Ephemera Newsletter Iss Sept.3

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Přátelé! (Czech for “friends”)

The equinox blooms! We bid you take stock of the macrocosmic above us, the changes and movement of our solar system’s bodies. These make for good reminders to be purposeful with our artistic practices, and to practice humility.

This issue has a paywall. Remember, becoming a paid subscriber, even at the monthly level, grants full access behind the paywall for our weekly issues, as well as other subscriber perks (discounts on submitting, early access, and some others). Although we have occasional sponsors, we are a reader supported endeavor. If you like our content, we hope you’ll consider supporting our humble letter. Thanks-thanks!

Check out last week’s issue if you missed it. And here are some reminders:

• We’re redoubling our message to access the full letter with cut-offs. This email may get abridged. Please remember to click around any cut-off point and or try reading us on Substack.com or through the app.

• Good Contrivance Farm Residency: Sept 15 we open for applications.

  

• Call For Submissions: $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.

In Brief…this week’s features:

• Thoughts on Grimes, and her song “Dream Fortress.”

• Thoughts on Surrealism in writing: Kerouac and Burroughs.

• September’s poet, Alison Luterman, and her second of four poems, “Dear Monster”

• Our weekly lists:

  • 3 magazines with open calls

  • 3 awards/prizes

  • 3 recent job listings for editors and writers.

• More ephemera: check out an Interesante selection on rare and enticing (maybe even surreal) apples; Book Recs, bonus content, and 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,

Time around these points, the autumnal equinoxes (day by day near, then upon us, now passed, equal parts light and dark), begins to feel more precious. We must guard it…if we can. So many obligations, events, social interaction to be head. It gets difficult to protect our creative time, which is where our Interesante article this week comes into play, a piece on how to say ‘no.’ Maybe our writing mornings, or quick 1 hour blocks mid-day get eaten into. Alas and woe and grr and all things cursed. But, if you can, let’s consider a way of connecting with our selves that eschews the preliminary reading, or brainstorming, or myriad anality-fueled maneuvers—check one, check two, check, check, check three. Certainly, we have a project, but why not write adjacent? Take the forms and thoughts and feelings, a quick refresher in the mind, and rinse whatever the amalgam happens to be into the keyboard, or pad, or napkin. Automatic writing. Spontaneous writing. Use the subconscious as did Kerouac and Burroughs and their ilk (see this week’s artist). Sure, it’s a style, but it’s also a tool for us to wield. Draw upon a few of the spontaneous writing lessons, don’t shy away from connecting with whatever you happen to think. Be emotive. Don’t be precious. Later, later you’ll have a moment to reconcile what you’ve done in your brief session with what you’ve been working on. We’re convinced there will be kernels of truth, veins of incite, globs of something usable. We’re sure the practice will aid you, if in no other way than purely as an exercise. But you must give of yourself in the time allotment, fully, forcefully.

“By not revising what you’ve already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way…”
—Jack Kerouac in The Paris Review 1968

Love what you’re about to do…bring to mind a character, a line, a plot or sub plot, one of your more lovely metaphors. Now zoom out, above, into the sky looking down. You’re no longer you, but a being watching you and the item of your mind’s eye. Move further out and become the sun. This light of yours shines in all directions. You can see your sky, your you sitting there bright with love, imperfect, capable of sin with that glint of an idea, but you can also see the solar system, feel the burning at your core, colliding molecules fusing too fast for you to know anything but the lovely engulfing heat and brightness. Your cup runneth so far over emitting your excesses is a relief, regardless of whether each wave or packet brightens the day of a being or shoots past into blithering darkness. That’s you. You’re it. And too full loving any release. Beyond, you’re a stitch of star clusters, an urge in nothingness to coalesce gravitons and gravitas. You’re not you. You’re up and out there. Suddenly, inexplicably, you return to you, full, elated, heavy and light, and you have anything and everything to express, which you do, not you or it or anything. You are the conduit of expression and you’re in love with that process and anything it yields. A stream. Turgid. If it’s there, it’s written. Out pour. Drain. Emote. Live everything that you can. Core you will return. Later, after, epochally as you need or wish.

Vděčnost!
(Gratitude)

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~We’re so happy you’re here!~

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Good Contrivance Residency

October 31 is the deadline. 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 have been sent an early-bird submission portal at half price).

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Poetry by Alison Luterman

Dear Monster

When Maria Callas does the aria
from Norma, “Casta Diva,”
she stands still as a willow tree for long moments
through the overture, arms wrapped
around her newly-slender body,
jewels trembling at wrists and throat.
Then smiles demurely as the orchestra swells,
her long almond eyes uptilted,
as if she held a beautiful secret close.
Watch how she waits. Like an animal
who hides her claws for the pounce.
Then when that voice finally comes on
in sinuous waves, its amber beauty
is almost unbearable, but she bears it,
she births it through her wide, avid mouth
which is shaped like the prow of the Argo
carrying Jason and his men away
after they’d stolen the golden fleece.
Oh mouth of Callas, dazzling orifice,
pouring out glory and rue in sonorous round notes!
Oh lonely workhorse, exile
on the island of fame, who gave everything for Art
and like Medea, trusted faithless men,
only to be abandoned in the end.
Haven't we all heard the myths and shuddered,
seeing ourselves in the enraged outcast who transformed herself
through sheer force of will,
but even that was not enough.
Art is art. Love is love.
Dear monster, dear sister, I have been lonely too.
But no one has been quite as lonely as you.

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Music: Grimes - Dream Fortress