Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.3
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
“Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections
between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way.”
—Alice Munro
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, bagwera! (Sepedi for “friends”)
Dear Readers,
Our support of the Institute for Regenerative Design and Innovation continues this week because we believe in their goal of improving food security and vegetable minerality, in creating a robust, local health network to undergird and lift up underserved peoples and communities. Hunger and access to health and education are some of the most difficult challenges to overcome. Read more below!
___________________________________
Housekeeping:
—This letter may get cut off by email providers. Please make sure to click through for the full experience and or white-list us.
—Please like and share, too!
As a note, to unlock the full letter always, subscribe at the monthly level or higher.
As an enticement, remember, yearly subscribers will be able to submit to our Write-In Residency for free 2x per year.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Cold air maps and hems our thoughts and interactions, that evening about the hearth differs from the July camp fire, galoshes heel differently than sandals. We offer a weekly mapping of creative thinking, literary ado: 3 zines, 3 opportunities, 3 jobs. Kehinde Wiley works at counter-mapping using classic work as a context and contemporary, common folk as subjects. Sylvan Esso evolves their songs in novel ways, changing contexts for new meaning. Revisiting Nick Cave, we link an article reviewing a recent long interview with the artist/musician focusing on positive thinking. Come at your work, at our letter, from angles anew. Shift your gaze, your path, your perspective…it’s refreshing.
Something new, we wax poetic on how to construct meaning simply, map the space of our stanzas and paragraphs. Something new…
Meaning and mapping are cousins, loud and messy when asynchronous, playfully building fantastic environs when in harmony. Meaning, in a tactically simple sense, can be created by objects in a scene, interacting with other objects. Mapping, how we conceive of it, is deciding how those objects interact, and choosing the scene or location ahead of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keys (voice to record, or brain quanta to ethereal computer in the not so distant, incoming future…yikes). Knowing where a flower grows is as important as the flower and deciding where it grows before writing the line informs the meaning; this is a type of mapping. The flower grew on the hill overlooking the valley, or the flower sat on the hill and hikers in the valley saw it when they looked up, are two ways of mapping the object’s meaning. It’s admired from a fixed perspective, or it sees everything that happens below it. These decisions convey and alter the significance.
Like Munro, think of mapping as erecting a house and the meaning is what gets filled inside. How we get to the flower in our example, is akin to directing someone to the flower from different directions in the house: wipe your shoes, enter the house and turn right through the dining room, sit at the head of the grand table and look to the credenza on which rests a flower in a vase: or look left descending the stairs to catch the flower bending brightly from the vase atop the credenza in the dining room. Either way, the flower is fixed in scene, location, or place. We can think of the flower as mapped whether it is in the sand, floating on a balloon string above a big city skyscraper, in the maw or under the paw of a romping puppy.
Growing bolder, to affect meaning or deeply alter the reader’s perspective, all things equal, we might try identifying the flower. If an Orchid, or a Blue Bonnet, or a Lilly, the experienced reader will attach unspoken detail, climate or color or literary reference—a rose is a rose is a rose (exclaims Gertrude Stein)—which can narrow the feeling or expand it accordingly. Generality of concept, larger ideas, tend to like less specificity. Particularity, precision of feeling enjoy the presence specifics. Echoing, perhaps Shakespeare’s phrase, “a rose by any other name,” contends, as we do, a flower has a meaning, reliable and concrete, independent of how it’s evoked, yet reliant on where and how it appears. As the onset of Winter chews the leafed and petaled, our rose lists bravely in its bestrewn bed.
We continue to map our creative truth by subscription or flower of appreciation!
Tebogo!
(Gratitude)
~We’re so happy you’re here!~
Featured Music: Sylvan Esso
Folktronic pop duo, Sylvan Esso, defy the repetitive electronica tropes by evolving mid song their sounds and rhythms, tempo and effects. We like this sometimes fractious approach to what we might editorialize as remapping genre. Indie, particularly in film though less so in music, has tended to solidify as a genre unto itself though it was meant to be uprooting, fresh, re-imaginative and thus exist as an ongoing defiance of standard categorization. Sylvan Esso manages to produce indie sounds without reproducing indie-ness by virtue of fracturing and fragile sound schemes and arrangements. They don’t let synth or drum machines persist too-long, too mechanically. In “H.S.L.T,” while we do get repetition, the song moves and bops with familiar irregularity, and the repeated lyrics (sounding like lines of poetry: “I got a television, it’s filling me with home.”) as with our proverbial flower (see above), stays rooted as the mapping shifts. We enjoy this band for their innovation and consistently playful approach. They often sound like an odd nursery rhyme, upturned, with anti-rhyme messaging, more Aesop than Disney. We can learn from this playfulness combined with serious messaging, from the upturning of established paths, how to dance around the flower on the hill, see it or be seen by it. Map, imbue, remap.
Writers Submit: Three Magazines
Reading poetry and seeking “cutting, strange, and daring work from new and established poets.” The magazine has published some great poets and has published fifteen issues since 2019. Closes December 1
Reading work in all genres, the magazine has rolling publication deadlines and publishes work throughout the year online and in print and ebook format. They also feature a cartoon section. Closes December 31
Reading work in all genres, Missouri State U. publishes annually in print. Though they look for work about the ten states that border the Mississippi River, they publish work from anywhere. Rolling Deadline
Continued Nonprofit Sponsor: IRDI
Please take another look at our non-profit sponsor IRDI. They’re fundraising to kick off their ambitious project of building a renewable economy around health and food security in NC. Once successful, they will bring their model around the country to communities within municipalities in need. Their project begins with mineral rich soils which imbue the produce with 100x the mineral and vitamin content of regular food. Next, they educate and build interest in the project while integrating the farming into the local economy. We like local. We like building health and educational justice. Please share with folks who have a particular interest in these matters!
HEALING OUR NATION FROM THE SOIL-UP
Launched on Sept. 21st as a part of a National Day of Dialogue, communities from across North Carolina have begun a #NCSOLUTIONSTOUR to spark a “National Resiliency Movement.”
Winston Salem, the City of Arts & Innovation is unveiling a systemic Health & Wellness model that holds the potential to #HEALOURNATION from the soil-up. We welcome you to come and be a part of co-creating solutions to some of our world's most perplexing problems including Climate Change, Mass Incarceration and Childhood Hunger.
Please CLICK HERE to support our efforts and become a part of the growing movement!
Please review their video campaign and thank you again for your attention!
Weekly Artist: Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley is perhaps best known for painting President Barack Obama’s White House portrait.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ephemera to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.