Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.2

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Amis! (French for “friends”)

Thank you for your presence. This is the final few weeks to submit to our residency: The Good Contrivance Residency. We hope you’ll look into it and share if you know anyone who needs a week on a farm in a cozy house! It’s a five day stay at a well-fitted cottage on a beautiful property in Maryland.

Follow the links for more information, for full details and photos. Last year we sent 2 people, and we’re planning on doing the same this year. The brief details are below. Applications are open until November 30.

Or apply directly

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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:

• Our letter can be cut off by emails! Please remember to click around any cut-off point and or try reading us on Substack.com or through the app.

• Call For Submissions: Submissions are in for the December issues. We are open for January now. December 1 is the deadline. 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 to Ephemera’s full letter. Learn more or:

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In Brief…this week’s features:

• Thoughts on Procelain Raft, and their song “Unless You Speak From Your Heart.”

• Thoughts on Bridget Riley and her pioneering of Op-Art.

• September’s poet, Freya Rohn and her second of four poems, “The curve of the earth.”

• Our weekly lists:

  • 3 magazines with open calls

  • 3 awards/prizes

  • 3 recent job listings for editors and writers.

• **No sponsor this issue: Sponsor our letter! Reach out to info@Litbreaker.com to advertise with us.**

• More ephemera:

  • Interesante selection: an article about easy changes to help your writing get noticed

  • Book Recs

  • Our mini-essays to start!

• Support us on Bookshop - See our past book recs and others. A highly curated list.

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

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Ephemera

Dear Readers,

We’re not always attentive to some of the more parsimonious tenets of writing advice, such as clarity, conciseness, and celerity. Suffice it to say, that’s maybe because this is an arty, mini-essay cum vehicle-for-personal-expression aimed at folks who enjoy flare, prioritize elan over the technical, pshaw at ennui, look for spice as well as satiation. We go with concision in the info segments. We try for elaborate clarity otherwise. And celerity, well, that’s in here, mixed in with variably paced sections aimed at delivering for differentiated tastes. Yet, it’s true, that editors the world over will find it easier to read new material that rings the three C’s loudly, first and foremost, before delving into voice and derring-do. We’d all be wise to adhere to such principles when pitching essays and other longer-form written work, including, but not always, short story writing and poetry. Pitching agents? Those rules apply tenfold. We need to become adept at writing and speaking in abbreviation, in quick, complete, to the point sentences, as well as long form, although, reserve the latter for when you’re “in” or having been called upon to expound. These heuristics will aid you in careering. Voice comes later—they’ll (the all-inclusive they who represent the gatekeepers of our professional and creative hearts’ desires) inevitably call upon you for that once the barrier to entry to your work is overcome, the focus tax paid, and once you’ve proven deft and clever. Practice the C’s. We need to be profoundly all things writing at our best, which is what we aspire to for all of you.

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most
distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language,
revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends
to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas,
to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark
that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.”
—Italo Calvino, “Six Memos For The New Millennium.”

On the subject, we’re reminded of Italo Calvino who in his book Six Memos for the New Millennium mentions six qualities he believes writers should look to adhere to; these items remind us of the three C’s mentioned above: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, Consistency. It may not align with some writers’ philosophies, but the tenets are worthy of study. As we always suggest, it’s worth being able to martial as many skills and styles as you can—and we find Calvino’s justifications and or implementations, particularly of lightness, quickness, and exactitude, beautifully rendered with compelling analogy and thinking. One may decide to write in a sparse, pithy style being exact and unencumbered with peripheral meaning. One may need that ability for a scene or character; perhaps nothing but a poem of that style can deliver what’s needed of a sentiment or moment in need of capture. Quickness evokes the ambiguous time a reader feels in the throes of the writing. Which is to say, the perception of speed or celerity of the work, connected but not tied to actual time spent reading, is an important facet. (We pray for your speedy accrual). And exactitude…accuracy of depiction, deftness and parsimony of diction. The consequences for you and your writing (maybe even the culture) are worth examining.

Gratitude!
(Sounds lovely when spoken in French)

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Dec 1 Deadline for the January Issues

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Poetry by Freya Rohn

The curve of the earth

My son asks what are the heavens—
his brush hovering over watercolors
with the deliberation of a bee’s errand—

watching horizon floods of green
take shape across white paper—
like the curve of the earth.

There are many things I thought would be
difficult to explain, but heavens wasn’t
on my list.       In my pause he tells me
it rhymes with seven—