ISSUE 20: Women’s Suffrage

Virginia has a degree in Literature, and a postgraduate degree in teaching English. She now runs a tuition business. She is a passionate advocate for neuro-diversity, particularly as she is autistic. She has had poems, articles and stories published and broadcast on BBC Radio, and is currently writing for a professional theatre production. Her collection of short stories, The Camera Obscure, will be published in late 2021; writing is her preferred method of emotional expression. Dysmorphic deals with the seemingly irrational feelings surrounding body dysmorphia, and wider themes surrounding female roles, identity, and relationships. “Natasha” and “Stepping Out On Derby Day” are both inspired by true events almost a century apart. Virginia is married with one son, and her passions, apart from words, are swimming and playing the violin.

As we all relearn what it means to retreat into our homes, I have thought about the ways in which oscillating metaphors and realities of motherhood shape us–and how the domestic space is a dizzying nexus of disorder.  My poems about Margaret Cavendish for this issue address themes I visit in my chapbooks (His Journal, My Stella and The Satisfactory Nothing of Girls), and they recover her as an example of how multifarious women can be: she is both a literary foremother and not a mother, someone removed from canons and rewritten as strange, impossible, absurd.

Abby Brunt is a poet and licensed massage therapist. Her work often explores themes of family, brokenness and survival. She has an MFA in Poetry from Old Dominion University. She grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical church where women were expected to be silent, submit to men and have as many babies as possible. Learning about women’s rights and suffrage was an important part of claiming her voice and in breaking out of that worldview. These poems speak to that experience and to the lives of women still living under the oppression of these fundamentalist churches.

Susan Caggiano teaches writing at Santa Monica College and has returned to her writing practice after raising her daughter and reimagining life after motherhood. She loves travel, hiking and the outdoors and sees her writing as both craft and life buoy. She has poetry published in The Northridge Review Retrospective and is currently working on personal essays and a memoir. “Shift” was inspired by the theme of working class family relationships, and in particular, the effects on her father and his relationship with her.

Jillian Danback-McGhan is a writer and former Naval Officer. Her work most recently appears in Line of Advance and Deadly Writer’s Patrol and has been anthologized in Our Best War Stories by Middle West Press. She is the winner of the 2020 Col. Darren L. Wright Memorial Writing award and is currently working on a collection of short fiction. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her family.

Debra Madaris Efird, from Harrisburg, NC, is a writer who has always championed women’s causes but became adamantly political in recent years. She has participated in women’s marches, attended protests, contacted members of Congress over 3000 times, and even made those annoying phone calls to get out the vote. She is author of “Groups in Practice: A School Counselor’s Collection” (Routledge 2012). Other credits include saturdayeveningpost.com, livinglutheran.org, and numerous anthologies, magazines, and professional journals.

Nancy Johnson lives with her life partner on a lake in the Canadian Shield, about 200 miles north of Toronto, Canada. She’s been writing short stories for some time but has recently been making more effort to share them with the world. A proudly second-wave feminist, she believes it was not just the large, dramatic events that drove progress toward women’s equality. Countless smaller moments of epiphany and personal acts of courage in the post WWII era, also propelled us forward. “Matters of Credit” is a story about one of those moments.

Rosalind Kaplan has been published in several literary and medical journals, including Amarillo Bay, Annals of Internal Medicine, Another Chicago Magazine, Brandeis Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, HerSTRY, Minerva Rising, Prompted, a Philadelphia Stories Anthology, and The Pulse Magazine. She is a physician and also teaches narrative medicine and medical memoir writing at Thomas Jefferson University/Sidney Kimmel Medical College. Dr. Kaplan is a 2020 graduate of Lesley University’s MFA in creative nonfiction, and she has attended a number of writing workshops. She lives with her husband and a rescue dog, and has two grown children.

Paula is a former TV producer whose credits range from late night Rock and Roll to Emmy-nominated movies. Her poems have been published in Halfway Down the Stairs, Moon Magazine, Poets Magazine and included in anthologies from Darkhouse Books and Constellations. When not writing, cooking, Zooming or sanitizing in 2020, Paula Rudnick devoted herself to political work. Happy 2021!

After thirty-five decades in the legal profession, most of them as a law professor, Deborah Schmedemann now volunteers with newcomers to the United States and particularly enjoys teaching adult English language learners. She has published essays in the anthologies Surprised by Joy; Corners: Voices on Change; Awake in the World; and Home: An Anthology of Minnesota Fiction, Memoir and Poetry. She lives as close as one can get to the Mississippi River in south Minneapolis, yet is often found with her two daughters and their families in the Chicago area or traveling internationally with her husband.

Kay Smith-Blum, Woman Business Owner (NWWA) of the Year (2013) is a recovering retailer, living in Seattle. “Desco Drive” is the short story that beget her second novel of historical fiction, now out for agent review. Her short stories can be found at CommuterLit.com, Fiction Attic Press, Fiction Southeast (late 2021) and The Stray Branch (2022). Her humorous essays (nominated for Best of the Net) may be found at Pif Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Furious Gazelle, Quail Bell Magazine, Bewildering Stories and Down in the Dirt Magazine (2020 Anthology). Twitter: @kaysmithblum; Instagram: @discerningKSB; www.KaySmith-Blum.com

Karin Spitfire is the author of Standing with Trees and a chapbook “Wild Caught.” Her poem “Liquidation” won the national first place in the 2019 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, sponsored by WOMR, Provincetown. “What is to be Offered published in The Kerf, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Me in 2007 & 2008. Spitfire, dancer, poet, artist, credits radical intersectional feminist activism, the rocky coast of Maine for tenderizing/healing her fierce abused edges.

Violet Snow is a journalist and the author of To March or to Marry, a recently published historical novel about suffrage and women’s clubs. Violet’s articles have appeared in the New York Times “Disunion” blog, Civil War Times, American Ancestors, Woodstock Times, Jewish Currents, and many other periodicals. Her fiction and memoir have been published in Otter Magazine, Pilgrimage, Tinker Street, and the podcast series “The Strange Recital.” She lives in upstate New York.

Lisa Zimmerman poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her chapbook Sainted is forthcoming (Main Street Rag, 2021). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Cave Wall, Amethyst Review, Florida Review, SWWIM Every Day and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives with her husband in Fort Collins, Colorado and is a Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado.