Ephemera Newsletter Iss Dec.3

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

“When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them (children).”
—Pablo Picasso

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, priatelia! (Slovak for “friends”).

Dear Readers,

Some Housekeeping Notes:

• This letter may get cut off by email providers. Please make sure to click through for the full experience. Also, please like!

• This week’s letter is for Paid Subscribers w/ a free preview.

• If you are a free subscriber, we’d love it if you considered joining us. Please read our post on going paid here.

• This issue is themed: Perspectives: The lens of Childhood.

• Our usual order has been altered slightly.

• We will be taking one week off this month on the 29th and resume in 2023!

Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo, Xiè xiè.

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Prizes/Awards/Stipends Winter ‘22

(NF book contest, Poetry Mag Contest, and All genre Flash Contest final calls)

EP/UW Bothell MFA Book Contest Awards $1,000 & publication by Essay Press for a full-length work of nonfiction. They look for work that is traditional as well as interdisciplinary and genre-bending. Judge is Amaranth Borsuk. $1k + Pub. $20 fee. Deadline December 31

Crosswinds Poetry Award 3 cash prizes starting at $1,000 and publication for a poem judge by state poet laureates. The annual prize has published the work of winners & runners up in the magazine since 2016. $1k / $500 / $250 + Pub. $20 fee.  Deadline December 31

We highly recommend friend of Ephemera Showcase for regular and prize submissions. Please consider supporting this new Substack-based journal seeking to look deeper into short work and author’s intentions from their own perspective.

Showcase Freewrite Prize $100 honorarium, publication and a Traveler typewriter ($600 value) each for a work of poetry and flash prose. Showcase pairs work with analysis and interview from the writer. $100 + Typewriter. $15 fee. Deadline Dec 31

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Holiday Creative Sponsor: Freewrite

The Freewrite reminds us of playing with typewriters when kids, imagining what it might be like to write a book.

One of the reasons we like this new tool is not only that it’s functional, but that it’s also playful and nostalgic in a way.

It serves a physical purpose of distraction-free writing, but also a psychological purpose, sort of, it’s safe and fun to dream again.

Please have a look and support Ephemera in so doing. Enjoy!

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Ephemera

Why when the days shorten do we celebrate instead of mourn? It might be because there’s an inherent nostalgia that sets in as the sun dives earlier and earlier, staying aloft for precious little hours. We’ve already experienced the earliest sunset! (Dec 7) and now we torpedo toward the fewest hours of light (Solstice). We rejoice so that we do not mourn. We celebrate so that we might be brave. We give thanks, visit family and close friends, bring cheer, or at least togetherness so that we might stave off the cold, the all too real truths about a harsh nature but for our heat and food stores (and not everyone has this, still!). Amidst celebration, however, there’s room—we’d argue, a need—for internal reflection. A taking stock of time as related to self. Nostalgia is the yearning for, the angst at having been young (or younger) and remembering in earnest the beings that we once were. One thing we all have in common before maturation cleaves us is childhood. Ponder and weigh, for a moment, if you will.

Addend us to your practice, whether craft, reading, general knowledge or inspiration! Ephemera writes with you in mind: 3 zines, 3 opportunities, 3 jobs. This week, we look at childhood, nostalgia, and how we might utilize our past selves for content and perspective. Apropos, we discus Arcade Fire’s well known song about childhood ending, as well as the absurdly famous Pablo Picasso, how he learned to perceive and portray art as a child. Close to our heart is this week’s Interesante, an article about The Velveteen Rabbit. We’re promoting the old maxim, know thy self, expanding interpretation to essentialize that which inspires us to remember past selves, our childhood in particular.

We are our own lambs. Such is the nature of childhood cum adulthood. Pressure and development give way to change and growth at the sacrifice of something that attaches to our core. Oh what pain and potentiality, yet rife with emotional richness, truths about the world, what the self must endure to stay relevant, to succeed. We can access this process of yore in search of conflict and tension lessons, mine our past selves in order to more completely know the present, what we face continually in the grown-growing now. We need not be children again, but feel as a child felt, learn the impactful nature of those early changes and seek out similar spaces of the now. Youthful transition has much to give. Yet, let’s also live as we might have been, for a moment, to remember what it was like, that earlier being who we once, to the fullest boundaries of Being, indeed were. That cannot leave us completely. Access it as it was, feel sincerely, denote perhaps as then and through the prism of now, and bring a touch of it back to your art.

“Somethin’ filled up
my heart with nothin’.
Someone told me not to cry.

But now that I’m older,
my heart’s colder,
and I can see that it’s a lie.”
―Arcade Fire, “Wake Up”

Your subscription is our ripening. Buying us tea is the gift of a stuffed bear or bunny.

Vďačnosť!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Featured Music: Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire’s debut album, Funeral, dropped 2004 and made an immediate impact in the indie rock community and more widely, too, later being played by U2 as they came on stage and being reworked to fit into the Spike Jonze film, Where the Wild Things Are. Others have made use of the work in various, unexpected settings, and we can’t help wonder if it’s because of the something-deep-down-unexplained, the something-from-proto-self-development, a core connection to the young selves we once were that bridge the gap of creative messaging and grownup sense-making. People feel it. We feel it. The song seems to be about the necessary tragedy of leaving behind a life of emotional purity and easy archetype while having to and then steeling oneself for the necessary hardship and complexity of adulthood. Our Interesante featurette below hearkens directly to this phenomena in an article recalling The Velveteen Rabbit and that story’s author, how the book debuted around Christmas and how it’s become (and why it’s become) a classic.

While Picasso (see below: this weeks artist) deigned to paint as a child, Arcade Fire accesses the space of childhood transitions. We wonder how these themes might be built into our writing, how we might explore those fertile if but furtive grounds within ourselves, not necessarily writing as child, but writing with our once-child-self in mind, thinking of the other once-child-selves who might connect. The holidays, celebratory and joyful, are also a space for exploration of how we iterate as beings, as bodies, the toll and sacrifice that takes, old toy trains, toy rabbits, dolls and dreams our lambs.

• Lyrics for “Wake Up”

• On topic: Think about Pixar’s movie, Inside Out.

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