Grant Me This: Some Moolah

Boldly ask for what you wonder if you truly deserve. That must be the writer's mantra in requesting funding and submitting work.

Image found here

Just sent off an application to the Elizabeth George Foundation asking for a grant to fund writing time. I have better credentials this time--more awards, more milestones reached--but you always wonder, How dare I ask for money? Just sweat it out, honey. Work a 15-20 hour day and get 'er done. 

But artists have to get over their fears and guilt and self-hatred. If we want time to write, it must be either found at some expense to ourselves or funded by external sources--those are our options. While we all love the stories of those authors who lose sleep and friendships and sanity to write beyond the workday and commute and cleaning and cooking and supposed exercising, it's no way to live.

I recently saw Robert Olen Butler post on Facebook about his 14-hour marathon writing days and felt inadequate. (Well, in the face of his writing I will always feel inadequate, but that's another post.) Then I thought, I can't do that long and survive. Even if writing was my day job, I couldn't persist longer than eight hours of writing without developing some helpful addiction.

I have found that the first and early drafts of my novel were do-able with a stolen hour a day and many hours stolen on the weekends. But there comes a time when deep reading and focus is needed beyond an hour a day, and it's very hard to unravel a novel and re-knit it with your brain unable to dive into it deep on a regular basis.

So I need time, which means money. I don't care what the free culture says, what those who hate their day jobs say, those who resent artists for asking to do what they love all day--I say fund the arts and the artists.

Lately there's been a massive outcry and debate over Emily White's confession that she's never bought music--"I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With," and it's raised a whole host of responses, the best of which, I hear, is David Lowery's. His argument of why we ought to pay for the arts, specifically songs, but I'll extrapolate that to movies, books, plays, paintings, sculpture, dance--strikes right at what I see as American myth: that artists ought to sweat it out beyond the regular work day and somehow make beautiful things to entertain everyone else. If you (and by you I mean all of us) want to spend any time with entertainment, then don't just nod to the artist, thank an artist, but pay the artist. We need tips, we need patrons, we need grants. We need moolah as much as anyone else.

I have no more wisdom than this tonight except to keep applying for several more grants and see what happens. For women, check out A Room of Her Own Foundation's Gift of Freedom--a pretty amazing opportunity. A great storehouse of information is housed at Hope Clark's Funds for Writers website and in her weekly e-newsletters, so start surfing there to see what options are available.

And don't feel guilty about it. If you're not planning on wasting that money, if you've paid dues and plan to pay more, if you work damn hard and you're serious about your craft, that's enough to ask for some of the money that's out there.

Clean Enough to Kneel at the Shrine

Clean. The office is clean.

Office is such the wrong word. I prefer space, study, or retreat. But whatever you call it, it's relieved of its dust, cat hair, and Lyn hair. The floor is swept, the desk is de-cluttered, and the shrines have been dusted.

St. Catherine of Siena by Michael

That's right, shrines. A writer's space is a spiritual one and so it must be filled with good energy. Over the years, talismans of love and beauty collect around my writing space--gifts from others and gifts to myself, forming a tiny Stonehenge of power. They're what I see daily as I write.

There is the

• elephants shrine
• and the saints shrine
• and the cats shrine
• and the stones shrine
• and The Wizard of Oz shrine.

Five corners of good energy. They're cheering me on now, though I'm making more notes than pages--notes for when I pick up the manuscript again for more revision. As I wait for my agent's review of my latest pass at my novel, I've got Zen felines giving me patient looks; Ganesh proffering his tusk, that great sacrifice for art; Pope John Paul holding up a hand in blessing; and the Emerald City glimmering with hope. A huge gray rock perches against my desk top with one word carved in its surface: BALANCE. 

Is it any wonder that I with all my sacred relics wrote one novel called ST. MICHAEL, PRAY FOR US or another called OUR WHITE LADY OF THE GENTLE SINS? I'm all about the blessed tokens--holy wafers, smoking censers, purple vestments--that make a sacred story come to life. 

We don't write to make a buck or make a name for ourselves. We think we do, but at the end of the day we seek the eternal. Ask any writer who wants elusive fame: all she really wants is life after death, the hope that others read her words and do this in memory of her. 

So if my office is more full of meditation these days than productivity, good for me. At the very least, the way is clear for the next part of the pilgrimage; I'll know soon what I'm about. I may not like the next fork in the road, the next twist with unforeseen consequence, but you can't call yourself pilgrim if you hate taking the steps. For a moment there's rest. I can see and I can breathe. 

Writing Prompts

• Find a shrine in your house and spend some moments there. Write what comes to mind during and after your stay.
• If you don't have a shrine, begin one. Write a poem about something holy, and lay it there as one of your offerings.
• How do you define spiritual when it comes to writing? How is writing a spiritual act?
• What have you created lately? How is it a divine act?
• How is writing spiritual and not religious? What makes writing religious?
• Who are your favorite spiritual writers (remember, your definition of "spiritual") and what do they teach you?
• Write something with your eyes on the sky, on the trees, seeking wind, thinking about forever. Seek truth, not perfection. Write honest and open and see what emerges. 
• Write something looking at a shrine.