Ephemera Newsletter Iss Dec.1
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter free edition, Prieteni (Romanian for “friends”)
Thank you to all who submitted to poetry in October for our December issues and especially to our finalist, Rachel Beachy who will be the poet for the month of December! You can review her poems altogether once they publish as well as artist statement and bio on this dedicated post on our Substack page. We thank you for checking out Rachel’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:
Yearly Subscription Drive:
We hope you’ll read through our annual subscription drive letter. It’s been a beautiful ride producing 4 letters a month along with extras here and there for going on 3+ years, as well as administering a poetry contest and two residencies. We’ve paid out $3,800 for poets and a couple thousand additionally for our residencies!Ephemera shares interesting articles and links quotes from artists, musicians, and writers to thinking on being a creative mind. We share music, thoughts on craft and the practice of being a writer, important book recommendations, journals we like, and timely links to prizes and grants. Ephemera is eclectic and germane creative miscellany!
Please consider upgrading to paid to have full access to every issue. Paid subscribers can submit to poetry for free. And yearly paid subscribers can submit to residencies for free or discounted.
Ephemera is brought to you by: Volume 0
From Volume 0’s website:
“We like stories offbeat and fun in a slightly naughty way. So expect bad behavior, adult themes and a bit of menace. You might not like all of these stories. But we certainly don’t think you’ll be bored.”
This is an interesting approach to promoting fiction. Maybe they can revive the public’s interest with some edgy work packaged in shorter formats. We’ve read several stories from their latest issue and were intrigued! Check out Volume 0 from Book of the Month!
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Bastien Dausse’s acrobatic and dance art using counterweights
Listening to Boards of Canada and the changeling, ambient track “Seven Forty Seven”
September’s poet, Rachel Beachy’s first of four poems, “The Butterfly Effect”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
More ephemera: check out our Interesante Section, where we present an article or site or interesting bit of info—sometimes a study, sometimes a video, sometimes an interactive site, sometimes an experiment.
In this issue, we present an article from NYT about Alice Munro and her, unfortunately, now-tainted legacy. It’s an important read for folks on several fronts, dealing with family history, abuse, the will to creativity and more.
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Last Month’s Free Issue.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Just before the holidays, such as they are and are called, we want to live loudly for a moment or two, before the malaise, the needed quiet, the bouts of family and friends (hopefully) sandwiched between quiet sessions at our desks—the time-off-ness of holidays is ours to own and writers need their space. We want to call this time, these times, layered, maybe in the way of a Boards of Canada track, a sample here, a loop (a repetition at the desk, another note of intrigue at a party there. Variegated living. Wild and controlled. Think of the desk as our counterweight. As much as we stray, we’re as indebted to the chair. (Our butts certainly owe interest at this point, which is coming due).
“It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness.”
—Isamu Noguchi, Sculptor
We counterweight in order to feel light. We live brave and wild and unabashed (in a writerly sense) because we have the space of our selves to return to. Yes, there’s that. But hold on to that weight and bring it with you to the craft work. Maybe without sound—sure, even the stills—watch this week’s artist jump and float and twist attached to a seesaw of sorts. He’s dancing as if on the moon. In some ways we want to consider quickness, lightness of prose as a point of order—even with dark or heavy themes. Letters can grow ponderous. But watch our artist. Let the movements sink in. Maybe play a Boards of Canada track while you watch. We swear, there’s a state to be reached in that process (which makes us think of listening to Tim Hecker while watching Nosferatu the original silent flick, or, more commonly known, Pink Floyd’s Darkside over a muted Wizard of Oz). Maybe don’t learn to speak it. Maybe just experience and feel it. Intuit it. Let it seep in, don’t name it, don’t “know” it with the academic mind, but nonetheless look to apply the “unknown” lessons. Look to float at the behest of a counterweight.
Recunoştinţă
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Rachel Beachy
The Butterfly Effect Our daughter wraps the blanket around her shoulders pretends to be a butterfly a delicate thing how I once turned left (I could have turned right) onto his street.
Music: Boards of Canada
Boards of Canada are a sibling duo, two brothers from Scotland, Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin Sandison, who many people seem to know despite their working in electronic music. Normally, we reserve our first issue of the month for a bigger act, but BOC carry a name recognition and we’d been thinking about them for a while. Despite the genre, which usually garners fewer listeners—and maybe because they formed in the 90s and had been plugging away prior to their arrival with their first studio album in 98—BOC garners 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify, which dwarfs the other ambient/electro acts we’ve discussed in the past. They’re relatively popular is all, which is good for the genre; they often serve as an entry. We like them and the space for thinking and writing.
“We have this system of working where we never work in a linear fashion. We work parallel on lots and lots of music at once.”
—BOC on Pitchforkmedia.com
If you read their interviews or listen to them speak, they tend to dart about. They’re quippy. And they self-describe as having short and divergent attention spans. Sometimes this can be a hindrance to the creative process. But if you allow yourself the space to be as you might—maybe at some point hone the psychological processes of the self to be able to control a wild mind—you can layer on top of projects over time, rather than building one complex at a time. This can work. Certainly we have ten poems that we might return to here and there, growing them by the bye until, one day, they’ve arrived. We can hear the diverse interest in BOC’s music, the sound progressions, sometimes within a song, but certainly across albums if you have time for a lengthy listening session. Long form writing leaves us the space to be disparate in some regards. We don’t always have to have a straight and narrow approach to a story or novel. Everything the same for 30-300 pages.
We like this track. The sound progression reminds us of a story. The volume, the emphasis shifting, the crescendos and dips. Expanded to an hour+ maybe these type of track maps a story. Maybe in microcosm it maps an epic. What does the aforementioned owe to? Like other bands in this space, they use layering and samples, loops, fade-ins and outs, all with the effect of a sense of the recording decaying—which seems to owe to their mixed use of analog and digital equipment, and, in fact, deliberate debasement of the sound in some capacity. All of this describes, perhaps, a texture, but we mean that in the deepest of sense—the crust of the earth sense whereby you have miles of depressions and trenches, miles of mountains, and all manner of ecosystem and geography in between. Diverse. Living. Voicey. This is some of what we want to effect as writers.
Writers Submit: 3 Magazines
A straightforward magazine with a straightforward name. The magazine was founded in 1972 and focuses on experimental work to bring it to a wider audience.They publish emerging and established authors in fiction. DEADLINE JANUARY 15
An inclusive magazine that reads in all genres. They are a biannual publication with editors in Louisville, Kentucky, and Brooklyn, New York. They look for intersectional work, with a socio-political, cultural, or artistic point-of-view. DEADLINE ROLLING
A weekly online journal with a strong web presence that feels like walking through a very cool bookstore. They read in all genres and have published 71 editions, alongside weekly offerings. They also have a musical list in its 37th edition. ROLLING
Weekly Artist: Bastien Dausse
This performance and acrobatics-based artist is a must watch. Bastien Dausse reminds us of street performers who’ve obtained an ill-gotten wisdom that they yet share with their onlookers with cautious love: the money would be nice but it’s the promise of eyes-on and your reciprocation that motivates them most. Perhaps Dausse manifests an old-world burlesque, a Chaplin-like gravitas, the tramp, the cheeky imp of a shorter man who might pick your pocket but will make a spectacle of it and give you back your cash as long as people applaud. The reason these sorts of folks are interesting to us is, of course, their movements—they move as smooth and as erratically as jazz, as the performative case may be. Too, and perhaps foremost—particularly in the case of Dausse—everything they do is balanced.
Quite literally, in these flying and leaping and air-tumbling performances, Dausse attaches himself to a counterweight on a curved piece of metal that we’ve likely all seen in miniature. He floats. He spins. Fast and slow and stalled in the air. He plays with gravity. We watch, thrilled because of the small concern for him coming crashing down, even though this is unlikely to happen. It’s the counterweight we’re after. The necessity of a device to aid the performance, the defiance of reality made so precise and beautiful that the artifice of it disappears. By the disappearance of artifice, by the emergence of the art, we convey a distilled beauty.
“People often ask me if they can try out my devices, as if they were easy, as if they were just forms of gravitational escape. Unfortunately, I have to tell them the truth, explaining that it takes years of acrobatic work. But these reflections are very flattering, because that’s exactly what I’m aiming for, to convey a feeling of weightlessness, a lightness, always in a form of visual minimalism. I’m quite convinced that you can tell a lot with simplicity.”
—Bastien Dausse in nr.world
We recommend watching several videos and looking at the myriad stills you can find. You’re welcome to intuit any lesson that makes sense, but we’re hoping you’ll note the mechanisms described above. How in order to achieve the beauty there is a device, a counterweight, and he hope you’ll connect that to your written craft. For every gambit or framing device, for every flare of language, maneuver of voice, chance with simile, allusion or elision, there’s a cost; there’s a way by which we have to “get away with it” so to speak. We can see this fact readily with characters. Characters that make wild or overly convenient decisions do not come across as realistic or well rendered. They need to have a history, a reason, a process—they need to be counterweighted in one way or another. The dance the writer performs on the page we see as akin to Dausse and his weightless movements. Our job is to hide the device, for our would-be onlookers dislike the presence of artifice.
Watch this youtube video and others.
Interview with nr.world
Interesante: About Munro — Good&Bad
From: NYTimes.com
— (1 min to Forever)
…it shows how an artistic sensibility, a disposition to see other people as grist for transformation, can give rise to a frigid disengagement.
This is an important read that delves into the life of Alice Munro with the access point being her, at best silence, on the molestation of her daughter by her husband. The article goes into the occurrences, the testimony of Munro’s children—very recently—and Munro’s writing. We’re left with the depiction of someone who wants to be a great writer at the cost of pilfering the calamity in her own life, even that which struck her children and that which she overlooked for the purpose of her craft if not induced, along with the fragility of her beingness and her related needs. It’s terribly interesting and explosive in several ways. —Read the Full Piece
Prizes/Awards/Stipends Winter ‘24
Center For Book Arts Chapbook Contest $500 and A Week Long Residency for a poetry chapbook. Also: 10 copies, $500 stipend to participate in a reading, and runners up receive $250. $500 + Residency. $30 Fee DEADLINE DECEMBER 20
The Caterpillar Prize awards €1,000, €500, €250 and publication in the Irish Times for one winning poem and two runners up written by an adult for children.
€1K/€.5K/€.25K + Pub. €15 Fee. DEADLINE MARCH 31
W.Y. Boyd Literary Award awards $5,000 for the best fiction written about any time of American war. The prize was founded in 1997 and hosted by The American Library Association. $5k award. No fee. DEADLINE DECEMBER 31
Bookstore: Guides, Gifts & Classics
Please consider supporting our letter and literature by buying books. It helps us and others! Bookstore via Bookshop.
Alice Munro (Controversially) — Too Much Happiness Booker Winner:
Last Month Rivka Galchen — we’re fans — in a collection of essays:
»»»Remember last week’s letter has important deadlines!«««
Thank you for subscribing to Ephemera. We appreciate your support very much! It means a lot to have you as a reader and paid subscriber. We look forward to growing the letter and bringing you new content and conversation along side our staples. At present, we’re considering creating a book volume containing a large part of our content, including artwork and essays. We’re also considering other projects, such as a monthly podcast, mini-videos, and a Q&A with our editors. Let us know if you have any ideas on how we can improve.
~~~La Revedere~~~
(Goodbye)
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Metropolis: Copywriter. FT. 3 Yrs exp + Samples. $100k. NYC.
Texas State U: Literary Curator. 4+Yrs Exp. MA. ~$85k. San Marcos, TX.
Veracity Insurance: CopyEd. FT. BA+. 5+ yrs exp. ~$85k. Remote or Utah.
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