The Venerable Art of Grantwriting
-or- How to swim with your head underwater
Hearty greetings from the depths of despair!
There are going to be a lot of screenshot images in this thread so get ready! You too might look a little like this fish at the end of reading this!
For work, I’m writing three grants for Pen Parentis simultaneously. Each one has instructions for dealing with the multiplicity of people and various departments that “could be” working on these grants simultaneously. There are several logons with several permissions for each one.
I’m just doing the whole thing solo. It’s like planning a party where everyone says “oh just get other people to put up the streamers and take out the trash” and you look around and the cafeteria is empty and you’re holding the streamers.
But I’m used to it! What I am not used to (yet) is that the portals update every single year, so I can’t get a system going to fill out these applications! As if grant writing itself wasn’t hard enough, I get about a million of these messages every time I try to navigate from one place to another:
Here, for your amusement is how at least ten minutes of my day was brutally murdered by these pop up messages. I was looking for last year’s NEA submission (which we won! yes, yours truly won a grant for Pen Parentis from the National Endowment for the Arts. And we made a very cool issue of a magazine that used only parent submissions and came out with a super-high-end-artsy-fabulous-literary magazine — see? parents can be cool too! For example, I know a certain writer-mom who enabled the creation of an entire literary magazine’s annual issue in the same year that her husband left—it was during also the launch year for her own first-ever fiction collection. That’s pretty kick-ass for any artist don’t you think?
(Except I was so busy working on the literary magazine I completely missed my own launch anniversary - A Flash of Darkness was a year old in April! I had no idea. Was distracted!)
(Oh, here’s the issue if you want to take a peek - I’m quoted in the editor’s letter! There are also some incredible poems by fathers that are currently serving in the Ukraine military as ground forces. You’ve never read poetry so powerful.)
Anyway, here’s the ridiculous activity that has set me on the path to madness this week:
So I guess I have to buy Adobe? Side note: who is making bank from the national requirement that everyone applying to the National Government for funds must use Adobe? (I was very amused that the linked article is quick to point out that Hedge Funds are not the answer—though the question was of course “who is controlling” not “who is making bank” —if you do math with the very next sentence, 20.7% of the shares are owned by The Vanguard Group, Inc, BlackRock, Inc, and State Street Global Advisors, Inc, the 3 largest shareholders.)
Oh - when I click the form I get the option to…..
So let’s try clicking on that link to buy this new version….what’s $15/month when it could save me all this aggravation right? And after all Hedge Funds are only making about 1/5 of the profits:
But okay. I got a reader that should let me access my old form, even if I can’t interface with the website. I’ll pour myself a new cup of coffee and….
Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial in grant writing! Yes, friends, THIS IS RIDICULOUS!
WRITING NEWS:
I wrote some new things on Medium:
Meta Flash Fantasy Romance is a weird fiction piece trying out a new writing technique. I’d love to know how it lands for you. (it’s very short)
Selfies With Strangers is a longer piece (with photos!) responding to a friend’s Facebook post about, you guessed it, how to take selfies with strangers.
How the Internet Broke Art is an essay that you might have missed (with gorgeous photos, really) about the state of art today thanks to the fact that photographs of the art experience tend to overshadow the actual experience for the patron.
So far no news on the reschedule of John Foster’s book launch for HATE HOUSE. I’ve been writing short fiction and sending it out - I know, I know, you’re all waiting for a novel. I will get to it! My son just left for a six week internship in Lithuania and my daughter is about to head for eight weeks of summer camp. Their absences will overlap this July and I will be living in an NYC Writing Residency. Send happy thoughts!
I HAD THE BEST TIME on a panel for the Nebula Conference (the conference is in Pasadena and brings together members of the Science Fiction Writers Association) on Saturday June 9th - the other panelists were Carol Gyzander, R.S.A. Garcia, and Barbara Krasnoff (all luminary women in genre!!) and of course our moderator was the very cool Ava Kelley who was zooming in from Norway via Romania (or vice versa—in any event a very different time zone).
And guess what? R.S.A. Garcia won a Nebula Award shortly after our panel! How amazing and wonderful is that?
Crazy thing is our virtual panel was at the same time as a NASA-hosted panel that I wanted to attend! But it was definitely an honor to be invited to speak and great to meet the other panelists - many of whom I’d seen in and around NYC - but the thing I realized is that it is so interesting to be “seen as an expert” in anything at all…. even if it is “Older Protagonists in Fiction.”
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHT:
I am in awe of the many 22-30 year olds who proclaim themselves experts. Do they really think they are experts? Or are they doing “fake it until you make it?” Or actually trying to sucker people into paying money for books they have written that have some information but are mostly rehash of other people’s work?
I have never felt like an imposter, but I have also never felt like an expert. How does one begin to feel like an expert? I know so many things and am very talented at many of them, but there is always more to learn. Always.
What is an expert?
Also, why did this guy not deflate this cactus to carry it on the subway?
I think expertise applies more to specific skills, to sciences, than it does to art, and maybe that its why you are dubious of the concept, because where you (M.M.) are most remarkable and seem most driven is towards areas which are not black and white and cannot be judged simply.
A thought I have is that the more one believes in expertise, the less one tends to believe in genius. I recently read Nietzsche's "All Too Human." He, of course, did not believe in divine genius, and I don't think even in genius itself. Sorry to go so long on this, but here's a really interesting passage (translation Helen Zimmern):
"163. The Earnestness of Handicraft - Do not talk of gifts, of inborn talents! We could mention great men of all kinds who were but little gifted. But they obtained greatness, became 'geniuses' (as far as they are called), through qualities of the lack of which nobody who is conscious of them likes to speak. They all had that thorough earnestness for work which learns first how to form the different parts perfectly before it ventures to make a great whole; they gave themselves time for this, because they took more pleasure in doing small, accessory things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. For instance, the recipe for becoming a good novelist is easily given, but the carrying out of the recipe presupposes qualities which we are in the habit of overlooking when we say, 'I have not sufficient talent.' Make a hundred or more sketches of novel-plots, none more than two pages long, but of such clearness that every word in them is necessary; write down anecdotes every day until you learn to find the most pregnant, most effective form; never weary of collecting and delineating human types and X characters; above all, narrate things as often as possible and listen to narrations with a sharp eye and ear for the effect upon other people present; travel like a landscape painter and a designer of costumes; take from different sciences everything that is artistically effective, if it be well represented; finally meditate on the motives for human actions, scorn not even the smallest point of instruction on this subject, and collect similar matters by day and night. Spend some ten years in these varios exercises: then the creations of your study may be allowed to see the light of day."
That he places the investment at 10 years is interesting, because I think that and 10,000 hours is what Malcolm Gladwell advocated for, and is what has taken hold of as the necessity for expertise (although it's not a universally accepted theory). I have to suspect Gladwell noted a lot of people like Nietzche saying the same thing, and that's where he got the idea.
Since I don't agree with Nietzsche about the process, and do not think it's just about intense time on task, I can also say that I do believe in expertise in the young, at least as a possibility and occasional development. I understand that it doesn't mathematically seem possible that they could be among the best in their given field, but you earlier had a post about magic, right? I think there can be an intense drinking in of a subject by a young person that is unfathomably deep and undertaken most unconsciously. They would never approach their subject so intensely if they thought about whether they wanted to do this beforehand, because it is a kind of madness to be so consumed with something. It is not at all a social or aware thing to do. But that is the advantage someone of any age can have over someone who has mere experience.