Writer's Grant Analysis

I applied for a writer's grant and did not win, and I think I would find it helpful to write a bit of analysis about it. There were seven hundred and fifty applicants and only one winner, with five more non-cash-prize honorable mention finalists, so the odds against each applicant were very high, but I learned a lot through this process and I want to do a breakdown around it.

The grant was from A Room of Her Own, an organization that supports women writers with this and other grants and with writer's retreats and workshops.

http://www.aroho.org/

Their charter is based on giving a very large ($50,000) grant every two years to a writer who is already showing a high level of commitment to her craft. It is also derived from Virginia Woolf’s thesis that a woman needs personal space and resources in order to live out her full creative potential, which is why the award is so large – it really creates a space of independence to get that much money in a relatively short period of time. The funds are parceled out over a period of two years, and are to be used for any purpose that furthers the recipient’s writing. This year’s winner, Barbara Johnson of New Orleans, plans to use the cash to support the process of writing her first novel. Other people have used the award to pay for an MFA in writing, which the current winner did not need because she already earned one from the University of New Orleans. If I had won, I planned to use the money to self-publish and promote the two Arthurian books I have already created and to clear a little space to move forward with the remainder of the volumes in that series and with other projects in process. (I am going to do all of that anyway, but $50,000 of free money would have sped things up considerably.)

I read Ms. Johnson’s application, and I looked at her biographical info and that of the finalists and I found it to be very revealing of the mindset of this particular awards committee. When I was filling out the grant application, I came across a question that made me think, “I’m probably not going to get this grant.” The question asked what community benefit one’s writing would have if awarded the grant. I live in an artist’s community, and I interact with my neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles creative community, I social-network online, and I’ve done volunteer work for various organizations. However, I am not involved in any substantial way with any community arts organization, partly because I have not lived in L.A. that long and partly because as soon as I got here, I started writing my second book and holed up in my house for over a year to complete it. It was so demanding that I did not have any time or energy for anything else, and the editing process has proven to be no less demanding. It’s been a pretty clear choice to me my whole adult life that I have to either do my art and not much else, or not do my art, which is unacceptable, so I’ve cut out a lot of other interaction. The public aspect of my creative career has certainly suffered for that, but it was a sacrifice necessary in order to actually make the art. I haven’t pursued finding avenues for publishing my shorter poems for the same reason – I felt the books were an investment of my time that could pay much larger dividends in the future so I put the bulk of my focus on them. I’ve also had almost insupportable disruptions in my life from 9-11 in NYC and Katrina in NOLA, and I had to ruthlessly refuse a lot of activities requests in order to get back on track with my writing after both of those massively destabilizing interruptions. I honestly haven’t been in a position to help anyone else much, because I’ve had to apply all of my effort to getting somewhere for myself. I answered that question on the application by outlining how my work is feminist in nature and possesses a strong component of historical relevance and religious and cultural cross-pollination derived from its origins in medieval source material. I said I would like to bring those values to a dialogue with the wider community, and that I would happily give free readings and workshops in places like libraries and other public institutions in order to further that. When I reviewed the background qualifications of the winner and finalists,

http://www.aroho.org/GOF/Barbara_Johnson.php

it was clear that they all have extensive community outreach experience and they have all been far more public with their writing work, garnering prizes and gaining advanced degrees. The winner herself and two of the runners-up already have writing MFA’s, which does show a high degree of commitment to one’s art. I have foregone that level of education to date simply because I was writing the books, and felt that committing to them was my best course of action rather than seeking public validation of work not yet completed. I also wanted to form them in the crucible of my own sensibility rather than expose my creative process to the possible subjective influence of critical feedback from a professor or thesis committee. The process of writing my books is highly spiritual in nature, very much like the milieu of a monk or scribe sitting in isolation in his cell in order to refine his own expression on the page. They are an act of private devotion, and bringing them out for public scrutiny before they were ready was not at all something I wanted to risk. The very first person I showed my first book to at the medieval conference I went to in France tried to edit it to her own taste, so you can see why I wanted a clear field of non-interference to work with. I think there are two potent lessons in this for me: one, the organization behind this grant simply had their own set of priorities for candidate criteria, which is perfectly fair, they just did not happen to match my profile of career and life experience; and two, I do need to go more public with my writing. Journalism is one thing, but the books are something else entirely, and I really do want to get them out to the world and start interacting around them. For what it’s worth, too, if taste was a factor in the determination, I can see that mine diverges greatly from that of this organization. The winning writer, Ms. Johnson, writes poetically, but her style is very American and modern. My literary touchstones are old sometimes to the point of antiquity and are mostly European. I need to find a grants organization whose objectives are more closely aligned with the work I am producing and I think I’ll get better results.

I read back over my grant application, and I would not do anything differently with it. I was very honest about my writing and my life situation, and I spelled out exactly what I hope to accomplish. I outlined specific goals and the steps I would take to reach them, and in the part of the application that inquired what I would ask for from AROHO, I said I could use their help creating a business plan, which I thought was a very reasonable request to make of people who make a living supporting the creation of books. I wrote very passionately about my art and what it means to me, and I especially responded to one of the questions that asked applicants to discuss one of several Virginia Woolf quotes regarding writing that were provided by the committee. I love Woolf, and wrote a paper in college about her book Orlando. We share the same birthday and she’s been a big influence on me. I chose the quote, "Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father." In the essay, I gave my mother due credit for teaching me to read and taking me to the library when I was little, and I wrote a lot about how women have been marginalized educationally and culturally throughout history, and of what a profound impact Woolf’s words had on bringing attention to that. She self-published via the Hogarth Press which she founded with her husband Leonard Woolf, and I wrote about the admirable avant-garde nature of that undertaking, too, and how I’d like to emulate it. In answer to a question about what writing means to me, I described my trip to France, and how overwhelmingly happy it made me to visit Mont St. Michel, a place I had written about in my Parsifal book. Here is a passage from that essay:


Seeing in person what I had seen only in books and on the internet was incredible - I had imagined my hero Parsifal, the knight of the Holy Grail, exploring those same lands and the great cathedral, and I felt like I had stepped into a fairytale, a fairytale that I had written. It was like the wonder of the stories I loved when I was a child curled up in a chair with a pretty book, but I was living the book instead of reading it. That is what writing means to me – it is no less than a divine gift that allows me my highest expression in the duration of time that encompasses my earthly existence. I was given the gift of writing the story of my own life and thereby co-creating with the great Creator my tiny corner of the world He made, and aside from life itself, I can’t think of a greater gift than that. That’s why the first cave paintings, also in France, hold such a sense of wonder and awe – they convey the whole cosmos and they make of a cave a cathedral. The Gothic churches are in turn an articulation of their builders’ awe at the immense groves of trees of Old Europe, the soaring trunks that suggested columns and the interplay of light in the leaves that solidified into the glory of stained glass. Thus is distilled the core of spiritual interaction between man, environment, and Maker: the arts are the closest that man can get to being God and making a world in his own image.


I'll stand behind that any day of the week.

My housemate, Evonne Heyning, runs a small non-profit to support artistic aims and is an old hand at grants. She is also a master social networker in new media, and when in my postmortem of this application I asked her for her advice on the grants process, she had an absolutely brilliant idea. She responded, “Why don't you use the space we have available at the artist’s community where we live to hold literary and poetry readings and workshops, and do more community outreach that way?” I can create a salon that comes to me, rather than having to search out venues, and I can put the resource of free space that we have in the service of the greater community. The Los Angeles literary community is not as widespread as in many other cities, due to the overwhelming presence of other kinds of media, but that is a perfect motivation to create another event for it. There are a lot of fine writers who deserve exposure, and an underground, grass-roots event is right up my alley. I may not have won this award, but I’ve now got more grants experience for myself, and a great idea of how to win friends and influence literary people.