Ephemera Newsletter Iss March.4&5

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, bạn! (Vietnamese for “friends”).

Dear Readers,

We have a few announcements:

• This week’s letter is pay-walled.

• We have selected 4 poems by Maureen Alsop for April’s poetry in Ephemera! Thanks to all who submitted. We spent 20 fantastic days reading thru some good to great to shining submissions.

• Reminder: Deadline for the May issue: March 31.

  • Ephemera pays a $200 honorarium.

  • For more information, please see our post outlining the details. Or:

• Remember: Make time for you and your creative pursuits.

Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.

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Ephemera

Plenty of scientific and common self-help books and articles tackle one of the great scourges of modern living, loneliness and isolation, and we don’t purport to offer new-new thoughts on the subject, though we would like to contribute to raising awareness of the problem particular for the writing community. Loneliness is on the rise; data suggest most acutely in the generations 35 and younger (catastrophically for gen Z). There are some well researched contributing factors, particularly smart phones and social media (moderation!). We writers know better…don’t we? Let’s be sure to consider our well being after so many hours plugging away alone in our offices, or the darkened corners of coffee shops, or even those moments where we write poetry at the bar, surrounded yet deeply distant. There’s a comfort in our isolation isn’t there? We can be productive! We can divine new ideas. We can reconnect with our creative epicenters. Yet, too much time islanded, even with cats galore, even focused, produces significant changes to our minds and can lead to decreased ability to connect when we need it. For this reason, we ask (and pledge to do so ourselves)…make sure to reach out to folks, even if you don’t “want” to. Let’s be connective, olive-branching. For our personal sake and that of our peers. Imagine what reputation destruction, meanness, pettiness, and otherwise othering behavior can wreak on our community, with so many of us suffering winter, so many naturally inclined toward isolation, so many divergent but well-meaning, beautiful beings who need space to focus and for whom a social defeat can be truly crushing. Generosity! Kindness, please! Hugs not hellfire. Hello to everyone and welcome…

Art is a type of outreach. Shake hands with the work. Let an artist know you’ve been affected. We ruminate via music this week with a somewhat obscure ambient-electro act, Casino Versus Japan, whose sometimes somber, and frequently looping tracks luxuriate in our ears as lonely tunes with positive tinge of “here we are alone together.” Opposites attract: painter Baron Batch produces popular, stylized art that aims to connect, aims to please, brings him out to the streets oh Philly and elsewhere. On the subject, we remind everyone of Rebecca Solnit’s musings on being alone via book rec. Too, 3 zines, 3 jobs, 3 prizes to get you busy. An interesante article that delves into the science of loneliness—a must read. While we toil and till solo for literary bounty, after hours let’s look for social collaboration as our souls are wont to need.

“If just 10 hours without social contact is enough to elicit essentially the same neural signals as being deprived of food, ‘it highlights how basic our need to connect with others is…’”
—from “How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain,” Quanta Magazine
(see our Interesante article below)

Social invisibility is a recurrent theme in literature, isolation, loneliness. Of course it says something about authors if we are mostly writing what we know. From Ellison’s Invisible Man, to Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, to Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Plath’s Bell Jar, we could go on. Not only are there many titles that fit our characterization, these are some of the all time great books. The lessons in these books, while myriad and layered, more complex than we’re about to suggest, circle in one way or another around the need for connection, whether their protagonists achieve that end or not. Lo! We have a signpost for ourselves (we’ve always read literature to know self as well as the other) and for our writing. These themes are rife, complex, and popular. We can derive individuated meaning while still engaging with a subject matter so long and thoroughly established. Each generation, each era, each historical movement produces particularity, the down and out or underground being who must contend with culture from the outside looking in, from beneath looking up. Write with sympathy and live with sympathy—all of us, human and character alike, deserve each other’s and our own.

Lòng biết ơn!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Poetry at Ephemera (March 31 for May)

We’ve selected April’s poet! Maureen Alsop will grace our humble letter with her poems. (See her Ephemera page here). Yet, we have room each month and want to see more work…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. Read, like, share, submit if you have work.

• $200 Honorarium / $15 fee / Submit 5-10 poems

• 120 submissions permitted per call

• Appear across 4 or 5 issues

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Writers Submit: Three Magazines