Ephemera Newsletter Iss May.4

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Masinaka! (Aymaran for “friends”).

We thank you for your presence this month. Particularly, we thank May’s Poet @ Ephemera, Mark Saba. (Link takes you to his dedicated page).

Also, check out last week’s letter if you missed it.

• As a reminder: Starting this month on May 26th, 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’ve shared a special portal for paid members. 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).

This week’s features:
Music from violinist Esther Abrami, a classical musician who blends a love for contemporary orchestra, all things film, anime and classical composers. We revisit art from Marie-Claude Marquis, an artist who works with, quite popularly, found plates and quippy, vulgar and sometimes gender-upturning sayings and adages. Featuring our May poet Mark Saba. Our weekly lists of 3 magazines with open calls, 3 awards/prizes from respected institutions, 3 recent job listings. Check out an Interesante article on the ravel or unravel, how we descendant necessarily from Homer and Penelope. Book recs and bonus content and our mini-essays!

---

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

---

Ephemera

Dear Readers,

Ruminate on your origins as a part of your practice. List your books, your classes, your lectures, and personal influences. Whenever you’re in between focus, find some time to reflect on how you came to be where you are, why you like what you like. Reflection is an often non-discussed component of building a creative practice for writers. Perhaps we’re too often not deliberate. Deliberation and purposefulness are good attributes to apply to craft. List the museums you’ve been to, which pieces captured your eye, why, what you loved or didn’t. Films too. Top shows. Music. Non-fiction work and quotes from great minds. Refer to your notes. Have a relationship with your creative self, even if you’ve not published, even if you’re in the process of writing or editing, if you’ve arrived or simply thought about starting out. The summer begs of your experience…have it, but have your reflection in close proximity. Journal and record as an artist might. Then, when you go to your work, you’ll see…

“3.1: There were many Homers, not just one: each chanting this bit from a skein of passed-down lines + incidents, then adding that one. Interlacing strand + filament…

13.4: Out of this liminality we spindle-whirl the threads to plait our snare-ropes, to weave our webs, saying: listen: this upstairs room, this Siren-chant, this journey to an Ithaka unrecognized. 

13.4a: Saying, look: this war, this life on fatherless adulthood’s brink, this urge to enter the monster’s cave & eat his stores, this maelstrom, these misfortunes that seem like bored gods’ whims. 

13.4b: And: this entanglement of tales, this rasp, this seriality. 

13.5: This semi-dreamtime is when we truly shadow Homer. When we are most Penelope. When [un]raveling thought makes ravels from stored / discharged perceptions reconfigured + the rootedness of things.”
 
—Jeanne Larsen, Essay in Poetry Northwest (see below)

Quote, homage, rhyme, wink, and Easter-egg. Be aware of your craft, of your atomic nature, how we became who we are artistically, whom we’re referencing, borrowing from (exquisitely). We must be able to unravel or ravel (see the Interesante below) the how and why and from where of our style—and we must also have a major self-fashioned component in order that our readers will find us compelling, in order that we be differentiable. Write a paragraph about your youth, your adolescence, young adulthood, early-adulthood, middle adulthood etc. Then distill the top influences into a consumable block. Use this as a supplement for your submissions, on your websites, in your bios. Use it for yourself. Be deliberate. Own your brain-spaces. Awareness inevitably leads to further delineation, further distillation, and, too, combinatorilly, perhaps neo-fusions; right? If by virtue of how well you understand your influences and contributions you can more easily see opportunities for enrichment or addition, won’t you then be able to actively and expertly shape how you evolve creatively? How do you think greats have become so, at least those that were not born of it…it being genius or so expansive a knowledge and awareness that influence and inspiration fruit as in Eden? Will it. You can become.

Munatarjama!
(Gratitude)

---

~We’re so happy you’re here!~

---

---

Poetry by Mark Saba

A New Autumn

I have been eating trees
with my eyes, ears, and nose.

Their colors soften
a bitter landscape

creating a welcome amnesia—
days when I gobbled them up

in paint, words, or dreams.
But trees remained outside

of me, petrified by my plan.
I killed them one by one.

Now I know their leaves
must shake, rattle, and fall

whether I note them or not.
Whether my dreams give them back

or I digest them into oblivion.

---

---

Learn About The Write-In Staycation

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. It’s a staycation residency for the bookish!

The Write-In Residency Details:

• 1-2 applicants will receive the residency.

• $300/each toward writing-room upgrades (or for whatever you like).

• 10 Books from indie publishers. (Full publisher list below).

• Moleskin & Pen.

• Optional: Each awardee may write an optional 2 page essay on the experience and Ephemera will publish it in our newsletter.

• ~$600 value all considered + Publication.

• $25 application fee and a free 2 month paid subscription to Ephemera (Free for yearly newsletter subscribers).

---

Writers Submit: Three Magazines (International Focus)