Ephemera Newsletter Iss Dec.4

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, asxaabta! (Somali 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.

• We’ve also published to archives for paid subscribers:

  • Artists of 2022

  • Music of 2022

• 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

(Poetry Book Prize, Several Writer Grants, Showcase Prize)

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

Michael Waters Poetry Prize $5,000 and publication for one manuscript of poetry. The prize is administered by University of Southern Indiana. The annual prize has published one book per year since 2013. $5k + Pub. $30 fee. Deadline February 1

Courage to Write Grants give seven grants of $7,000 in all genres for works in progress. There are also ten Writer of Note $1,500 grants. The de Groot Foundation has awarded hundreds of grants to writers. $7k grant. $22 fee. Deadline February 12

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Ephemera

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, good tidings to others, happy holidays and pleasant solstice—the darkest day is behind us and now we grow lighter and lighter! During these times, and the next week, we like to take stock of our craft, sit alone for a few hours with our thoughts, and mull our projects and writing goals so as to reorient and privilege, in the new year, project completion. We like to consume lots of media and take note of the stories being told, the books being published, what the poetry and fiction landscapes look like, where they’re headed. All the books we’ve not yet gotten to we’ll crack open and explore piecemeal—the first 20 pages of a novel, the first few poems in a collection—and note all that we can about the craft, emotionalism, figurative language and everything else. Sampling has many merits, can reveal techniques and trends, internal motivations and fires as well. Surveys of writing are useful and a tool as much as reading end to end. Remix, mashup, learn the parts as well as the whole. Enjoy widely.

Ephemera writes with you in mind: 3 zines, 3 opportunities, 3 jobs. This week, we look at re-mixing and borrowing, at surveying piecemeal as a technique for growth. Apropos, we discus DJ Sickick, mashup artist extraordinaire with a distinct individual flair who stitches well-known riffs and musical bits into unique jam, and ceramacist Stephanie H Shih, chronicler of Asian immigrant diasporas through the replication of household and consumable food products. Check an important definition below and a book rec. Don’t be afraid to treat drafting like collage, to learn by studying and borrowing components of your favorites, to muck about and play.

Reading scrap by scrap…isolate sections, read in smaller sessions, hop from book to book, piece to piece, opening to opening, closing stanza to closing stanza. In essence, turn yourself into an editor on occasion (god forbid always, never being able to turn it off!) or reading critic, literary analyst. Different eyes will prove useful for your own work, lenses upon lenses like so many microscope magnifications. Reading piecemeal, surveying, will help with invention, will improve your homage-ability, borrowing clout and ultimately, make you homageable. Contexts, meta-references contain a layered beauty when executed precisely, with exactitude. Consume to gain breadth. Notate to lock in lessons. Sleep on it to forget what you know. Then come back to the nook with vigor and a new tool kit. Use your editorial lenses to hone and hedge against too much similarity, inopportune timing, not enough of your own verve.

Your subscription is our dance party. Buying us tea is the gift of song.

Mahad!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Holiday Creative Sponsor: Freewrite

The new old tech. Much like the devices DJ-producers use, an amalgam of new and old, the Freewrite is old-timey newfangledness. It’s techno-retro. It’s cool and it works. Comfortable typing, portability, distraction cancelling. It looks like you could produce writing to dance to!

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

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Featured Music: Sickick