From the Archives: Ephemera 2022 Iss. May.3
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Dear Readers & Writers,
It’s been three years almost since we started our letter! We’re looking back today at posts from May 2022 and wanted to share this one with you from the archives. The archives are paywalled unless you’re a paid subscriber, which we’d love for everyone to become to really help us focus on this endeavor, which is really meaningful to us. It’s sort of the culmination of a combined several decades of thinking about writing and creativity as well as working in and around the literary space as well as art-bathing and attending readings, taking and teaching classes, and trying our hardest to be for and live within the intersecting realms of literature and art.
Mini Essay
Music by Avram Fefer in conjunction with…
Sculpture by Richard Serra
Thank you for your presence and focus.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
From the past:
May 19, 2022
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, padi dɛn! (Krio for “friends”)
Here we are, here we are, mid May on our way to the heat of summer, implementing our plans (we have writing retreats on the old schedule) and tackling important work and life quagmires, puzzles, and predicaments in order that our minds our liberated. We, the species, used to have rituals to enact this, in many ways, epic struggle with responsibility as it pertains to liberation, required thought vs creative thought, managed expression’s endeavoring to snuff out individualism. Consider this letter our attempt to tiptoe-in some rite of passaging, sneak in a mimetic Trojan past your work-hour guards such that, in the evening, enticing the thoughts of weekend, lo, a surge of creative soldiers run amok. Toward that end, we offer you sculpture from Richard Serra and music by a talented woodwind instrumentalist from his Resonant Sculpture Project that connects sound with Serra’s steel. Serra is a treasure trove and we invite you to luxuriate in our suggested reading and listening, but, too, fully explore as much as you can online and in person—we link to one of our favorite Serra installations. And we hitch you to zine suggestions, three prizes and publishing opportunities, a distracting definition cum art site, our #friend of ephemera (please consider), and jobs!
Heat thickens the air and we move slow and open up to meandering, to new experiences (hopefully) as well as old reliables (make these count), and in our business languor we permit the natural and art-envisaged worlds to impact us: how space is shaped and sound moves within, how we rise or fall internally in reaction to a scent, too grating sound, an enticing visual. Focus on your mind and where it goes. Allow that thought and feeling to roam freer and bring you to a new space of experience; therein lay fertile creative lands for our work. We’ll be sowing these fields for the next quarter and can’t wait to hear about yours and describe our harvests come fall moons. Please seed this letter to your friends and colleagues, and entice them with the future yields. Praise be novel thinking!
We feast at your support: Tea or Books!
Fil fɔ tɛl tɛnki (Gratitude!)
~We’re so happy you’re here!~
Featured Music: Avram Fefer
Avram Fefer is a musician, educator, composer, and woodwind instrumentalist who plays in many genres, solo and with bands. We’re particularly interested in Fefer’s Resonant Sculpture Project as discussed in the video above. You can follow the link to the projects webpage for several videos (and lovely photos!) and more detailed analysis of the intent, import, and impact of the project. Fefer’s work connects with our artist selection for this week, Richard Serra, and we enjoy the compounding effects of musically interpreting a large art installation focused on space, material, and thought. If you’re a consistent reader of our letter, you’ll already know that we believe music can be an aid to our own creative endeavors—in many ways, not the least of which is forging new thought paths by opening our thinking in ways we might not have had access to. Serra enables this process and Fefer piles on, exploring the spatial and sonic components of Serra’s immense steel work. Can we place ourselves in and around monumental art in order to influence our thinking and our writing? Can we include art in our writing in effective ways as in use pieces to explicate or evolve character, to build ambiance, to expand the minds of readers?
Here’s the full piece (with some editing) of Fefer’s performance in and among the Serra steel sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery, NYC.
Writers Submit: Two Magazines
Published in print and online, the magazine has published over 50 issues and looks for all genres that “...engage the perilous conditions of life in the 21st century…” Great covers and some amazing new and veteran writers.
Breakbread is focused on the development of creatives under 25 years old. If you’re an emerging writer under 25 please consider sending them fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. The magazine also hosts workshops with literary advocacy for writers under 25.
~~^^Definitions & Distractions^^~~
Graphwords connects a core word to synonyms and words with adjacent or connected meanings in a visual chart.
Weekly Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra, born in 1934, is one of the most prolific sculptors alive. Of particular intrigue are Serra’s large installations often made from weatherized steel to create spaces that are poignantly recognizable as significant changes to building interiors and outdoor landscapes. The artist has many permanent sculptures around the world and his work has been exhibited in major museums. Intriguing us is Serra’s stated interest in form rather than image, in tactility and physical presence. Images, it would seem, reduce our senses…touching, feeling, and listening…one-sidedly, create hyper focus on simply the piece. These spacious steel installations that one can walk between, under, around, while touching, while humming or singing or yipping to perceive sonically how the art reverberates offer a complex experience—we at Ephemera are (pre covid) yearly visitors of DIA Beacon for this reason.
As writers, we might take note and obey the mores asking that we read work aloud but maybe, a la Serra, even conceive our words aloud! How does the space of speaking out loud form how we invent and create? Too, let’s be sure that when we do have words on a page we include touch and smell and sound, expand the space of our inventions. Serra’s a treasure trove and now has us questioning how we look at form (genre and our outlines and the structure of a story) and how something steadfast or spindly, common or recondite, particularly when utilized as a technique prior to our plot and character, how form shapes our diction, our thoughts, what we’re capable of thinking.
We invite you to view this clip of Serra discussing form and process as a means of expanding how he thinks. The full clip is unceasingly worth listening to as well.
Interlude: #Friend of Ephemera
Prizes/Awards/Classes in Early 2022
(Poetry & Pub Award, Fiction Award, Chap Award, & Sponsored Residency)
Press 53 Poetry Award $1,000 and publication to a poetry book. Manuscripts should be between 50-120 pages. The press also hosts a number of contests and publication opportunities. $1k Prize. $30 fee. Deadline is August 1.
New American Fiction Prize awards $1,500 and publication to a manuscript of fiction that includes collections of stories, flash fiction, short-shorts, and linked collections, alongside full-length novels. $1.5k prize. 25 copies. $25 fee. Deadline June 15.
Orison Chapbook Prize $300 and publication for a chapbook manuscript in any genre between 20-45 pages. The press focuses on spiritual depth that embodies a deeper meaning. Deadline July 1.
Please consider supporting Ephemera by applying to our sponsored residency. We will select 2 folks (i.e. 2 separate individuals) to receive the residency sponsorship (7 days at Good Contrivance Farm) and each will receive the travel stipend of $200.
Ephemera Presents: Good Contrivance Residency - New Deadline is June 5.
Bookstore: Guides, Gifts & Classics
Buy books, please. It helps us and others! Bookstore via Bookshop.
On Richard Serra:
»»»Remember last week’s letter has urgent deadlines!«««
**Bonus Section**
Select Job Postings
Yale Review: Publishing Assistant p/t. $22-$30/hr. On site. New Haven, CT.
Archipelago Books: Admin Associate full time. On Site. ~$25-$40k. NYC
Carnegie Learning: Senior Editor f/t. 5 yrs exp. MA English/Business. ~$90k. Remote.
~~~Gudbai fɔ naw~~~
(Goodbye For Now)
A Poem From The Archive
Poetry by Mark Saba
A New Autumn
I have been eating trees
with my eyes, ears, and nose.Their colors soften
a bitter landscapecreating a welcome amnesia—
days when I gobbled them upin paint, words, or dreams.
But trees remained outsideof me, petrified by my plan.
I killed them one by one.Now I know their leaves
must shake, rattle, and fallwhether I note them or not.
Whether my dreams give them back
or I digest them into oblivion.