Hopefully you’ve seen our contest to win Sue William Silverman‘s new book How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. I think you will find her work, and her stories, really speaks to women writers. And listened to our podcast featuring Sue. If you’re like me, you may have really started to think about metaphors… and how you can use metaphors to support your life as a writer.
What is your metaphor?
For our contest, we are asking women writers to share an image that represents a metaphor for their life, or their character’s life if they are writing fiction. And like my mind does, I start thinking about how this applies in other ways. Can you change things in your life by finding a different metaphor for your life? For your fictional character’s life? Can this help you re-frame things? Is this furthering our mission to support women writers?
The metaphor for Plume, for example, guides how we’ve handled business, pretty much since we started at the UNM Business Plan Competition. When asked by one of the mostly male panel of judges, “Have you ever heard the word pivot?”, he was clearly convinced that we would have to change our business model—not because he knew a pandemic was coming, but because he didn’t understand our business model: to support writers. Especially women writers.. He also clearly did not realize that we both were well read, had MFAs in creative writing, and one of us (me) had been working in the business world for several years before I came to grad school. So yeah, we knew the word “pivot.” I wish I’d said at the time, “Do you know the word ‘pirouette’?” In my mind I picture a ballerina and a pirouette. It’s what women have been doing since the beginning of time. It is our strength; it’s our grace; it’s how we survive.
Is it a pivot or a pirouette?
Mirriam Webster defines a “pirouette” as : a rapid whirling about of the body, especially: a full turn on the toe or ball of one foot in ballet.
They define “pivot” as: to turn on or as if on a pivot
Plume has been dancing—doing pirouettes since we started. We are continually trying to reach new communities of writers to amplify our mission to celebrate and encourage women writers and non-binary writers, and celebrate diversity in all the ways writers (who are not cis white men) identify themselves. As women too often our stories are not told and we have not been a part of the narrative. (We often hear about our founding fathers—what about our founding mothers?). Our mission is to lift each other up, to support writers.
Our biggest pirouette so far has been to address the pandemic.
(Photo by Liel Anapolsky on Unsplash)
We’ve gone digital.
We started a podcast.
And we’re looking for new ways to connect and showcase the great work you all do.
Hope you’ll stay along for the ride! To enter the contest, you’ll find the rules on our last post about metaphors.
Thank you all for your support. You are helping us continue our work to celebrate and encourage women and non-binary writers. Share our posts on Instagram, tell writer friends about our podcast, rate and review the podcast on your favorite app, and introduce us to writers you think should be featured. You also can help us financially (and get some fun perks!) by signing up on Patreon.