Ephemera Newsletter Iss August.2

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter free edition, Ħbieb! (Maltese for “friends”)

As you may be aware, we’re running our Good Contrivance Farm Residency for a third time. Deadline is August 31! We hope folks will submit early. Yearly paid subscribers can submit for free. We’ll send you a special link this week.

Please join us to support the letter so we can continue to bring weird tidbits, mini essays, artists and music from a writerly lens, opportunities and other literary and creative ephemera. We have 29k general subscribers and followers but only a small amount of our readers are paid subscribers—thanks a million to those folks! We’d like to get to 200 paid subscribers at any level. That would really help us continue on. And if we hit that level (or beyond) we want to bring new programs into the fold—in our paid subscriber updates we discuss a residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Thanks and onward!

Poetry August is here with our finalist, Tara Zafft who will be the poet for the month! You can review her poems altogether once they publish as well as her artist statement and bio on this dedicated post on our Substack page. We thank you for checking out Tara Zafft’s work.

On to our standard content matters: Won’t you please check out last month’s free issue if you missed it.

And here are some reminders:

• Monthly Invite to Submit: We are open for October now. September 1 is the deadline. If you are a paid subscriber to Ephemera, you can submit to poetry @ Ephemera for free as a membership perk! (We email you a secret link at the end of your second consecutive paid month and every month thereafter for as long as you are a paid subscriber). Free subscribers and anyone else can submit, too, with the reading fee and can submit up to 10 poems. Paying the reading fee will grant you 1-month paid access to Ephemera’s full letter. Learn more or:

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In Brief…this week’s features:

• Thoughts on Hua Tunan’s traditional Chinese ink and spray-paint-contemporary murals.

• Listening to “Dwellberry,” by the wistful and ambient artist Khotin.

• August’s poet, Tara Zafft’s second of four poems, “Rodin’s Hand”

• Our weekly lists:

  • 3 magazines with open calls

  • 3 awards/prizes

  • 3 recent job listings for editors and writers.

• Interesante: In this issue, we look into a nicely arranged study on the decline of text on the cover of Vogue over the past few decades.

• Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!

  • Support us on Bookshop - See our past book recs and others. A highly curated list.

• Last Month’s Free Issue.

• Ephemera’s Good Contrivance Residency: Deadline August 31

• or

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Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.

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Ephemera

Apropos of nothing really…well, maybe some incidents while traveling we ran up against, the American wall of commercial ubiquity, let’s call it…we’ve been troubled by the difficulty of having simple bespoke experiences. What we mean is nearly everywhere we have adulteration from nosy and imposing commercial interests, be it via advertising or a type of in-house psychological persuasion: the smell of CVS, the arrangement of grocery store aisles, ads ads ads, text messages from marketers and who knows what else (does anyone reply or pick up numbers they don’t know?), but, too, food experiences. Think about the items on sale at Starbucks…these are designed, in various ways, to be nearly irresistible at best and addicting in various ways at worst. Popular music and the same few artists over and over again on airwaves and then via contracts in stores and elsewhere. The world of thought and letters—co-opted every way you turn with types of thinking that reflect the will of some mishmash of political, corporate, and monarchic interests. Maybe even books (all genres) too, dare we say it.

“I don’t think I have completely achieved my technique yet. It is continuously evolving. Art is life—everything interconnects with each other. When I see my mom sweeping with a big Chinese broom, it’s like she’s making a huge calligraphy”
—Hua Tunan

As creatives, we have to be very careful. Guarded. How can we produce useful art if our experiences are all enfolded into, by, and within a corporate-political uni-vision of the world? Experience is about who you’re with…sure, and we believe that, but, too, can you be the individual you need around even well-meaning friends and family who adhere to the ever-encroaching boundaries set by the above-describe phenomenon and its purveyors? If you go to a beach town and all there are are corporate or corporate-replicative food joints, if all the bars are playing the same stuff, sourcing and serving the same food, if all the TV’s are broadcasting the … if all the stores hawk poorly regulated plastic-derived products, if all the grocery stores sell adulterated food-adjacent food … you see? What can we be and to whom can we speak and about what can we write if this is everything? We may go to an affordable beach town, but we’re bringing our own food and entertainment and substances, and planning days in ways unprescribed. Existence by prescription can’t be good for us.

So, maybe individuate in small ways. That’s all we can do. Build behaviors and festivities that eschew the too-easily-acquired and the too-within-reach. Make things when you can. Buy from individuals, artisans and entrepreneurs and tradesfolk. Read widely. Read with and to friends and family. Find music with 1k-10k listens. Push back as much as you can. And then, when you go to incorporate you experience and feelings—the you that makes you you with the impulse that makes us “speak” as writers—you’ll approximate what Hua Tunan says about his art, interlacing the everyday with your changing understanding of self; create something true, essential, unique and yet relatable. If we’re right, our art will prosper. The ecosystem as well.

Gratitudni!
(Gratitude)

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Poetry by Tara Zafft

Rodin’s Hand

I stare at a black canvas long
enough to just make out
a shadow of a hand, the hand
from The Kiss
the hand in the middle
the hand holding the left thigh
were it not for that hand
she might fall, I am always drawn
to the hand when I see the bronze
I am not drawn to the kiss, I see the
tender holding reminding
me of holding I have had
holding I have not
had, and now thirty years after seeing
the kiss in Paris
at Rodin’s home
I see myself in the reflection
in the black of the paint
and wonder
if the holding
has always been 
me.

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Prizes/Awards/Stipends Winter ‘24

Zoetrope: All-Story prizes of $1,000, $500, and $250, plus publication in the large format magazine. They accept all genres of literary fiction and welcome simultaneous submissions. $1k, $.5k, $.25k + Pub. $30 Fee. DEADLINE OCTOBER 1

Open Season Awards give $2,000 in each genre (f, p, nf) and publication in The Malahat Review. The magazine has been one of Canada’s leading literary journals since 1967.  $2k + Pub. $30 fee.  DEADLINE NOVEMBER 1

EPHEMERA’S RESIDENCY: Support Ephemera. Support your practice.

• We’ve teamed up with Good Contrivance Farm for a 3rd time! We’re sponsoring up to two (2) writers each for a 1-week stay and a travel stipend to the Good Contrivance Farm Residency in Maryland.

  • 1 and up to 2 applicants will be chosen after submissions close

  • 1-week on the farm per person (valued at ~$900)

  • $200 stipend

  • Total Value: $1100

  • $30 application fee (for early applicants before July 31) $40 thereafter

or

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Music: Khotin