Ephemera Newsletter Iss July.3
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter free edition, Dost Sabha! (Maithili for “friends”)
The early deadline for our sponsored residency has passed. The final deadline is August 31. Please join us to support the letter so we can continue to bring weird tidbits, mini essays, artists and music from a writerly lens, opportunities and other literary and creative ephemera.
We hope you’ll read our poet for July, Jennifer Gauthier, whose work, along with her artist statement and bio, can be viewed on this dedicated post on our Substack page. We thank you for checking out Jennifer’s work.
On to our standard content matters and reminders:
Invitation to Submit: We have extended the deadline for the September issues until August 5th. Right now, there are 40 submissions and we cap submissions at 100. 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 to Ephemera’s full letter. Learn more or:
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Gary Wong’s intricate abecedarian painting and an essay by Gregory de la Haba.
Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen’s hidden pop-gem guilty goodie, “Run Away With Me.”
July’s poet, Jennifer Gauthier third of four poems, “Ant Dreams”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
Interesante: In this issue, we look into
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Last Issue, Jul.1 which is free for all subscribers. Read here.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Sometimes in the summer we’re a little bit inscrutable to ourselves. The outward versions who run from one thing to the next unbridled, a bit wild, impulse motivated. Run and run away with. Be wild. Hold hands and endeavor in whatever way enables you most to glow. By now, you’ll have had your writing practice and habits solidified and defying them will not carry the same cost as it might at other times. Perhaps running in this sense can be incorporated into that practice, into that routine. In a way, these periods of doing and being without too much structure (or any) contribute to our creative lives and our relationship with our selves. We don’t know what we were doing June through much of July. Here and here and then there and then with them and then alone again, winding and wilding, back home and back out, running in a darkened art exhibit in the basement of DIA Beacon, romping through a botanical garden in the Berkshires, on the New York streets during a storm, rain whipping sideways, lost as to where to take cover, running, then down south down the banks of a shallow stream slippery and rocky but in need of a closer look at the second largest snapping turtle—dubbed snap-dragon—we’d ever seen, back in town at a dinner party listening and longing to be moved to romantically abscond…
“I was told once by a famous artist that when you obscure something, people are curious to see what’s behind it.”
—Gary Wong, interview in cartwheelart.com
See yourself in these ways, at moments as a being bust being. Let yourself be obscure to yourself from time to time. Particularly in these ways, in the ways of a hot-hot July where you need to move about like bare feet on hot pool-side concrete; get where you’re going each time you need to get and get moving and get out of your head because, hot-hot-oooh-hot. This week’s artist gives us some insight into why we might become briefly unknown to ourselves, pursuing useful impulse and action: if you allow for some obscurity into your being, you’ll rediscover a curiosity for your thoughts and actions and interests. It’s a technique. Maybe a trick. But it makes sense in the way of fasts and resets. Be and do and don’t let your analytical self too close in the moment. Be unknown for a time and then, back when the months slow and the inside feels like the place to be, you can think about and wonder anew at who you were and maybe who you became. Put up a screen and later try to get at what was behind it. A technique for the page. A philosophy of self practice. Be a sinner unto yourself in secret. Then run and find out what that was all about.
Aabhar!
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Jennifer Gauthier
Ant Dreams Drunk on honeysuckle fumes and blinded by the bottle tree, blue glass gashing – I stumbled, stubbed my toe, and fell. Nose to nose with a line of ants I lie prone and with singular purpose they carry me off like a bit of leaf, to their sandy hill. Presented to the Queen, I falter, I don’t speak ant, so I curtsy deferentially with a polite smile. Comforted by their orderly industriousness, (insect OCD?) I fit in, though outsized for the colony. I’d like to stay and try a bit of cake, carried off, from a nearby picnic, but it’s time to go. When I open my eyes, I’m back on the sidewalk, with a scrape on my knee and the sun still high, ants absent.
Music: Carly Rae Jepsen
Another running-themed song; we’re clearly interested in the romance of getting away with a lover on a moment’s notice. (See Issue July.1 for our essay on Vampire Weekend’s “Run.”)
The introverted Carly Rae Jepsen is a Canadian pop singer. She has a knack for distilling catchy, cutesy pop-songs into fun, lyrically simple tracks, see: “Call Me Maybe.” And she’s got a sense of humor, irony even. This makes her, as far as we can tell—we’re not pop music people and don’t follow those musicians apart from the occasional guilty listen—a bit of a rarity and also extremely appealing. The songs we like of hers are often delivered from the perspective of a shy girl, in her head, listening to her heart, romantically speaking, and wishing for a mutual connection. Was she in our head during our teenage years? Possibly. She might have access to telepathic powers. In any case, in terms of popularity, this track is one of her less-known bigger songs, per Spotify listens data—“Call Me Maybe,” has 1.4 billion listens and this track has a mere 167 million.
But, we’re telling you. You might yet to have become obsessed.
This dance-pop, synth-pop track, bolstered by the key contribution of a saxophone, particularly for those heightened “Run away with me” moments, is memorable and sort of fantastic. It’s a great road trip track. It’s great to play after a party or dinner or encounter with an almost realized, not yet there, hopefully soon to be requited, though it could go sideways crush and you didn’t quite connect but you likely did more than you think and now you’re trapped in your feels driving or training home with nothing much to do but obsess and rather than obsessing you day-dream the perfect getaway at the perfect moment of this just-had encounter and maybe there’s a little fiction in there in terms of how steamy your repartee was and maybe you’re imbuing their flirtation with more meaning and even your signals with greater significance than your hasty glances or too-brief touches could possibly convey, but your trapped and rather than spiral into self-doubting oblivion you instead dream up this fantasy of running away with the crush after a secretive intense exchange during the party where you found them alone in a dark corner on accident/on purpose and now your letting lose in the car—the lights dim suddenly under a bridge or passing through a tunnel—and you’re belting “I’ll be your sinner in secret when the lights go out,” meanwhile the bass is bumping and that saxophone is wailing and the tempo has jumped and there’s a new euphoric quality you’ve just discovered sort of through your pores, sort of heart-gut-nexus-induced, and definitely co-experienced as epiphanic light at the crown of your inner mind.
“Baby, take me to the feelin'
I'll be your sinner in secret
When the lights go out
Run away with me, run away with me”
—Carly Rae Jepsen
You gotta let yourself go with these types of songs. A hot, running-themed, impassioned July should be the perfect time.
But what can we take from this other than guilty pleasure and a feeling of nostalgia for those days when these types of songs might have defined our lives in one way or another? To us, these types of pop songs with dramatic choruses that seem to elevate above the rest of track remind us of epiphanic moments in writing—those poems that end with this “whoa” feeling while your gut is butterflying. You feel seen. You feel like you’ve penetrated something deep and true about self or existence, a true realization or coming to terms with a long unknown thing now forever explained. In Jepsen’s case, maybe it’s a Portrait Of A The Artist As A Young Man epiphany—a sudden spiritual realization connecting the self with a feeling of knowing or beauty about something commonplace. We love these moments in literature. We can study even vulgar pop songs that deliver on this front to garner how to build up to the moment and how and when to deliver the epiphanic blow. Language might want to be quiet and slow and hasten toward a loud to louder moment where we must deliver something profound. Oh, writer, take us to the feeling. Demand we run away with you.
Prizes/Awards/Stipends Winter ‘24
Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest awards $1,000 and publication w/ 20 copies to a chapbook of poetry. Judge this year is Brody Parrish Craig. This prize has been operating since 2019. $1k + Pub + 20 copies. $30 fee. DEADLINE AUGUST 16
Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel awards $1,000 and publication to a work of experimental fiction. Hosted by the Journal of Experimental Fiction which has published over 20 novels. $1k + Pub. $25 fee. DEADLINE AUGUST 31
EPHEMERA’S RESIDENCY:
Good Contrivance Farm
Ephemera sponsors one (1) and up to two (2) writers each for a 1-week stay and a travel stipend to the Good Contrivance Farm Residency in Maryland.
1 and up to 2 applicants will be chosen after submissions close
1-week on the farm per person (valued at ~$900)
$200 travel stipend
or
Weekly Artist: Gary Wong
Gary Wong is an accomplished jazz musician as well as painter, a leathery guy who grew up adjacent and sometimes intermixing with the so-called streets of L.A. He paints in two modes, from what we know—this lovely yet cryptic text-art, and a more figure-driven, narrative art that centers around his identity (not featured in this letter). Multi-talented and multi-interested, it took him some time to arrive where he is, particularly after a not-so-focused youth and early adulthood. We can relate in many ways. We feel like the writer can often relate, for in most cases, even when writers knew what they wanted to do at an early age, it takes a decade of bad writing, false starts, and living a little before one’s writing can mature—along the way, given the impossibility of starting, we trip up, lose focus, live more than work, work more than write, and in many ways fumble numerous projects. But we’re all good now, aren’t we?
In any case, Wong came to our attention through our recent hook-up with artist Gregory de la Haba, a Queens-based artist who we wrote about earlier this summer and whose studio we visited as luck would have it one rainy day in NYC. De la Haba was working on an essay and sent it our way prior to its publication on his website recently. We’ve read his work before and really love the artist’s take on the artist. He’s a great writer. And so, we present you a portion of his recent piece on Gary Wong with a link to the full essay on his website. He really captures the spirit of Wong’s life and upbringing and coming into his own. We particularly like the integration of Wong’s musicianship, with his painting, with a learning disability that has Wong seeing the world differently. Follow this link for Gregory’s full essay and keep reading for the excerpt.
“I find in my painting that I’m dealing with visual vibrations. With music, it’s aural vibrations, and with writing, it creates another vibration. They all involve the creative process, and the creative process is interchangeable.”
―Gary Wong, Interview with cartwheelart.com
From Gregory:
What his eyes lacked in interpreting color, his ears made up for in hearing tone and differentiating nuance in sound. And his dyslexia was compensated with and complemented by an uncanny ability for musical and creative improvisation, both on stage and in the studio. The musicality of sounds first heard and observed from the alcove above 21st street can be seen as his first call and response moment, his tutorial in life’s auditory overtures (God’s signaling)-- in comprehending dissonance, in layering, and in harmonic overtones–where the illogical spontaneity of life’s theater sounded perfectly logical and orchestrated. The alcove sessions became the foundational impetus for his trajectory into a life filled with moving sounds and impactful visions.
The Roman statesman and philosopher, Marcus Cicero, would have referred to Gary’s paintings as silent poetry. They are the non-verbal, pictorial equivalent of the blues; a visual vernacular of pure expression through feeling life intensely and celebrating that through joy, sadness, or rage. Each stroke of the brush details an emotional gravitas belonging to a poet's ability of transforming the mundane into art.
We refer now to Wong’s paintings, with a few examples. These are not large works, often on heavy, single-sheet, Arches paper, or canvas, and they provide an incantatory visual effect vis-à-vis the pictorial dissimilation of words and frenetic sentencing that separately (unto themselves) go nowhere in the literal sense but roll and tumble off the page in an E.E. Cummings, creative-license-to-reinvent sense. They are painted writings not dissimilar to a poorly crafted run-on sentence but encapsulate the visual equivalent of euphonic verse purposefully rendered to dizzying effect. They are hypnotic ensembles of mesh, an interlacing of typeface that weaves together the same calligraphic power and melodiousness as a treasured medieval manuscript. The Book of Kells, a masterwork in Western Calligraphy, comes to mind. On that note, Wong’s unique font has some semblance of Chinese Calligraphy (Character Writing) fused with Cholo, a west coast style of gang graffiti perfected by Gary Wong’s contemporary, Chaz Bojorquez, the renowned Godfather of Cholo writing. But especially rare is his natural inclination, his rhythmic fluidity, of writing backwards from left to right–like the Renaissance, left-handed maestro, Leonardo DaVinci. Some habits never die.
These painted works also recall ancient palimpsests encoded with something familiar. Due to their masked readability, they appear rather foreign, distant, yet reverberate an emotional effect that hums and awes. What they lack in color they make up for with vibrations. Here are musings of a Bluesman strumming his brush not between “downstroke” and “upstroke” but by casting words-as-markings more akin to hieroglyphs, pictured across the page in linear, exacting precision. The beat is played symbolically via repetition while harmony enters the picture through overlappings, creating a shadowy, three-dimensionality to the work. Tone and color are more subdued, desaturated and in grayish hues or swaths of pure black (ink) and white (paint). Painted refrain and poetic discernment not dulled or impaired by a blurred retina nor from a dampened cerebral cortex. They are masterworks that pack a punch to the viscera. The ink and paint bleed like residual stains of a crime scene; the paper’s pulp embedded with ethereal evidence lifted from humanity’s morbid existence, cutting like scars across the page yet seem to imply: carry on and move forward: keep strumming, keep rock and rolling. His alphabet soup of cacophony has become his “wow.”
They are the visionary manifestations of his iconicity. Synesthetic sonatas of dueling modalities. Pure art that, paraphrasing Aristotle, has been concerned not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be. (More at delahaba.com)
Interview with Wong at Cartwheelart.com
Interesante: Fumigating Book Worms
From: laphamsquarterly.org
— (12 min read)
“In late spring 1928 librarians in the rare book collections at the Huntington Library in Southern California noticed that something was feasting on the volumes in their care”
We found this article to be really interesting, in a book-related and etcetera sort of way, which we tend to enjoy with regard to all things writing. First of all, perhaps naively, we did not realize that the term book worm had a real world and literal corollary, that being a worm that eats paper, leather, glue, and what have you. We could see an indie horror movie made out of these worms gone amok in a contagion sort of way and soon, as we too-late rush to digitize the world’s catalogues, the bugs are threatening to have devoured the whole corpus of humanity. —Read the article.
Writers Submit: 3 Magazines
Publishing four print editions per year alongside online work and reading in all genres. University of Georgia is the longstanding & award winning publisher. A diverse catalog of new & established writers. DEADLINE AUGUST 15
A print journal published by Washington College reading in all genres. They pay $20 per contributor & two copies. All work is considered for their Literary Shade section, which is work in the vein of the documentary Paris is Burning. OPENED AUGUST 1
The recently converted to online magazine was first published in 2014 and has published some of the brightest new writers alongside established voices. They are reading in all genres, and have published over thirty editions. OPENED AUGUST 1
Bookstore: Guides, Gifts & Classics
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Currently Reading: Devotions by Mary Oliver
The Trope Thesaurus:
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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.
~~~Alvida~~~
(Goodbye)
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**Select Job Postings**
ICF: Writing/Editing. FT. MA/4+ Yrs exp. $60k-$105k. Remote/DC.
NightboatBooks: Ed Fellowship. 15 hrs/month for 2yrs. $10k. Remote.
NCAT.edu: Assoc Prof or Prof/Chair Eng. MA/PhD 2-5 yrs exp. $70k-$100k. Greensboro, NC.
Ephemera Programs
Poetry at Ephemera:
Testimony from our previous Residency Selectee:
“From the moment I arrived at Good Contrivance Farm for my writing retreat, I was captivated by its tranquil beauty and knew I was at the right place at the right time. The farm is tucked away in a quiet picturesque rural area, north of Baltimore, and has serene orchards, majestic trees, and lovely Victorian farm buildings. I often found myself walking around the farm in quiet contemplation taking in the beautiful landscape. During these walks, friendly dogs and a gentle cat became my ‘writing companions.’ Exploring nearby nature preserves and local shops further enriched my experience. As you can imagine, these combined experiences made it easy to write and write I most certainly did. In fact, it was one of the most productive writing weeks I've had in quite some time as I was able to shut off the usual perfectionist voice in my mind and just let the words flow. Part of this was because of the living quarters. The cozy Hen House Cottage itself was a haven, boasting a diverse library, bluetooth sound system, inspirational notes from former visiting artists, and most importantly, a comfy bed—each detail contributed to a memorable stay and reminded me that simple pleasures often yield the greatest joy and creativity. Overall, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to grow and create in a place so steeped in history and natural splendor. Good Contrivance Farm truly lives up to its name and is quite a special place for artists. I plan on returning and spreading the word. I hope that all artists have a chance to create in such an inclusive, safe, and charming space.”
—Monique Harris