like Mezghan. I have a bright purple banqa like Mezghan. Last summer, I learned to make minced lamb like Mezhgan, and pistachio dessert, too,...
“Eye See You,” by Toni Martin
That girl broke down. Back humped up like a kitten, breaths jerky, crouched in the leatherette chair. “You okay?” I say. Loud, to carry over her inward grieving. Head flips up. Scared her. Black hair curtain parts. Looks all around, for someone else. I been here so long, never speak. A big brown statue. Other chairs in the waiting room empty. “You okay?” Yeah, me, I tell her eyes. Black as the hair. She don’t talk. Maybe don’t...
“Under Water,” by Holly Sneeringer
The morning after the lady next door dies in the middle of the night, I go inside my house to tell my mother. “Ronnie is dead,” I say to an empty foyer. I return to the front sidewalk where I had been standing, already warm on my summer bare feet. There is a stillness that I have never, ever felt before as I watch the silent blinking lights of the ambulance parked along the curb. Ronnie’s front door is pushed open by a firefighter...
“Shellacked,” by Jenifer Browne Lawrence
If I step from slick refinished hardwood to concrete draw the door’s body to its jamb with a click, down to the grit where in darkness rows of Camaros Celicas Impalas drowse like horses at the foot of the drooping bougainvillea if I cross the blacktop like a pasture in which no tuft of grass remains unchewed where the potholes are tamped gopher mounds and the scent of ginger rises from planting beds delicate barb driving me into the...
Woman with Crows by Ruth Thompson
Woman With Crows is Ruth Thompson’s second book of poems. It explores her own past from ”hungry ghosts” to the Fool-Crone, “dancing what she does not know to dance.” It was a finalist for AROHO’s To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize and includes poems that won the New Millennium Writings and Harpur Palate awards. The poem “The White Queen” has generated conversation about dementia and multidimensional expansion and a new...
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What treasures are secreted in the deepest places, the bathys, and how will we recover their promise?
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