Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Dostlar! (Azerbaijani for “friends”).
We thank you for your presence this hectic month. Particularly, we thank June’s Poet @ Ephemera, Ann Huang. (Link takes you to her dedicated page).
Also, check out last week’s letter if you missed it.
As a reminder: Starting this month, if you are a paid subscriber to Ephemera, you can submit to poetry @ Ephemera for free as a membership perk! (5 poems max, 1x per month). We’ll share a special portal for paid members 1 week before the deadline. We thank you for your support and look forward to reading your work. Free subscribers and anyone else can submit, too, with the reading fee and can submit up to 10 poems.
Share and or submit to our residency: Ephemera runs another program called The Write-In which is a modest grant plus 10 books of our choosing from different independent publishers. It’s a staycation residency for folks who want to upgrade their writing space and home practice, for those who can’t or don’t want to travel. (Yearly paid subscribers can submit free. Anyone who submits gets 2 months of Ephemera comped).
In Brief…this week’s features:
Music from Interpol, a band come of age in the early 2000s whose ode-cum-complaint song, “NYC,” has us thinking about those places that nurtured and or tortured us. We look at art from Maya Lin an architect and artist who has produced many large-scale memorials and public-facing art works (who has attributed her sensibility to her pottery- and furniture-making father and poetry-loving mother).
Featuring our June poet Ann Huang. Our weekly lists: 3 magazines with open calls, 3 awards/prizes from respected institutions, 3 recent job listings. Check out an Interesante article on the benefits of living quietly, a “useless” life of following intrigue. Book recs and bonus content and our mini-essays to start!
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Our minds are of two these last few days, so to speak—although, really, they’re of many. We’re meandering, and hobbying, thinking and perusing, mainly pursuing, what our Interesante article describes as, non-instrumentality; in other words, we’re just being and being with a vague purpose unencumbered by the profit of that being. It’s the time of the year, right? We’ll get our summer legs. Our blood will adopt in short order to the bursts of heat. Like other transitions, it always takes a moment, however welcomed this one might be. What we’re finding is that’s okay. The article reminded us that we likely have a natural rhythm of functional work that apexes and then bowls into a period of pleasant tinkering or experimenting or sort of sensing and lazing that feels productive internally (though tell that to a non-writer, non-artist that you’re working when you’re clearly not and they’ll offer a scold or scowl for sure). Whatever. We need it. Everyone has their own wave function of productivity. There’s a bit of a contradiction in terms coming, but it’s useful to think of our forays into personal asides and randomly enriching hobbies or pursuits, to think of all this as a wing of the soaring beast of productivity. Anon, circling birds often roost.
“It's up to me now turn on the bright lights”
—Interpol, from the song “NYC”
Perhaps in these times of disorganization, or non-utilization of productive hours, we have the space to consider things nebulously or anti-linearly or randomly or in parallel or whatever our individual brains do (swirl? storm? nebula?). In ours, a common theme of late has been to take stock of the things we value and are happy for—the small and large, but mainly whatever we passively have found to cling about, whatever resists that relentless data shedding that doesn’t permit perfect memory of birthdays and anniversaries, names we want to recall in the moment, passwords and directions. With these scraps we organize odes, sometimes written out, often simple bursts of love, a little bitty zesty flair of the mind or humors that delivers the feels and goes unnoticed, unwatched (hopefully no one saw that mini-shake), a solitary plucked string in the eponymous theory, as it goes. Yet we marvel and baste. Our blood thickens. This is human. This is the creative process, or can be. To each their…Complaints! Oh let’s not forget those counter-weighting or quiet joys with blips of pity or despair, or, even, dirty relish—cuisine acknowledges the utility of a disgusting but acquired taste as a palate cleanse. Sometimes sweetness makes us sick. We dive deeply into and at all angles, good-good, good-bad, bad-bad, bad-good, sometimes in a mummed-out trance, others via loud ablutions, yackity-yuck! Odes and complaints and their half-siblings are integral to the creative process. Quietness. Meaningless pursuit of personal intrigue. Heat be our excuse. Oh-Ode, to simmering!
Təşəkkür!
(Gratitude)
~We’re so happy you’re here!~
Poetry by Ann Huang
Meteor
At present momentI sit somewhat weary under the moon,
Somewhat weary under the cold lonesome minute—
That harsh ways of the ocean bed
Strolled by; a hummingbird perched by my toes
Believing them for a petal.I always bathed in your light,
So wonderful it was, so wide—
When the cold water brushed in your shape like whisky,
The water that had melted through,
And I woke up—shaken by you.(Originally published by Barnhouse)
Deadline is June 30: The Write-In
We all need more time to read and write, find new books, and publishers. In that pursuit, we’ve created The Write-In Residency. The Write-In Residency will sponsor 1-2 individuals, where selectees are gifted a curated package of 10 new books in multiple literary genres from 10 independent publishers, a Moleskin & pen, and a $300 award to upgrade their writing nook or home office. Click the logo for details or…
Writers Submit: Three Magazines
The once in-print magazine went online a few years ago, and continues to publish the same high-caliber work. They are reading fiction and nonfiction. They offer other genre opportunities throughout the year. Deadline June 30
Published online by the Black Earth Institute, AP is reading poems, prose & essays for the theme “The More-Than-Human World.” The guest editors write, “we as humans have used plants and animals just as we saw fit…as two-dimensional props, as background figures denied their own sentience and emotion.” Deadline August 1
As the name suggests, they are reading for poetry, and year round with free submissions for all. The only caveat is that submitters should not have more than two full-length books of poetry published at the time of submission. Deadline Rolling
Featured Music: Interpol
Odes and complaints are on our mind, on the minds of the four gentleman who make up the band Interpol (or once were on their minds, at least) as per their crooning, sometimes ironically versed yet delivered with much sincerity, ballad of a song “NYC,” which appears on their debut, much lauded album, Turn On The Bright Lights. Interpol was a slow-to-boil NYC band that launched in the early aughts that, when their album dropped, became an instant hit in that less poppy more sophisticated sense, amongst hipsters and critics and in-the-knows music-heads (first and foremost) and then reached more popular circles. Simultaneous, they were also surrounded by a lot of criticism from that same aforementioned ilk. Yin-yang, maybe. They had a strong followup album and then sort of fell victim to the regression to the mean phenomenon (to put it nicely), which is to say they couldn’t maintain a meteoric presence forever, much like nearly every other band/group/artist. One might also say Interpol fell in love with the idea of being a band and doing band things that a sort of prestige, infamy, and popularity permits to anyone willing to become a trope unto themselves. (Writers beware of the opportunities to become too much of a ______ poet/writer/novelist/academic).
In any case, their debut album with soaring guitar work, lots of well-used reverb, interesting vocal affect, lots of homage and allusion, and cryptic nearly-profound lyrics remains a great album—great for listeners but great, too, for creatives looking for something to pick apart in order to grasp its kernels of how-did-this-work-so-well. Which is what we’re interested in, per usual. We’ve alighted on their song “NYC” for it’s slowness, for it’s meshing of complaint and ode owing to the eponymous city in which the band came together, where, in many ways still, writers and the professional class that sells writing come together, for better and for worse. It might not be hyperbole to suggest that anyone having lived in New York City for any length of time could have written the line in “NYC,” “I’m sick of spending these lonely nights training myself not to care.” Or, even more intensely and yet quotidian (interestingly?), “The subway is a porno. The pavements they are a mess.” So, they capture—in many ways across the whole album—much of the adolescent cum young-adult, creative type cum creative-realization phenomena in so far as that’s a thing easily bottled (likely, it is, particularly for the age group of folks under 30).
“We spent five years being rejected by every record label around…. It’s expensive to get by and most bands don’t make it that long in New York because people’s attention spans are pulled every which way….”
—Daniel Kessler of Interpol, from Loudandquiet.com
We can appreciate an ode, and NYC is a ballady, angsty, somewhat laconic ode to the proving grounds of New York City as an attempting-to-be artist of sorts. It’s part ode part complaint, as stated or indicated. That duality is quite writerly. While an individual piece might fulfill the ode or complaint idea explicitly, the act of writing is all things mixed together. That’s what Interpol’s song does for us, sort of the whole album, too; we get to experience a hearing-to-feeling enactment of the swirling, mixed nature of being or attempting to be a creative writer. And how do they do it? Even the upbeat songs are brought down sub-textually by the vocals, or the ways by which the guitars intermix to combat a more dancy or at times somber bass. Pay attention to the movements of tone, tenor, sound, and flair, then apply those musical words to writing, tone, theme, narrative and aside—these are approximations and not intended to be exactly analogous. We can maneuver our poems, our paragraphs and chapters, whole works in this way to build an effect greater than the arithmetic sum of the parts. And, it’s okay to let odes and complaints find their way into your work, maybe even an essential access point to the reader. Also, whatever you do, remember to glaze.
Interview with Daniel Kessler in Loud and Quiet
Weekly Artist: Maya Lin
Maya Lin is an artist and architect, a scientific and data-driven thinker as well (go figure), whose work is seen by millions of people per year, though she has flown under the radar reputationally speaking. The Yale School of Architecture graduate was first recognized for her now famous design of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, which she submitted when she was a student and which we don’t feature here but encourage you to view (as we also encourage thorough perusal of Lin’s website and all of her work). Decades later, with installations that incorporate natural landscape work as seen in Storm King in the form of waves (see below), and Madison Square Park in NYC, as well as at Chief Timothy Park and many others, her orientation towards contributing to the public experience of everyday life remains significant and she continues to be prolific.
Early in her career as a professional architect, with a sincere focus on public-facing concepts and less practical more artistic projects, The Southern Poverty Law Center recognized her work, and commissioned her to create a large piece for the entryway to the institution that commemorates civil rights victories (see above). Each of her works manages to produce a type of thoughtful stoicism in us, like these waves built from mud and grass, placed to interact with the surrounding hills, the lows, light and air. Lin’s Storm King installation stands out in many ways as an important monument that speaks to us now but, considering the many earthworks of our ancestors, links itself to the human past.
“And I tend to almost sketch an idea sometimes with text. I’ll write. I’ll sit down and I’ll just write what I think I want, what I want to say here. What needs to be said, how to do it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I’m done I am unbelievably just at peace. I would say sometimes if you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, it’s totally pure.
BILL MOYERS: Writing?
MAYA LIN: Writing, in a way.
BILL MOYERS: Is the purest of the arts?
MAYA LIN: Is one of the purest. Not to say that sculpture isn’t — but the medium has no weight. The medium is a word on a page. Because everything else sort of translates through medium. This one is just my thoughts to yours. As whether it’s the purest of the arts, I don’t think I’d say it that way. But it’s so direct. And it’s also so integral to how I make things.”
—Maya Lin, Interview with Bill Moyers
We’re interested in many aspects of Lin’s work, including teasing out how she plays with form, function, and artistry across disciplines, no less, however, what stands out most to us is how she conceives of the work to be affecting, that she’s attempting big-picture, large-scale influence and always for improved awareness, both social and personal, proving a keen eye for how to interact with people. Perhaps related to her architectural training, she works at the intersection of public and private wanting individuals and society to become more thinking, at least that’s the way the work speaks to us and begs us ask, in what ways does the work we do as writers build something significant that contributes to the literary and wider landscapes? What are we doing to incorporate the environments of modernity into our words and messages? Are we also asking large questions, considering the space outside of our writing nooks, outside of the immediate affect on readers? It’s okay for us to do this. Some might say we ought to. We’ll say, let’s consider how our work branches out beyond what we intend, how we might make pleasant waves, and how our words might ultimately help enshrine the good works of our species, past and present. Let’s allow ourselves to think publicly, think big, and act out with precision and expertise through our creations.
Interview with Bill Moyers.
Interesante: On “Splendid Uselessness”
From: pysche.co
— (8 min read/15 min study)
“…how the pursuit of creative and intellectual activities for their own sake results in an abundance of unpredictable, often unexpected rewards.”
Let’s not be entirely seduced by the cult of instrumentality, i.e. that everything must be done for a terribly great, rational, productive reason. Certainly, we’d like to comport ourselves productively in many ways—as writers, if we don’t do that, we’re at risk of endless asides, infinite digressions. But, the author of the article, and we as well, would argue that following a current of joy in an ad hoc, undefined way, is good enough. Ironically—we’re unsure if this was intended—looking for a non-good reason to do things randomly according to your tastes or intrigue and justifying that with a longer term outcome of enhanced pathos, might be doing the instrumentality thing with a slightly less immediate time stamp… In any case, it’s worth the thought, our consideration. —Read the article.
Prizes/Awards/Stipends Spring ‘23
Library of Poetry Award gives $1,500 and publication to a full-length book of poetry with Bitter Oleander Press. The series has published eleven books, and offers other opportunities throughout the year. $1.5k + Pub. $28 fee. Deadline June 16
Anthology Short Story Competition gives €1,000 and publication to a short story, with honorariums going to two runners-up. Anthology magazine is based in Ireland & features art, essay, and design. €1k + Pub. €18 Fee. Deadline August 31
Gloria E. Anzaluda Poetry Prize awards $1,500 & 25 copies & publication of a poetry chapbook by Newfound. The publisher also publishes other types of work throughout the year in all genres. $1.5k + copies + Pub. $15 Fee. Deadline September 17
Bookstore: Guides, Gifts & Classics
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Apropos Books: Lost in Thought
Last Week’s Rec — George Saunders:
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~~~Əlvida~~~
(Farewell)
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