Ephemera Newsletter Iss July.2

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, prijatelji! (Bosnian for “friends”).

We offer free-readers and newcomers a portion of this issue. Behind the paywall find the features as marked below. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. We are reader supported. And mark this edition by announcing we’ve become a Substack Bestseller!

Thank you to our paid subscribers! This means we’ve reached 100 which is putting us on the path to sustainability. We’re very grateful to you. Bless you!

Check out last week’s letter if you missed it. And here are some reminders:

• Call For Subscriptions and Submissions: If you are a paid subscriber to Ephemera, you can submit to poetry @ Ephemera for free as a membership perk! 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. Now accepting submissions for the August issue.

In Brief…this week’s features:

• Thoughts on Music from Kodo, a Japanese drum ensemble with a truly unique sound and stellar performances.

• Thoughts on art from Tatsuya Tanaka, a micro-scene creating Japanese artist.

• July’s poet Heidi Kasa and her poem “The Bullet Cures”

• Our weekly lists:

  • 3 magazines with open calls

  • 3 awards/prizes

  • 3 recent job listings for editors and writers.

• More ephemera: check out an Interesante article on the psychology of jealousy; Book recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!

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

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Ephemera

Dear Readers,

We’re jealous, we’re jealous, we’re jealous…jealous of the neighbor and their exquisite front yard, that lovely oh so big home atop the hill replete with forever-blooming rose garden and perfection-patina-ed guest house (green clay roof tiles on their garage!)…oh, not to be outdone, jealous of the lake house our cousin has, Southerners jealous of the weather in Maine during the summer, Northerners jealous of Floridian flyers escaping the winter…jealous of that couple’s joie de vivre, jealous of that stranger’s fashion, of so-and-so’s wit and wisdom…hair-pulling, foot-stomping jealousy!…that suspiciously prolific writer in our reading group, of how many poems so-and-so has published, that just-rightness of their turns of phrase…maddening updates, posts, and too-perfect, too-staged (why can’t that be me!?) photographs!…their music talent…their way with public speaking…they them theirs…jealousy! Whatever, it’s the heat, really, gripping too tightly…if only we were to stalk so-and-so, we’d know how, how! Jealousy. Watch out for this ailment, the false succor in dabbling and in skirting the edges of what might lead us there. Jealousy. No strings, no breadcrumbs, no limited hangouts with… Instead, let’s think of our personal health, the well-being of our community, of the undergirding forces of the universe when we pursue gratefulness and admiration instead, particularly during these scorching months when the fire in our bellies ought lead us into our own romps and gambols, cafes and AC-ed writing nooks. Experience! Be you, jealous of your time and ambitions only…

“The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others.”
—From Today’s Interesante Article (see below)

And yet…how sweet a motivator, how epic a destroyer!…How enticing a theme! What a spectacle to make out of jealously for the sake of allegory and satire. How cruel of us to imbue a character with so potent a wrecking ball. How deliciously schadenfreude the self destruction of a character too-great, grandiose and possessed of hubris turned jealous of a lover, of another, of the glassy blue moon, of the handsome rising sun. How fun are complaint poems? How our narratives bop and brim with energy, with pace, burst at the sentence-seems with verve when the jealous figure takes the lead. Let’s not forget how to be the semi-evil maestros we ought be when it comes to our pages. Pulling on terrible strings for our readers—but with purity and grace, of course. Part of what we will for our writing and creative cohort is sculpted control of all facets of writing as derived in many ways but certainly and importantly as a result of (though not limited to) the pursuit of self-knowledge and the practice of self-control. Know the all of a vice; its internal burn and external scald. But behave genteelly. Let your characters, voices, and literary surrogates bedevil. Master this and have a greedy grin for your execrable artistry and escritorial cunning. In art, be capable of bad. Succeed, and we’ll reward you with much earned glower (wink-wink).

Sa zahvalnošću!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Poetry by Heidi Kasa

The Bullet Cures

“a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back”
-K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

The bullet asks to be the fire that melts it.

The bullet asks to be given back, returned to the earth. To become a bridge, a garden gate, a plant liner. A tent, enclosing instead of burying. A ring that keeps going and going, running from itself and into itself like wisdom, like love.

The bullet asks to be the cure. To turn into the helmet saving a head from crushing. To create the structured bones of a man-made waterfall. The bullet wants to be a shield. To be shingles on a roof. Provide cover. The bullet aches to serve a higher purpose. To be a wheelbarrow distributing seeds. To be the pin in your glasses, the tiny one that holds the whole thing together. To be as cold as an ice cream scoop, as warm as a pacemaker. To become what ticks in your watch.

The bullet asks to crumble in pieces. To be delicate like lace or a spiderweb. To transform into the jar or the candle it holds. To flicker and fade slowly, liquefy as it’s consumed. To live as an outdoor chair, abandoned. To die as one. Its rust the dirt reclaiming its victim.

The bullet wants to be the echo, not be echoed. The bullet wants to forget itself, to forget it was ever there.

The bullet asks to rest, to rest. To rest.

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Coming Soon… Good Contrivance Farm

Last year Ephemera co-sponsored a residency program with Good Contrivance Farms where we sent a travel stipend to two applications who also received a 1 week stay at the farms. We’re bringing back this successful program! Applications will open the end of July and we will select 2 folks (i.e. 2 separate individuals) to receive the residency sponsorship (5 days at Good Contrivance Farm) and each will receive the travel stipend of $200. Please stay tuned!

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Writers Submit: Three Magazines