Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.3+4
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter paid edition, Masikuna (Quechua for “friends”)
Another and final 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. We’ll give you one more chance to sit with her work this Sunday before we move on to our to be determined (soon, soon!) December poet.
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.
Also, please check out our sponsor below. They are a new, edgy, consumer oriented story magazine that aims to challenge literary norms, entertain, and escape the academic bend of many many lit mags. The issues are entirely fiction in the form of micro, flash, and short short stories. It’s a cool read! (we were sent a copy of the latest):
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Andy Warhol’s portraits
Listening to Nightwhisper’s “Firefly” and chilling out in a thinky sort of way.
November’s poet, Deaundra Jackson’s final two poems, “After Trumpet Player by Langston Hughes” and “Seismic.”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
Interesante Article: On Huxley’s Doors of Perception and the new thinking vis-a-vis hallucinogens and creativity.
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Last Week’s Issue.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
It’s been a bit of a long break. The fall festival spent in the Appalachian foothills where it was unseasonably cold. Where, in Georgia, the woods and air conspire and whip up an odd smokey stench that clings to clothes, lingers in your lover’s hair. This season has been nostalgic and wistful. We’re not sure why. You can always point to one or two, maybe even a dozen influences. But we were struck with writer’s block, where the thought of squeezing out anything produced a sort of dread, fear in some cases. We can’t. We can’t. We Must! But, no. Alas. We can’t. At times like these we try and let the feelings run their course. Burn and rage and ravage. They tend to dissipate with the valley fog exposed to the sunlight of new experiences and ideas. We took up one of those old school recently revamped video games we’ve dubbed “Quest Games,” in many ways the bildungsromane of the gaming world—in this case, very much on the nose, this one was called Dragon Quest III. Often, a character wakes up to a crisis and is called upon prematurely as an older teenager to venture forth to save family or kingdom or lover. We ride someone else’s journey for a bit in order to free us to access ourselves later on, once we’ve been distracted or, hopefully, re-inspired.
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
—Andy Warhol
It’s in the space of uncreative malaise and too precious thought that we re-accessed Warhol’s portraits, which, for whatever reason in the moment, jumped out at use as being filled with portent in a way we’d previously overlooked. Congrats to you if you “got” it or had a discrete connection with the work before—why didn’t you say something! The faces. Many of which are now passed. Colors framing and overlapping their contours at times. Their features degrading across iterations of silk-screen print attempt. We’re all imperfect and fading. These great people of Warhol’s eye. We’re all very much alike, with particularities that can yield devastation. Or normalcy. Or, by the thinnest margins, fame. Sometimes fortune. Maybe by this channel we were steered to appreciating simplicity, of art and of being. Sometimes we need to be simple on the page. At least in construction, in appearance. That we found a deeper complexity to Warhol beneath what we had previously eschewed as basic and unappealing—thanks new music, deer path adventuring, cruising unfamiliar thought-moors—renewed us in a way. We’ll want to watch out when confronted with the simple. Maybe it’s a facade. We’ll want to learn how for ourselves. How the simple poem is the complex experience. How to fill easy constructions with the tiny infinities of people, normal or extraordinary.
Riqsikuy.
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Deaundra Jackson
After Trumpet Player by Langston Hughes Of course, I remember Him He was jazz He was tender melodies slinking from the silk like stolen kisses in the sin of day I’ve been furrowed brows but my new earrings really shine and I got a new eyeliner all cleopatra like and so I remember I remember me in the Nile drawing you from the water where you drifted in wicker some salvation was you, boy
Music: Nightwhisper
Nightwhisper, a pairing of two German electronic music producers Arne Behnfeldt and Ben Walter, seems to be a new venture, which is a fun occurrence stumbling across new things about which there is little written. And there really is almost nothing about these folks and their tandem which has produced an EP and a bunch of singles amounting to, as per Spotify, about ten tracks. “Firefly” has been one we happened across down a music discovery rabbit hole—these urges are glorious when they hit, the impulse to be alone and focused on music for an hour or two, sitting up in bed with headphones on, or at the coffee shop, buzzing, being fully engrossed in the venture of new, which is preceded by a welling of feeling and openness to self and discovery, particularly of sound.
We hope everyone has these experiences. We find ourselves driven inward, almost always without self-criticism or judgement, back into our emotions, into places we’d never visited or seldomly so. New tracks are important for this reason. They offer pathways. Old tracks often become monuments to previous thought-scapes; when you revisit them, as pleasant or lovely as they might be, you’re stuck with the same experience. Hey, that can be great! We want to preserve thought-spaces of merit or import or inspiration. But we need novelty. That helps us connect differently with ourselves, with, by the transitive properties of being, our writing on the page or in process. This issue, we offer a new space, hopefully. A deer trail. Tread gently or bring a machete. That’s up to you and how you want to exist. Listen and be open.
…
Another interesting consideration is the business plan of the management company that serves as agent for this producer team-up. They offer management expertise and also run a label. They work with electronic artists and producers, operating out of Germany where there’s a large music scene for this genre. It’s an interesting model from what we can tell looking in with little to go on. We wonder about models of artist management for the writing world, if there could ever be more innovation in the space of rights sales and publication in the digital world—couldn’t someone with the smarts extract the best segments, lines, quotes, great paragraphs and monetize them outside of full publication? Couldn’t there be a house of clever writers who may not have books or be in the top literary mags, but who fill all sorts of other spaces in the social media world, maybe whose stories fuel content for production houses to build for the streaming sites? Take a look. We’re on one of those writing and business thought-tunnels. Drop us a line with your thoughts.
Writers Submit: 3 Magazines
The online and print magazine is reading in all genres, and has a few prize categories. Florida’s oldest literary journal in continuous publication since 1964. They calls themselves, “a gallery space in print.” DEADLINE DECEMBER 31
The online literary magazine of South Dakota University focuses on writers with a relationship or work about the Northern Great Plains region. They publish work in all genres, and, as a bonus, submissions are free. DEADLINE DECEMBER 31
The online magazine is free to submit in all genres. The undergraduate magazine awards cash prizes, and considers all entries for publication. Open to travel & other sub-genres of NF, alongside creative work. DEADLINE FEBRUARY 1
Weekly Artist: Warhol’s Portraits
We’ll say it up front: before this issue, we weren’t terribly interested in Warhol. The selected works we’ve come across or happened to be familiar with registered as, to be blunt, boring. However, maybe it’s the getting older phenomenon whereby once you’ve passed a certain threshold of experience you gain access into art pieces (be it paintings or songs or what have you) that you previously had no way of entering. Think about when you were a child and you heard of someone’s death on the news or even in the neighborhood. Think about how similar news affects you as a grown up. If you’re above 35, think about how it affects you even more than it did in your twenties. Quite a digression, but this age-access effect bears some thought-time as it pertains to the world and art and certainly our writing—go back and reread a book that nurtured you in your teens and contrast that with your new perspective.
Warhol was more innovative and future-thinking than we thought. The idea that, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” has never rung truer than now. And the reason for that is often connected to random people cleverly turning the ordinary into a form of art or entertainment—content, we call it—which is no small part of what Warhol and the pop art movement were after.
Born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, his family were descendants of folks from the present-day Slovakia region in Eastern Europe. The slightly more diminutive and way less ethnically conspicuous Warhol went to art school and found employment as a commercial illustrator before taking his private pieces to galleries. He exploded on to the scene in the 60’s and was a fixture until his death in 1987. We’re speculating his utilitarian approach to art-making—see, silk screen printing and consider the use of ready-made or familiar imagery—derived from the immigrant experience, from a working-class upbringing from one of the more working-class cities. We’re thinking about our upbringing, how our aesthetic principles and understanding of how to communicate inexorably connects to specifics, to the straws we were given and didn’t even draw, to the circumstance of being a dependent and how all of that goes on to integrate with our approach in the now.
“I do mostly portraits. So it’s just people’s faces, not really any ideas.”
—Warhol via Interview Magazine.com
One of the reasons we were recently struck by Warhol’s portraits is the passage of time. His process, silk-screen printing, and his altering of colors combined with many depictions of his subjects across several iterations necessarily involves imperfection, change, degradation and variability. This manifests the human condition. In many ways, we are simple beings—the primary and proximal colors—engaged in habit-formation and behavioral-iteration for the purposes of ease, comfort, and safety. Habits, insistence on iterating success such that we can selectively engage in anomalous behavior or experiences is a very human adaptation. Warhol now appears to us to be a deeper thinker than we expected, one from whom we can learn, particularly concerning characterization and how we depict the people that populate our pages: flaws, inconsistencies, carnality.
We like this idea of portraying things simply, easily consumed. Of course, we’re proponents of complexity if you’ve read previous letters, but greater than that is the idea of mixing and balance. Ease of access into things complex, perhaps. Deliver us broad strokes, but be sure to take us into the minute. The general as window into the specific. Too, we can be granted specificity in order to deliver universal truth. Something we see lacking in work that comes through our imprints is an appeal to this sort of balance: sometimes the simple never grants us anything beyond face value. Sometimes the complex stays muddy, never bestowing clean looks at the beauty beneath its inevitable brackishness.
Poetry by Deaundra Jackson
Seismic
I love that James Brown scream!
“Awe! I feel good! Nananananana”
it is as if his voice sticks
to every corner of the room
it is as if he knows
his country wants him
muffled and chainedbut his voice is a seismic frequency
even chains can hear,loosening the shackles
as they shimmy the way he doesacross the stage until
the shackles dissolve
as if
they were never there
Interesante: Huxley’s Ideas
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