Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.2
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter paid edition, Dwst (Punjabi for “friends”)
Another thank you to all who submitted for our November issues and especially to our finalist, Deaundra Jackson! You can review her poems altogether once they publish as well as artist statement and bio on this dedicated post on our Substack page.
On to our standard content matters: Won’t you please check out last week’s free issue if you missed it.
And here are some reminders:
Yearly Subscription Drive:
We hope you’ll read through our annual subscription drive letter. It’s been a beautiful ride producing 4 letters a month along with extras here and there for going on 3+ years, as well as administering a poetry contest and two residencies. We’ve paid out $3,800 for poets and a couple thousand additionally for our residencies!Ephemera shares interesting articles and links quotes from artists, musicians, and writers to thinking on being a creative mind. We share music, thoughts on craft and the practice of being a writer, important book recommendations, journals we like, and timely links to prizes and grants. Ephemera is eclectic and germane creative miscellany!
Please consider upgrading to paid to have full access to every issue. Paid subscribers can submit to poetry for free. And yearly paid subscribers can submit to residencies for free or discounted.
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Shintaro Okamoto’s ice art and artist collective.
Listening to Yann Tiersen’s score for the 2001 movie, Amelie
September’s poet, Deaundra Jackson’s second of four poems, “Mortal Kombat”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
Interesante Article:
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Last Week’s Free Issue.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Exist in your void. Avoid direct thought. Be nothing. Access emotional states or memories of those states. Effect the state of being such that you can flow from that physio-mental space to the page. Don’t self correct. Just be, be writing, nothing at the forefront of mind. Use some tunes, use some ritual, use some breathing, use whatever you use and need to become flow. Occasionally, we achieve this state of being. An essential space where creativity moves because there are no barricades. We’re plastic, malleable, the brain-space of youth, of being a kid tackling problems without worrying about appearances (see our Interesante article below). Hone skills and learn as much of the craft and of, importantly, the world, hold it all in reserve, a balloon in mind and release it above you—everything up and up and tethered, not away. Write as if blind now. When the balloon settles back down (oh, what a great session if it deflates naturally) or when a tool is required you can reel it in and apply all that you know, span your light across your designs.
“The best way for me to write music is to think about nothing and to reach a kind of void. And then just let the emotion and something more subconscious go through your mind and into your music. It’s something physical and cerebral.”
—Yann Tiersen
We’re reveling in the words of this week’s music selection, the soundtrack for Amelie, composed by Yann Tiersen. And we’re thinking about the exquisite craftsmanship of our artist selection, Shintaro Okamoto, looking for balance, the blessing to be as we might with the full force of our creative convictions while we put in the work of grinding and improving. May the intersecting of these poles be fruitful, furious and delicate. Let’s strive to be balanced. Let’s read widely and access excellence. Let’s practice the art of refining. Let’s think with forgiveness and leniency—arriving at ‘no’ is as important as a ‘yes'.’ Let’s season. Let’s be inventive. Let’s prepare feasts. And not lose sight of palatability. Good thoughts and beauty arrive in mind as blocks of ice in need of forming. Work hotly. Be cool.
Sẖḵrgzạry̰.
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Deaundra Jackson
Mortal Kombat Today I wrestled with a hummingbird for the nectar of life. I climbed a Magnolia tree to behold more closely the white flowers and looked for pecans in the grass below I stretched my hands to the sun and withdrew honey from the rays there I fell backwards and sprouted wings painful in their outstretching like a yawn of doom from a breaking lung like a breaking lung torn from a claw of life birthed from the coo of a mourning dove
Music: Yann Tiersen
Yann Tiersen does not think of himself as a composer or as a scorer of films, though he seems to have done a lot of both. Rather, he prefers to be known as a touring and recording musician, which he does even more of—excellently, we might add. Born in Brittany (France) in 1970, Tiersen learned to play a slew of instruments including electric guitar, piano, synthesizers, violin, melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord and others. He plays all these instruments in his recorded albums and even as a solo act on tour. While we enjoy his solo music, we’re focusing on his scoring for Amelie, a French indie-film released in 2001 that has a cult following for the film and, even separately, its soundtrack.
For those of us who didn’t watch Amelie around the time it came out, does this score feel compelling? For us, it provides those difficult-to-identify chills deriving from a mix of nostalgia, deep meaning, realization, the process of leaving youth and becoming mature mixed together while viewing something or someone for which/whom we have a profound empathy in a way that makes life feel beautiful despite varying degrees of tragedy (loneliness to calamity). We experience simultaneously internal reflection and a call to action toward what’s good, meaningful contribution through a type of service despite any hardship with the chance of personal deliverance, though not the promise. Lucky for us and Amelie, this is a movie, and our heroine realizes a personal reward for her acts of love and service within her tiny community.
“Music is like a language. It’s something really abstract. Even with songs and lyrics I prefer to suggest things instead of saying or telling stories.”
—Yann Tiersen in tiffanynaylor.wordpress.com
Can we say the score delivers all of this without the visuals? Not entirely sure. But it feels that way. Which is important to note for creatives. We can deliver through tone and sound and innuendo, tempo and volume and time, emotional truth in ways that direct articulation cannot (compare this essay to the music for a prime example of how that works). Feeling is not enough, though we want to do a lot through feeling. We have to know and be skilled first, a la Tiersen, in order to deliver in the ways of music toward deep knowing. The editors amongst us will readily understand this problem having read hundreds of times over the work of people who remain in their youth (age-wise and maturity-wise) who wield emotions like weapons which never land a blow to the reader.
Back to Tiersen and the music. The full score is a great listen. The recurring accordion charms every time it’s present. The score is dynamic and not all yummy-sad in the way of our example song. But yummy-sad is so good! Interesting, that it’s not terribly complicated, this track; until about 50 seconds in when the higher notes rain down. That moment is what releases us into our thoughts and vibes for some reason we can’t get at. We don’t want to push for an unraveling because it’s nice to exist in mystery and intrigue—sometimes this works for us as writers, not knowing what we somewhere-in-the-gut know yet we deploy that knowing/unknowing well, instinctively. Flourishes from the deep self. Made possible by experience and learning and forgetting. Being through our words rather than writing to create being.
Interview from tiffanynaylor.wordpress.com
Full Score via YT.
Writers Submit: 3 Magazines
Third Street Review is a quarterly magazine that publishes in all genres. Based in Laguna Beach, CA, TSR also publishes anthologies of work. They also offer workshops and reading opportunities for authors. DECEMBER 1
The online and print magazine is one of the most well respected quarterly journals out there. Right now they’re reading Fiction. They have staggered open and close deadlines for each genre. DEADLINE DECEMBER 5
The acclaimed online and print magazine just opened for reading in all genres, with a new nonfiction research based essay category. It’s always a good idea to submit early! JUST OPENED!
Weekly Artist: Shintaro Okamoto
With an MFA from Hunter where he first experimented with ice carving—was it glaciers and such on the brain having grown up in Alaska?—Shintaro Okamoto, a painter and wildlife enthusiast, has moved into the professional art life cutting up frozen water for the last 20 years. Of Japanese descent, Okamoto is a second-generation sculptor who runs a custom ice studio that boasts hundreds, maybe thousands, of corporate and individual clients—fund raisers, birthdays, weddings, junkets, art and more. Okamoto is one of those artists who has crossover art and commercial appeal; he’ll make ice luges for bars and then do a public installation of an elephant or a live carving of the statue of liberty. He lives and works in NYC.
Okamoto has participated in several international competitions, including a win at the Ice Sculpting World Cup in Finland. He’s known for experimenting and deriving new techniques and methods, both using and eschewing traditional tools that go back to northern Japan where there’s a strong ice sculpting history. Yet, he keeps to traditional themes, such as nature, animals, mythical creatures. One thing that most interests us is the ephemeral nature of his medium, a component of his discipline that he embraces and uses. We’re almost saddened. For Okamoto’s loss of the darlings he very clearly loved during their creation. And for ourselves…when we think about writing these days, we feel there’s a fleeting nature to words. There’s primacy placed on the most recent creations. Everything that only a few months ago was released seems to fall by the wayside. Seems to fade away, even major books from large publishers with much backing. Seemingly, only those books that make it to the silver screen, or those that get a treatment for the streaming sites, seem to have life. (Apologetically, these are onset winter thoughts).
“It amazes me how our audiences are first stunned by their familiarity with ice, and yet unfamiliar of the scale and amount of detail we put into it. When they see the art melt away right before their eyes, it gives them a feeling a graciousness to be a part of it. That’s the here and now.”
—Shintaro Okamoto
And yet, written projects persist with the small chance that a professor or magazine editor or someone with influence will pick up a discarded book and breathe new life into it. Okamoto’s sculptures cannot do that. He refers to this truth as “here and now,” a concept he hearkens to as a reminder of the importance of the experience, of gratitude for those around him. We like these ideas. If you’re a long-time reader, they’ll feel familiar. We try and pursue a philosophy of graciousness, responsibility, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit. We want writing to survive and move back into a commercial space in the sense that the written word is in demand beyond the tiny prestige circles cultivated by editing houses and top prizes. When we feel the weight of longevity pressing down, maybe we can chill out; it’s good to be reminded of artists such as Okamoto who craft with strength, grace, and such meticulous precision that it would be a tragedy to watch their sculptures only hours later liquefy and disappear if we didn’t know the joy they felt in creating, their accomplishment and their full incorporation of short timescales into their being.
Be brave. Be dedicated. Be precise. Be great. Come and go with humility like Okamoto.
IG for Okamoto’s custom ice
Interesante: Crisis in Creativity
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