Subscription Drive - Ephemera
Invitation to support Ephemera
Dear Creative Minds,
Thank you for participating in our newsletter over the last few years! 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!
We share interesting articles and link 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 books recommendations, journals we like, and timely links to prizes and grants. Ephemera is eclectic and germane creative miscellany!
“It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”
—Salvador Dali
We hope you are fond of our monthly Poetry @ Ephemera, where we publish 4 poems from a poet and pay a $200 honorarium. That’s 12 publication opportunities per year that come with a payout and promotion to our large list of subscribers several times per month.
Our dream is to make a living discussing creative ideas and connecting them to writing endeavors while serving creatives with publication and self improvement opportunities. We have grand plans for the future if we can realize the subscription support we need: we have plans for additional residencies (Puerto Rico), publishing collections of work (Anthologies of our published poets), and adding a literary prize for fiction writers.
Ephemera is a passion for us. While it has been rewarding on many levels spiritually, it takes two days worth of work hours to produce each letter and an additional one or two for follow-ups and administration. This is on top of our work as publishers and editors and literary marketers and the side gigs we take on (from editing, tutoring, and manuscript consulting to manual labor gig work). We’re not complaining. We love this work, the people, and serving art and culture. However, we do need to try and match up our time with making a viable living. Hopefully that doesn’t require unraveling!
We’re writing to ask if folks will upgrade their free subscription to paid at any level. We’re hoping to garner enough paid subscriptions to keep going with Ephemera. That’s our minimal wish. Our reach goal is to realize enough support through subscriptions to work on an anthology of our poetry selections and some of our best reviewed mini-essays. Paid subscribers will receive that anthology as a perk, but it does cost a bit to publish in print these days!
Our next goal will be to bolster payouts for poets. After that, we’d like to increase the honorarium for our Write-In Residency. And next, work on hosting a third residency that includes funding for a trip to Puerto Rico, which has a rich poetry tradition and a few great institutions we’d love to share with everyone.
If you enjoy how we connect art and music, the angle we take on linking disparate articles, artists, and musicians to the writing mind-space, we hope you’ll consider supporting us by upgrading to a paid subscription.
Thank you for lending us your ear for a moment. We dislike the sales aspect of being literary entrepreneurs so to speak, and appreciate your generosity in hearing us out. We hope you’ll stay reading Ephemera in any capacity.
As always, we wish you a prolific practice and copious creative energy.
You have our gratitude.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
In case you missed it…
Heres a list of our poets so far:
2023
2024
Sample of from our Weekly Artist essay on Darius Twin:
…Pearson plays with time. Writers play along, too. Novelists and story collectors, we set out to realize a thing years out from the moment of beginning. We are authoring a future self as much as a continuous story. Pearson must maintain a future self, too, which he does by scheduling and routine. Be nice to your bones. Think on the skeletal level. You must be good to you in a way that guarantees you of now will be similar and well-enough as the you to be otherwise your long form work will never be rooted or even realized. We can consider the performance of light, its slip-away-ness as well as the quality of it needing to be perceived. A little swing of our L.E.D. mind in this direction can yield a splotch of bright red in an intended or unintended moment for our readers….