Ephemera Newsletter Iss Feb.2
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Enyi! (Igbo for “friends”)
Thanks once again to all who submitted to poetry in December for our February issues and especially to our finalist, Ashley Williamson, poet for the month of February! 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 Ashley’s work.
On to our standard content matters: Won’t you please check out last week’s issue if you missed it.
And here are some reminders/announcements:
Good Contrivance Farm Residency Selection: Winner of the contest is Monique Harris, who will be staying at the farm at the end of May of this year. She will be staying for 5 nights for free and we will send her a $200 travel stipend upon her arrival. Thanks again to everyone who submitted last fall. We’ll be running the program again this summer! The farm is a lovely place and the owners are good people. Paid subscribers to Ephemera at the Yearly level can submit for free each year as a perk (along with submitting to poetry and other programs for free).
Call For Submissions: We are open for April now. Feb 29 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 the month). 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:
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Junk Culture and his sampled and mashed-up track “West Coast.”
Thoughts on Banksy’s art.
February’s poet, Ashley Williamson and her 2nd of four poems, “Tempus Mysterium”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
**Sponsor: Good Contrivance Farm — Stay at the good contrivance farm year round for a reasonable rate and get some writing done! They also have workshops and other programming to check out.
More ephemera:
Interesante selection, philosophies and razors useful for thinking about ourselves and therefore our characters;
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.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Artists such as Banksy and music from groups such as Junk Culture engage in a kind of mash-up creation. Things that exist, whether they’re objects, other artworks, or ambient noises can be captured and integrated into a new piece. We’re very caught up in thinking on this. How does borrowing and recreation work in writing? Can we, and, if we can, how do we sufficiently dress up repurposed art and objects and lines and ideas? Our presupposition is yes, as long as the threshold for creating new work is crossed or the original quoted should the work heavily rely on the original. But the boundaries are not defined and the way to homage and repurpose is not established. We must be considerate and careful. To do so, we must really think on how others have done it and train our minds to be able to see in this way. For writers, the type of borrowing might lean more toward craft techniques and styles, how words are juxtaposed in line, how edits and cuts and leaps are made, how voice is rendered, how emotion is conveyed without being didactic. In the process of considering and debating, an opportunity for creative thought emerges, one that can be defined because it will be different for every individual. Run with it, whatever ‘it’ you got.
“Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.”
—Banksy (or so goes the attribution)
Invent as you go. Liberate yourself to think and feel freely, first without boundary. Repeat with some ground rules. Iterate. Write down new iterations. Believe in each thought-life as purely as possible. Destroy it later if that helps. Cut and reuse. You might get good lines from this. We’re insisting at minimum you’ll get new thoughts and some possible heuristics such that, if you truly entertain them, particularly if you revisit, pathways within your at-your-desk writing-time will open beyond what you expected. New ideas will form. Interactions and linkages you may have not seen. Repurpose an old poem in a short story and turn it into something it was never meant to be but, now that it’s been Banksified, it can lord chimeric over a new text or mix in pretty as a couple of linked sounds woven right in a sonic tapestry a la Junk Culture. Maybe all of this is simply seed collection. Lots of seeds. We work our asses off to plant them in various ways (ground, beds, boxes, verticals, pots). Later they grow. Then we cut and move and graft. They may grow again. A season passes. The same. New buds. New fruits. Entangled roots. We’re somewhere we couldn’t have expected, but we have something nourishing and beautiful beyond our capacity to have built by design. What we’re saying might be something like, your tools are the intentional you. Your products the application of your honed skills intuitively calibrated against however your subconscious sense of art.
Ekele
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Ashley Williamson
SPONSOR: Good Contrivance Farm
A great retreat with a solid, vetted mission, Good Contrivance Farm is an idyllic farm in a convenient location for the Eastern seaboard. It’s run by writers and professors, so they understand the needs of writers looking for creative space. We hope you’ll take a look. They offer different types of stays on the property as well as classes. We partner with them for Ephemera’s residency program and have now awarded 3 residencies. From their site:
“All proceeds go to the support of our 501-C3 non-profit, focused on the restoration of Good Contrivance Farm as part of our mission to promote the preservation and restoration of historic family farms.
Good Contrivance Farm comprises six-acres that contain a large kitchen garden, a chicken run, many historic outbuildings, open fields, many lovely flower beds, and many places to sit and relax. The farm is conveniently located near major shopping areas and highways and is 35 minutes from BWI airport.”
Music: Junk Culture
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