Ephemera Newsletter Iss March.2
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter free edition, Amiche! (Italian for “friends”)
We’re praising our poet of the month, Sherry Rind! We invite you to review her artist statement and bio on this dedicated post on our substack page. Thank you for checking out Sherry’s work and for contributing to the poetry program.
On to our standard content matters: Won’t you please check out last week’s issue if you missed it.
And here are some reminders:
Call For Submissions: Submissions are in for the April issues. We look forward to reading! We are open for May now. March 31 is the deadline. If you are a paid subscriber to Ephemera, you can submit to poetry @ Ephemera for free as a membership perk! (We email you a secret link at the end of your second consecutive paid month and every month thereafter for as long as you are a paid subscriber). 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 Gwen Stefani’s solo album single, “What You Waiting For.”
Michelle Pred and her designer bag art activism.
March’s poet, Sherry Rind and her second of four poems, “Preserving Lemons.”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
Sponsor:
**C&R Press is reinvigorating the literary landscape with talented writers who focus on craft and character and sophisticated risk-taking. We publish Literary, experimental, hybrid, upmarket, and even art books. Check out their history book on women’s roles in literature: Women in the Literary Landscape, which is the well-researched product of the Women’s National Book Association.**
More ephemera: check out an Interesante selection, Language learning and brain health—how learning new languages may enhance our literary thinking;
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Support us on Bookshop - See our past book recs and others. A highly curated list.
Last Week’s Issue.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Listening to Gwen Stefani’s pop-retro dance album, her first solo venture, has us feeling social and contemplative all the same. Perhaps that’s not an unfamiliar feeling for the writing sort. We need social watering, and yet it’s difficult to drop the interiority game. It’s almost as if the thoughts, the creative bursts, the ideas, all of it might die permanently if quelled for a few hours to make nice with our cohorts, friends, and colleagues. Talk about what now? There’s more lines to get down, more character research to do, a whole bunch of side-questing imagining, some dense reading for hours to glean a thought or word for this one section of the text that seems to never get done. It’s a conundrum. Yet reading about Stefani—a very powerful creative being, a can do and have everything feminist sort impressively reminiscent of our grandmas who idolized several important fictional characters, such as Wonder Woman, Betty Boop, and Rosie the Riveter—we’re invigorated and challenged. Why not band together with creative-minded people for inspiration and community building? The thaw as it comes with the blessed retreat of the polar airs marks the perfect moment to transition out of hibernation.
“I [get] all my favorite people that I work with [together] and we [have] a creative day.”
—Gwen Stefani, Interview with NyLon
We’re optimistic that creative gatherings can be productive beyond the socializing, which is not to be overlooked if you’ve been hidden away for some time like we have. There were times this Winter, stretches of weeks, no exaggeration, where the idea of leaving the warm nest of home or permitting anyone other than our immediate partner entry seemed like a type of madness. For a time, this is fine. But the mind wants to bump up against resistance, creative thought energies from peers and other, less proximal, thinking sorts. Even an adversarial creative social gathering can be positive—being forced to reconcile our beliefs, account for our thinking, challenge the depth of our intrigues and solutions will yield a greater more complex interior expertise, a more well-vetted project or practice. Good push back is, well, good! And cooperative sessions tend to leave us feeling enriched and invigorated. We recently met with a buddy who’d had a generous portion of pages for some time—oh, we were anxious, and all but resigned to the inevitable practice-ending criticism…oh so much…—and yet, maybe the smile of a closer sun, maybe the cheer of the others, patrons and revelers, we found ourselves brightening, overjoyed at the intricate feedback. The generosity of spirit. The good humor of our unstinting peer who’d managed some quality time with the work. Now, to have this on the regular… We wish it for you. And bid you take the reins. Call a session. Host. Be ample with your creative feedback and social contributions. Everyone will grow from a “creative day.”
Grazie!
(Thanks)
Poetry by Terry Rind
Music: Gwen Stefani
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