seedgiver scatters reflections on life, community, resistance, and liberation. You’re invited to join seedgiver in reciprocity as a paid subscriber or by sharing a one-time gift.
Dear Beloved,
This is a short letter to you. While longer works await impatiently in my drafts, I did not make the time they needed these past few days. So today you get something last minute - and more personal.
I’ve been a writer and a reader my entire life. I squirreled the odds and ends of stories in composition notebooks while school-assigned essay deadlines flew on by. As a child, my mother invented the unique punishment of removing the last chapter in my precious books for every late assignment.
But I’ve never shared my writing like this before. In 2024, I submitted my writing for the first time - and shockingly, it was accepted. I submitted another piece - rejected. Another - generously accepted. A creative non-fiction essay here - rejected in less than a day, ouch. A poem there - rejected. Another to a larger publication - waiting. A short story scattered across literary magazines, high and low - still waiting.
There is so much waiting, hope dancing between late-night lines and painstaking paragraphs. I liken submissions to messages in bottles and see them so clearly - beloved little stories, essays, poems - curled up in green bottles, bobbing precariously along the beautiful and uncaring waves of the dark Pacific.
Today one of those submissions was rejected. Submitted in September, I breathlessly checked its progress in Submittable every day. The longer it sat in “In Progress,” read by the editor, the more hope I felt. Then the rejection slipped under the door, short and crisp. I was thanked for the time with my work, and the editor expressed appreciation that the literary journal’s mission and editorial voice prompted me “to be part of the conversation we’re fostering” but no, thank you.
“We wish you the very best of luck in finding a home for this work,” the editor wrote.
As we’re all intimately aware, rejections are a part of life. It’s a big part of life as a writer. It was fear of this very rejection that kept me sharing my heart’s work for years. Fear chased me away from seeking out my own dreams.
All of my life, I’ve been a writer. A reader. A lover of words and the spells they weave. I am an emerging writer coming into a world where the arts are devalued and frankly, writers are not paid what they used to be.
There is not a singular, clear path for us writers in this world - a world of crumbling empires, one that has never served people like us or listened to our voices.
“Poetry is not a career — it is a state of being. You become poetry or are in a state of becoming with poetry. My chronological map of becoming would not be linear, rather it has been crisscrossed with arcs of events, poems, poets, arts, music, all bound and directed by history and memory.”
- Joy Harjo, “Joy Harjo on Listening and Writing with Intention”
I am an emerging writer who is choosing to no longer put messages in bottles and set them out to sea with wistful hopes for approval. I liberate myself from fear’s leaden cage and look ahead into the storm.
Today I write to you, Beloved, and tell you that together, we chart our own course. I raise my sails and set forth, weaving between glorious salt-rich waves and letting winds of change guide me.
Beloved, I share with you a poem I wrote while thinking of a friend from long ago. While I have not seen this person in years, let alone spoken to them, I hope this poem finds its way home to someone who needs it.
Stargender
Your tears are falling stars
too rare, too precious
for a boy who cannot recognize the universe you are
who tries to capture your immense in labeled cages
and define you for his own vices
You cry, I come
presenting strawberries that pulse like my beating heart
bleeding for your sorrow
but here to sweeten those tender aches
in the crevices of your galaxies
He says it’s a choice, your undeniable glory
but the real choice is always
you
I’ll always choose you
– your femininity, your masculinity
your divinity
and all you encompass
There is a pervasive lie that writers are solitary creatures. While it is true that we often type too loudly on keyboards (according to my partner at least) and make paper bleed ink from long hours writing, no written work is made alone. Behind every writer is a legion of old cherished literature teachers, supportive friends and family, librarians, booksellers, beta readers, workshop facilitators, reviewers, and all too patient loved ones there to pull us out of our little world and bring us home.
All writing is is us talking to each other. Like everything, writing requires community. If you are a writer seeking out community through writing workshops and want to support our beloveds in Palestine, please consider Workshops 4 Palestine.
Workshops 4 Palestine
Palestine has birthed generations of incredible storytellers. These storytellers are nurtured by a people who prize education and cherish their children enough to ensure they receive it. Despite over 75 years of occupation, Palestine has a 97.8% literacy rate. (In comparison, the so-called “first world” United States falters at 79% - more on that in a future newsletter.)
As the occupier rolls into new levels of atrocities and its corporate sponsors censor the genocide, mutual aid and solidarity is ever more crucial. Writers for 4 Palestine is a group of autonomous writers, artists, and educators organizing workshops and classes to raise money for Palestinians in Gaza. Inspired by the Popular University for Gaza, Writers 4 Gaza aspire towards “world where learning and education is marshaled in service of Palestinian liberation rather than the death-making profits of university board members.”
All proceeds from these workshops are donation-based and go directly to mutual aid campaigns for Palestinian people in Gaza. To support our beloveds is as simple as:
Donate to the corresponding fundraiser.
Fill out the workshop’s registration form, where you upload a screenshot of your donation.
Receive a confirmation email within 24 hours.
Thank you for reading this issue of seedgiver, Beloved.
Please let me know: What is a poem waiting for a home? How have you overcome fear to go after something you desperately care about?
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Ouff I felt all of this in my soul. I am here with 16 rejections under my belt but I can say that finding substack and posting my words here has been such a breath of fresh air. Finding community and releasing our words on our own can also be so liberating.