Ephemera Newsletter Iss Oct.2
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome back to the Ephemera Newsletter, Venner! (Danish for “friends”)
Thank you for your presence. This week, we want to promote our residency program first thing. The Good Contrivance Residency is a five day stay at Good Contrivance Farm in a well-fitted cottage on their 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 October 31.
Good Contrivance Residency
Applications now open. We will select 2 folks (i.e. 2 separate individuals) to receive a residency sponsorship (5 days at Good Contrivance Farm) and travel stipend of $200. Selectees schedule with the farm their preferred dates subject to availability. ~$1100 value. Click to learn more. (Paid subscribers will receive an early-bird submission portal at half price).
Or apply directly
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:
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Good Contrivance Farm Residency: Deadline Oct 31 for applications.
Call For Submissions: Reading for the December issues closes Nov 3 (Submissions are capped so remember to submit promptly). $200 honorarium + appear in 4 issues! 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 each week. Learn more or:
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on John Williams’ Jaws theme.
Thoughts on Alex Eckman-Lawn, and his monstrous cut-out collages.
October’s poet, Max McDonough and his second of four poems, “Scull Bay”
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. A service, a book, an event, or a product.**
More ephemera: check out an Interesante selection on building community; Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
New Feature: Literary Films where we select an interesting movie we’ve seen that dramatizes the life of a writer or writers or artists, particularly we’re interested in biopics, and apropos book-related flicks.
This week: Frankenstein (1994) (Write up for paid subscribers)
Support us on Bookshop - See our past book recs and others. A highly curated list.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
As many people take a fall break of sorts, we’ve been a little checked out. Anyone ever forget how to write, feel like everything is forced, feel as if it’s a waste of ink and wood pulp to try anything? Maybe this is writer’s block. Maybe we fell in too comfy with our creative routine for too long…sure, butt in the seat every day same time with a fresh coffee and little distraction, but no flow state, no dreamy, epiphanic, elation-fueled stretch where words come easy, choices manifest, godly, verily truth filled. Maybe an edit or two, yet minor, so-so minor, one synonym x-ed out for another, a comma placed, unplaced, placed again. Oh what elation… Oh, muse, how you light our way… Alas, sarcasm cannot fully address the depth of despair in moments like this, when not even reading, not an extra caffeine jolt, not a blank page, rereading, music, when not a thing can break us through. What then? It might be these break times, walking clean away for a weekend, the full cycle of seven, that refresh us enough to get back to this vaunted work of writing. Let’s create an axiom. When the muse rests, take time to yourself, have a mini-adventure or two, whatever it takes to defamiliarize your surroundings and recover. That might be it, recovery. We were ill for a spell, spell-cast, ghosting. Nothing a gambol, a tango, or flirtation can’t alleviate.
“You could alter the speed of this ostinato; any kind of alteration, very slow and very fast, very soft and very loud. There were opportunities to advertise the shark with music. There are also opportunities when we don’t have the music and, the audience has a sense of the absence. They sense the absence because they don’t hear the ‘dun dun’ because you’ve conditioned them to do that.”
—John Williams on the Jaws theme, via Hollywoodreporter.com
New experience might be the best tincture for stagnation. Doctors should include in their training a curative practice, a creative regiment—read two wild books, have several random conversations, stay up late one Friday night, walk four city miles and eight in the mountain, make a type of love, listen to new music, read an interview with an artist, hit up several museums, take notes along the way, and let one month pass. If such a course of medicine could work… Alas, it seems that each of us is, in the creative musing sense, an island and, given our own micro climates, tides, and currents, we’ll need to work out a system for breaking through malaise and stalled projects that suit us individually. Try anything once. At least we ought to know that it might take several attempts, a month or two, convincing your body you’re a new you, you+, a plus you you’d not have expected you’d become-be. Sometimes, dear fright, we might need to add by subtracting—maybe you++ is too, too, much much. You-. Exclude a limb, maybe, or, we not being a hodgepodge of animated, grave-dug body parts, try undoing an addiction, examining an odd predilection, detonating something anti-social. Whatever it is, don’t dwell. Overcoming block is a writer’s preoccupation just as essentially as setting about, drafting twelve versions of nonsense so that the lucky 13th isn’t fool’s gold. We’re all golden and occasionally need a spit shine. Ptooey.
Taknemmelighed!
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Max McDonough
Scull Bay
Under the moon wrapped in gauze,
with one white bird out in the marsh hay
stalking shimmers beneath the water,
my little brother and I are filling beach buckets
with junk from the salt mud: silt-clogged
pocket lighter, stopwatch
stopped, an otherwise pretty doll
head, eyelids bobbing seizure-like
when I tilt it in my hand. Our plan
is to sell the stuff roadside, buy
escape tickets with the money, we think—
we oldest two who can hardly
stand each other, me often pinning his arms
under my knees, jabbing his chest, calling
the dog to lick his open mouth
while our mother shouts from the computer
upstairs, or argues with our father
about a broken door hinge, the unwanted family
reunion next month, his garage-hidden
handle of vodka. Cigarette smoke
chokes her closed office like the fog swirling
blue over the bay-tide here
drawn into itself like a secret.
Half an hour into walking, my foot finds
in the mud the point-tip
of a gnawed-up jig, its decapitated hook
piercing my flip-flop an inch
into my left heel,
flesh ripping inward and oozing. But I can’t
pull it out. Limping, useless, I call
the search off, less than half a bucketful each,
upsetting my brother who still
wants to keep looking, not knowing
for what exactly, in the trash and sand
running longer than we can follow, through the marsh
with its lone white bird who won’t
turn her head, the shelved moon too wounded
to blink, distant, precious
as my brother’s life is to me, our lives
to each other, though we can’t
see it, not yet.
Prizes/Awards/Stipends Fall ‘23
Patricia Dobler Poetry Award $1,000, a paid reading, & pub in Voices from the Attic for a poem written by a woman over 40 w/ no full-length book. Carlow University hosts. $1k + Pub + Reading. $20 Fee. DEADLINE OCTOBER 31
Story Foundation Prize awards $1,500 and pub for an original unpublished short story of up to 10k words. The magazine has published 17 editions, and offers other publishing opportunities. $1.5k + Pub. $25 Fee. DEADLINE DECEMBER 15
Danahy Fiction Prize awards $1,000 and publication in the Tampa Review for an unpublished short story. Simultaneously, the Tampa Review runs a poetry prize with similar payouts and fees. $1k + Pub. $20 fee. DEADLINE DECEMBER 31
#Friend of Ephemera:
C&R Press Prizes award $1,000 & Publication in 3 categories, Fiction, NF, & poetry. C&R has been publishing literature, 10 books a year since 2015, operating since 2005. $1k + Pub + Media Campaign. $30 fee. FINAL DEADLINE OCT 31.
Music: Jaws Theme (John Williams)
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