WWPH WRITES ISSUE 83
WWPH Writes 83…celebrates our 2024-award-winning books and more!
Join us as we celebrate the launch of our 2024 award-winning books: For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus by Varun Gauri; UNARMED: An American Educator’s Memoir by Megan Doney; and The Machine Autocorrects Code to I by Chanlee Luu at Politics & Prose Bookstore (main store on Connecticut Avenue) on this Sunday, October 13 at 5 pm and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda on Sunday, October 27th at 3 pm. The Writer’s Center event includes a wine and cheese reception, so please let us know you are coming with an RSVP here! At both events, our editors will also be on hand to answer questions about how you can be published with the Washington Writers’ Publishing House and how you can apply for a paid WWPH Fellowship for 2025.
And there is more going on at our nonprofit, cooperative small press: our 50th-anniversary anthology, AMERICA’S FUTURE, is now open for submissions. We invite you to send us your work now. More details below. Read on to excerpts from our 2024 award-winning books!
Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
co-presidents and co-editors Washington Writers’ Publishing House
WWPH WRITES Poetry
Chanlee Luu is a Vietnamese-Chinese-American writer from Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, and BS in chemical engineering from UVA, where she competed in poetry slams. She writes about identity, pop culture, science, politics, and everything in between. She can be found on Twitter @ChanleeLuu, and her work in Snowflake Magazine, the gamut mag, Cutbow Quarterly, Tint Journal, Honey Lit, The Offing, and diaCRITICS, among others, all at chanleeluu.weebly.com.
More about Chanlee Luu in this WWPH interview here.
From “Taylor’s Platinum Mop (Ode to Bleachella)”
The sun plays peek-a-boo with the downpour— gone
one moment and shining through webbed water the next. It was
an average day. I could be on any
plaza, but I am here. This trace
bewilderment reminds me I am of
this world. Human like you.
The machine autocorrects code to “I.”
The flowers lose petals in the wind and think
nothing but pollination and growth. I
absorb the rays of sun—my skin delighted. I am here. I am.
©Chanlee Luu 2024
WWPH WRITES Fiction
Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was a Summer Writer-in-Residence at Washington, DC’s The Inner Loop. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is his first novel.
More about Varun Gauri in this special interview here.
THE OPENING OF FOR THE BLESSINGS OF JUPITER AND VENUS
Overall description for context: Disillusioned with modern romance, globe-trotting Meena tries an arranged marriage with Avi, an aspiring politician in Ohio. But when Avi’s political opponent launches racist attacks, Meena and Avi are forced to defend their immigrant community, which narrowly understands its own traditions, and protect their increasingly shaky relationship. This is an intimate, funny, and heartbreaking novel about small-town America and the politics of marriage.
The opening sentences of this absorbing, immersive novel, told in alternating points of view from Meena and Avi…
MEENA PUSHED ASIDE HER VEIL. The gold bangles, heavy on her wrists, slid and clinked. She feared the audience would find the gesture graceless, clumsy, but she had to see his eyes. She would in moments be the wife of this man in the groom’s headdress. Maybe she already was his wife. The Vedic ceremony, hours of venerable ritual, had no vows, no exchange of rings, no single moment when choice, her will, exercised its prerogatives….
©Varun Gauri 2024
WWPH WRITES Memoir
Megan Doney teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at New River Community College in Virginia. Her work has appeared in Ilanot Review, Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals, as well as the anthologies Allegheny and If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. Doney was a Fulbright fellow in South Africa in 2007, and returned there in 2015 to study reconciliation and public narrative in the aftermath of violence. She earned an MFA from Lesley University. Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is her first book.
More about Megan Doney in her WWPH interview here.
Excerpt from UNARMED: An American Educator’s Memoir
…I have a class that morning, and then in the afternoon, I’ll see the students I was with when the shooting happened. Will they even be there? I have little memory of the morning class; a friend who works as a student advisor and some other man I didn’t know and whose role I don’t remember, stay with me in class as backup. We talk about what happened, just the facts. But the students want to know why he did it, and I have nothing to tell them. (Later the newspaper will report that when the police asked him this question, he said he’d been having a bad week.) I have wept in front of students only twice: on September 11, and that day. They send me the sweetest emails later and throughout the week. I feel like I am living only for them.
I tell my students, The conclusion is your “so what?” Why should we care? What is at stake if we act, or don’t act, as you’ve argued? A conclusion is another kind of door, I realize. The introduction welcomes you in; the conclusion ushers you out, confident that you have learned something and will walk through the world with fresh eyes.
Why should we care? What is at stake?…
©Megan Doney 2024
WWPH NEWS
Submit your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to AMERICA’S FUTURE. Detailed prompts and guidelines are available here. WE ARE NOT GOING BACK. FUTURE FORWARD, all…submit now. We are reading on a rolling basis all submissions.
One more reminder! JOIN US on Sunday, October 13 at 5 p at the iconic POLITICS & PROSE BOOKSTORE for the premier reading/event for our 2024 award-winning books…
LAST NOTE… FROM OUR FRIENDS AT GRACE AND GRAVITY edited by Melissa Scholes Young at American University… a call for submissions for Grace and Gravity Vol. 11: GRIT! “We’re looking for prose: fiction and nonfiction. We love stories. Tell us one in approximately 1000-3000 words in any form that you love. Submissions are welcome 9.15.24 ~ 12.15.24. We’ll notify selected contributors by 1.20.25. We welcome all women writers, especially marginalized identities, in the DMV. Because we seek to make room for fresh voices, submissions from recent contributors are welcome but less prioritized.” More details here.
Thank you all for being part of the WWPH community!