Awakening: Drawing Inspiration from Yellow Arrow’s 2022 Value
By Annie Marhefka
Happy new year, Yellow Arrow community.
Each year, staff and board at Yellow Arrow come together to select our value for the year—one word that reflects where we currently are on our journey and one that encompasses all that we are embracing and aspiring to in the year ahead. Last year, we chose EMERGE as our value, following 2020’s theme of REFUGE, where we focused on creating a safe place, a shelter for our community. In 2021, we anticipated an emergence—metaphorically, as we navigated our individual journeys in isolation for much of the year, and physically, as we had paused many of our programs as an organization and as a society.
Though we are not out of the proverbial woods of the global pandemic yet, we can sense a change—a revival, a rousing of the senses. We have learned, we have grown, we have changed, as individuals, as an organization, and as a community. There is a collective newfound awareness of what deeply matters to us, and our focus this year is on embracing that change as we ignite the way forward. Yes, there is much still for us to mourn and contemplate and grieve. But on this morning, the start of 2022, we choose to AWAKEN.
For the past two years, Yellow Arrow has had to pause or modify many of our programs in response to the epidemic and its impact on our operations. For 2022, we are excited about the opportunity to pave a path forward into a new day and as such, our chosen value is AWAKEN. Things will be different, certainly, but we have learned incredible lessons about our resilience, our collective passions, and our literary community’s needs and shared hopes. These lessons will serve as the springboard for our future direction.
If isolation and distancing have had a positive impact, it is that we have been encouraged to awaken our senses to those around us. Compassion and empathy have become necessities and we have pushed ourselves to be more present: to see, hear, smell, taste, touch what is around us more deeply and thoughtfully in order to understand what others are feeling. This awakening of the senses is not just present in how we feel internally, but in the stories we share with others, and Yellow Arrow hopes to inspire our community of writers and readers to incorporate those senses within our written words.
Awakening also signals a new beginning, a fresh way of working and being together. At Yellow Arrow, we have committed to reinstating our core programs in new ways, with a virtual writing residency, online writing workshops, and expanded digital support for our readers and writers. If and when the opportunity to gather in person arises, we will fully embrace it with a focus on safely fostering our mission. But for now, we will look for new ways to spark our creative lights.
And to awaken also means to open our eyes wider, to dig deeper into the background and grow our individual and collective awareness of what is happening around us. We have always had a solid foundation of women writers and a focus on supporting those with voices that have been marginalized by old systems. This year, we aim to expand the diversity of writers and readers we work with even further, in an effort to further support underrepresented populations in the literary arts community. We have brought on LaWanda Stone as Director of Diversity and Inclusion and look forward to the passion she brings to expanding our outreach and incorporating these values in all of the work that we do.
While we present our 2022 value to you with a message of hope and renewal, we also know that many of you are continuing to suffer—whether it be from mental health issues, physical issues, (COVID-19 related or otherwise), or just the tremendous burden that weighs on us as we navigate through the challenges we face in the world around us, and within our own homes. Some of you may not feel ready to take on this changed world just yet. If that is you, please rest. We will be here when you are ready to AWAKEN.
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Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts.
You can support us as we AWAKEN in a variety of ways: purchase one of our publications from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, join our newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 102, Glen Arm, MD 21057). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.