Today we’d like to introduce you to Megan Vickery, Ali Harford, Molly Gurney
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
In a way, ephemeral exists because of the eclipse this spring: because as the moon crept in front of the sun, Molly and Ali found themselves unsettled and aching for a creative outlet. In a way it exists because Megan fell in love with the ways stories shape our landscapes and craved a way to explore those ideas. In another way, it exists because though we have many changemakers, innovators, and leaders in our rural areas and small towns on the Colorado Plateau, our stories are often misrepresented and told by others. This magazine is a place to decide how our stories get told. And the name ephemeral reflects the fact that our beloved desert isn’t actually stagnant or dead at all, despite the way we think of it in the zeitgeist: it changes so quickly everyday, and often those changes last for a very short time.
ephemeral, our desert storytelling collective, exists because we need it to—because we need something that will allow us to be creative in thinking about our place and inspire others to do the same. It’s edited by three people – Megan Vickery, Molly Gurney, and Ali Harford – but it’s created by so many more!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There have definitely been moments of figuring things out, mostly on the business side – How do we start an LLC? Open a bank account? Make a website? – but we’ve had overwhelming community support in bringing this magazine to life.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We’re a storytelling collective with a print magazine focused on telling stories and sparking creativity in the Colorado Plateau region of the West. For the first issue of the print magazine, we asked the question, “what are the odds?” because it inspires stories with many themes—Fate! Magic! Luck! Science! Reason!—but also because creativity is a gamble, and we were betting on ourselves to pull this project together. We published 17 pieces of writing and art, including a thesis on the mathematics of chance, a poem exploring desert gambles, a Dungeons & Dragons-style retelling of a desert adventure gone awry, a reported essay on the likelihood of finding a jackalope, and a fictional story about a rural town a lot like Moab, Utah.
We’re extremely proud of these pieces: each of our contributors pitched us their idea, then worked with us to refine it for the magazine. And we’re proud too of the pieces that didn’t make it into the mag – of the people who saw the prompt and felt inspired to put a pen to paper for the first time in years or the people who used it to try out a new art style.
What sets us apart from others is that we’re in print! These stories are only available in the magazine, not online. We know that in this digital age, asking someone to pick up a magazine and really sit with it—to spend intentional time with it, to read it cover to cover—is a big ask. But we’re finding that people want that time and that creative spark.
What matters most to you?
We use the word creativity a lot, but that’s because it truly is what matters most to us. We want our monthly newsletter and three-times-a-year magazine to inspire people to be creative again: to really lean into their hobby, to put a pen to paper, to organize a craft night with their communities, to tell stories around a campfire. When was the last time you wrote a poem or a piece of fiction? When was the last time you tried to paint something? We want to help you put a few new coals on the creative fire, even if it feels awkward at first. Get wild! Get creative!
Pricing:
- Magazines are on a sliding scale, we just ask that readers cover the printing cost ($11). Anything extra goes toward paying our contributors. Typically people buy a magazine for $20.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ephemeralcollective.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ephemeral.moab/
- Other: https://ephemeralcollective.substack.com/
Image Credits
ephemeral magazine
