Ephemera Newsletter Iss March.2

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, druzi! (Ukrainian for “friends”).

Dear Readers,

Some Housekeeping & Notes:

• This week’s letter is pay-walled.

• Reminder: Now Publishing Poetry (Deadline for the May issue: March 31)

  • Ephemera will be publishing poetry in each issue w/ a $200 honorarium. For more information, please see our post outlining the details. Or:
    

• If you’d like to consider supporting us, our post on going paid is here. There are several useful perks.

  • The full newsletter on a weekly basis (no paywall)

  • Full archives & Special archives: All music, All art, all Mini Essays conveniently assembled at year’s end.

  • For Yearly Subscribers: Submit to The Write-In 2x per year for free ($50 value).

  • Creative Genius: submit for free 2x to The Write In, 3 Poetry Issues, & the Good Contrivance Residency ($120 value).

Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo, Xiè xiè.

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Ephemera

In the south, spring begins. We might experience deluge. Or the scratch of winter’s claw. In the north, a few final storms likely queue. A blip of transitioning warmth to raise spirits and crush them down again; such is the world, such is grandparently love, at times, with stewardship the switch accompanies the reward: lash, lash, kiss. With our peers, however, we aim for positivity and encouragement no matter the matter, because, what a nice buffer against the lesson-teaching earth, the state of nature, the being-eat-being impulse we all inherit and seek to govern within self, amongst selves. We’re all story producing, narrative building souls, and that impulse to story asks of us pleasantry or else we’re in a type of flux that becomes defeating, that compounds like water behind an ice damn whose heft and mass generate a melting effect. Feeling dire injures us, the community. Flux begets flux begets that aforementioned state of animalia. Maybe it’s no wonder that we seek story, and that our stories often steer toward the expression of yearning, nostalgia for a state of once-was-ness, that of being cared for, of simple times when our needs were the responsibility of a benevolent caregiver. Yearning might be a fundamental creative impulse. We explore…

…we visit a music duo, Beach House, for whom yearning is an instrument of melody and theme. We wonder how they maintain and change within and about that fundamental stylistic choice. Too, a visual artist who deploys nostalgia, icons of youth, in crayon exhibitions and sculptures to interrogate expectation and the transition from a then (childhood) to a now (adulthood). Writing best practices has us yearning for opportunities: 3 zines, 3 awards, 3 jobs. Also, we always glance at advancement—check out an article about AI writing overwhelming a sci-fi magazine and what it might mean for literature. Yearn, interrogate motivation, deploy theme with an eye toward delivering completeness and rewarding expectation, but temper with change and innovation.

…nostalgia is an industry, is a mechanism by which to generate sentiment that often times operates on the cheap. (Profits and widgets and bric-a-brac). Let us be aware; beware the too-quick, too-easy advantage of this now-ubiquitous tactic. There’s a force driven by the world of business that asks of us that we dull our perception and just dream passively. If we do, we risk not fully understanding our creative output. Stewardship requires awareness, an at times cruel adherence to self-awareness and an auto-impugning mechanism, switch, lash, nip, so that the kiss we create is fairy-tale soft, informs the minds-eye-lips of our reader of a complex and untold seduction. Yet, yearning is a type of fundamental impulse that’s important to connect to, can be a powerful current for whatever genre we toil amidst. We harp and hum on mastery of trope & novelty. And we’ll pluck that string again. Let us yearn anew. Reconfigure the iconography of nostalgia. Assay the crayon, the teddy bear, the rush of mind that looks backward. Twist, upend, and reinvent. Let us wonder with a little taste of the familiar; a yearning-flavored dew drop measured by the drip keeps us attentive, in delicate balance while we interact with new inventions, complexity. Bite. Pinch. Smooch.

“There are all different types of artists and I think that some people like to hold onto things and they get very perfectionistic. But perfectionism is kind of a synonym for destruction.”
—Beach House, from the Tucson Weekly

Your subscription is a kiss. We also yearn for tea.

Vdyachnistʹ!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Poetry at Ephemera (March 31 for May)

We’re reading submissions for the month of April and open for May. We want to see 5-10 great poems so we can put 1 in each issue of Ephemera for a month. This is a new idea and concept we’re trying and we hope to connect with readers by sharing work from the same poet, as we also hope to create a valuable opportunity for writers. Help us make this a success.

• $200 Honorarium

• 120 submissions permitted per call

• Appear across 4 or 5 issues

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Writers Submit: Three Magazines