How I'm Trying to be More Present

Grab your favorite beverage and open up this month's issue.

There are 25+ opportunities for creatives in this month’s issue, take a look! And keep scrolling for this month’s letter.

✨ July Deadlines

• ✍🏼 Due 7/9: The Walrus Magazine 2023 TD Fellowship on Disability and Inclusion

• 🎨 Due 7/12: Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists

• 🎨 Due 7/12: Penland School of Craft Resident Artist Program

• 🎨 Due 7/15: UCross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists (+ one for writers)

• ✍🏼 Due 7/15: 2023 Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers: Fiction

• 🎨 Due 7/15: Quinn Emanuel Los Angeles Artists-in-Residence Program

• 🎨 Due 7/16: Field Projects Gallery Ceramic Residency

• 📸 Due 7/19: En Foco Nueva Luz Study Center Commissioning Fund 2024

• 🎨 Due 7/21: National Public Housing Museum Artist as Instigator Residency

• 🎨 Due 7/30: El Paso Museum of Art 2024 Border Biennial

• ✍🏼 Due 7/31: AWP HBCU Fellowship Program

• 🎨 Due 7/31: Red Rock Review Literary Journal Cover Art Submission

• 💭 Due 7/31: Grand Canyon Artist in Residence

• 🎨 Due 7/31: City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Call for Graphic and Digital Designers

✨ August Deadlines

• 🎨 Due 8/1: Peters Valley School of Craft Guest Artist Residency (for artists working in Blacksmithing, Ceramics, Fibers, Fine Metals, Wood, Drawing/Painting/Collage  or Printmaking)

• ✍🏼 Opening 8/1: Oatmeal Creek Residency (prose, poetry, screen/playwriting)

• ✍🏼 Due 8/2: Gasher Press 2023 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize

• ✍🏼 Due 8/3: Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Literary Arts (for fiction writers in the South)

• 🎵 Due 8/16: Salt Lick Incubator Artist Project Grant

• 🎨 Due 8/31: 3Elements Review Call for Art

• ✍🏼 Due 8/31: Storyknife Writers Retreat (for women writers)

• ✍🏼 Due 8/31: Barthelme Prize for Short Prose

• ✍🏼 Due 8/31: Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

• ✍🏼 Due 8/31: The Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing

• ✍🏼 (officially due in October, but wanted to share!) Little, Brown Spark New Voices Award (in partnership with the Psychotherapy Networker)

• 👩🏽‍🎓 Same here! The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans

👀 Question Corner 👀

Turns out subscribers love lofi vibes! Here’s a Summer Lofi YouTube stream to get your creative ideas going. My new fave soundtrack is this Good Mood Jazz Music stream.

Thank you THANK YOU to the seven (!) paid subscribers that recently joined the list, after I re-launched Notes from Eva on Substack.

For the first time in a while, I got to read my work out loud to an audience. As part of Women Who Submit’s open mic, I read one unpublished piece and part of this piece that was published in Exposition Review.

It’s such a different experience to hold the pieces in my hand (I printed them out! wow!) and say the words out loud. Words that I’d sat down and labored over, deleting something here, moving something over there.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be present. At the open mic, I wasn’t checking my email or worrying about whether my projects would do well. I wasn’t comparing my accomplishments to others on social media. I wasn’t looking at my to-do list and wondering why I couldn’t get that one thing done.