Ephemera Newsletter Iss June.3

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Lagunak! (Basque for “friends”).

This month we’re reading and calling attention to June’s Poet @ Ephemera, Ann Huang. (Link takes you to her dedicated page). We’re very pleased with her work and hope you’ll enjoy.

Also, 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.

• Our Staycation Residency Closes this month: Ephemera runs another program called The Write-In which is a $300 grant plus 10 books of our choosing from different independent publishers. (Yearly paid subscribers can submit free. Anyone who submits gets 2 months paid access).

In Brief…this week’s features:

• Music from Daniel Avery, a fast-rising electronic music producer enamored of the guitar and vaunted European dance-club space.

• Michaela Yearwood-Dan, painter and mixed-media artist exploring color, abstraction, and intertextuality with her compelling identity-framed works.

• June’s poet Ann Huang and her poem “La Favorita.”

• Our weekly lists: 3 magazines with open calls, 3 awards/prizes from respected institutions, 3 recent job listings.

• More ephemera: check out an Interesante article on filtering (variation on last week’s theme) what we read ruthlessly but reading a ton; 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,

A hot sun today—we’re only very briefly star-bathing before quickly retiring to shade. Wherever we walk, we’re opting for shadow. On scorchers, the lay of the land (should you even bother to venture out and we’d understand a refusal to gambol) how the sidewalks heat, the grasses brown, where you go and how you might get there might become all important. Avoid the rays, avoid an asphalt heat sink—like the plague!—prefer a stream-side venture, bike lanes by the water. None of this is particularly revelatory, but, apart from the joy in lamenting supremely nice things—one can always grumble—there’s a lesson in planning and tactics garnered by examining the commonplace, which is to say, how we go about basic ambulatory decisions. These decisions affect our experience and we have no problem stopping a walk if we start to get burnt, if the path proves too dire in one way or another.

“A good reading filter is more art than science. You’ll have to find one that works for you. The bigger point is that the highest odds of finding the right piece of information comes from inundating yourself with information but very quickly being able to say, “that ain’t it.””
—From this week’s Interesante article (see below the fold)

Likewise, and apropos of our Interesante article this week (see below), we aim to remind ourselves that reading ought to operate in much the same way. Grab 10-20 books, line them up on your desk, chose an order (pathway) and devour those “steps” until you’ve arrived or, shamelessly and swiftly, change course if your flip-flops begin to melt on the rocks. Pausing or quitting a book is essential to being widely, eclectically, generally well-read because we must pass over the things that will cause us delays, difficulty, boredom, or intellectual injury—ruin our enjoyment to the point we don’t want to look at any more ink, let’s say. Read the first 25 pages of 10-20 books and go back to the top 2 you’ll read with the most vigor and enthusiasm. This is one way. There are many. Sometimes a bogged-down two-monther is necessary to be a part of the cognoscente, fully know the canon. Our rule-suggesting is just but one type of intellectual heuristic we should deploy, one that we find is more difficult to practice…“But shouldn’t I struggle through this book to make sure I’m not a quitter!” Too many of us will suffer for lack of courage to reject and move on (kill your book-plan darlings, too, hehe). Often when you’ve sampled widely, you can more easily discern which writing you prefer, is objectively more artful, develops in a way copacetic with your current intellectual needs. Read for yourself copiously and yet ruthlessly.

Esker ona!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Poetry by Ann Huang

La Favorita

For the ample peoplehood who my mother went 
Her body, fascinated by their spirits, margarita & mariachi.
World apart, and always beheld, her breadth would stop;
Her soul would chase after those folkloric lyrics.
She would want to go back to their chaos,
And the wise Chinese sayings beat her free,
She might always long for the half bondage
Whereas from their family memes she breaks her heart.
Something in her is beloved, eternally beloved,
Some quintessential thing has come from her heart,
And she might walk her way of life an expat
Beyond the descents of forest, oceans apart;
For she was born, nearby an oak tree of The Forbidden City,
Under no man’s menace, besides its time.

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Final Deadline is June 30: The Write-In

The Write-In Residency will sponsor 1-2 individuals, where selectees are gifted $300, a curated package of 10 new books in multiple literary genres from 10 independent publishers, a Moleskin & pen. Yearly subscribers submit for free. Click the logo for details or…

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Writers Submit: Three Magazines