Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.3

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Freonen! (Frisian for “friends”)

Thank you for your presence. Please help support Ephemera programming as well as the intrepid Good Contrivance Farm!

We are seeking applications for our residency: The Good Contrivance Residency. Take a week on a farm in a cozy house to work on your writing! It’s a five day stay at a well-fitted cottage on a beautiful property in Maryland.

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 Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions, and their song “Suzanne.”

• Thoughts on Wendy Red Star’s recontextualizing of indigenous art.

• September’s poet, Freya Rohn and her third of four poems, “Fall”

• 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 Op Ed about listening to audio books vs reading.

  • 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,

A trip to the northeast for family time, lots of family times given the nature of families these days, it seems, divorces and remarriages complicating travels and plans. Oh, what travails…we’ve been prone to say, however, with steps and in-laws and blood relatives and well-loved pseudo uncles and aunts, family friends galore, new marriages and new births, kids once small sprouted grown, we could just as easily find opportunity for love and connection (sorry to be sappy). Tribulations? In some light. But, too, in equal if not greater proportion, prosperity and health! The stories! We heard from dozens of people and listened intently. The holidays, such as they’re called, offer us great opportunity for listening. We wish you great connection and heart warmth first and foremost, but, too, take pains to listen to your people and extended people. Ask about their lives, look for detail in so far as it’s not prying or lascivious, of course, (but don’t ignore anyone who wants to relate more deeply if you can stomach it). If you haven’t been writing, haven’t had the time for the desk or studio or coffee shop, make your daily endeavors part of your creative practice. Listen, re- and de-familiarize. Take note, take heed, take warning. Broadly experiencing your obligations and interactions is an enrichment of sources and soul.

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
—Ernest Hemmingway

Hear-ye, hear-ye. Listen up. Take in the surface and more sultry innuendo of whatever is said in your presence. Certainly, we take breaks from the writing desk, from gripping a too-tight pen, hunching over keys, from drying out our eyes across so many texts. But writing is an artistic calling, a fully embodiable practice. It is a life. We’re writing, writerly, writer-ish when sipping lattes on a bench ejecting our breath as mist into the winter afternoon, sidewalks empty or teeming equal, mittens or gloves equal, company or in solitude. Once a practice is ignited, we’re on the creator clock. Listening is the linchpin. Our other senses too, but let’s focus on being present through our ears. Our characters will thrive, major and minor and bit and quasi. Allow people to feel in your presence. Let them be at ease. The writer is a sort of sage. We ought to hear more than be heard. We ought to become capable of wizened advice in the way of the guru, the sibyl, the oracle, the family elder. We’ve lived our characters’ lives so many times in so many variations, to say nothing of the myriad versions of our own—the marvel of thought-time. We can’t have gotten there, iterated and imagined, without listening first. Be marvelous in your pursuit of craft and creativity. Listen robustly. Practice where you find yourself. The holiday times are rife.

Tankberens

Gratitude!

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Dec 1 Deadline for the January Issues

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Poetry by Freya Rohn

Fall

My window broke yellow this morning—
leaves wheeling with each shake
of light—birch trees
hooked with sullen
coins, matched reefs
of candle flames
as sudden as sun breaking

breaking through summer
exposing some mescaline
otherworld—and waking

with these leaves—
now warblers in the inevitable
wind, the world becoming
one cadmium sun in an 
escape of window blind

blinded, I thought:
how kind death is to leaves—
mothering the fading abundant green
to reveal the burnished yellow
undercarriage, wired
and hollow as bird bones

falling on the wind’s
shoulders to end
on the earth’s instep
quiet as breath
made visible
in the first cold—

disappearing color
into a bleed
of snow.

(previously published: Sugar House Review, Issue 11, Summer 2015)

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Music: Hope Sandoval