Get Known Before the Book Deal

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet Bret Fetzer

By Gigi Rosenberg

 

Bret Fetzer, playwright and writer, knows grantwriting from both sides of the table. He has won grants from Seattle's Artist Trust and from King County, Washington's 4Culture and now works part-time at 4Culture with the panelists who decide which artists win funding.

To write a strong grant application, Fetzer advises applicants to "have somebody else read over your application. Have them ask: Are you communicating what you mean?"
 
"When panelists are discussing 100-250 grants, they have three minutes to discuss each individual grant application," he said. Although they've all read the applications ahead of time, three minutes doesn't leave them enough time to decipher an application that's not written clearly.
 
"Panelists want to understand what they're giving money to and fund the project that has the best chance of actually happening. If they can't get a clear picture, they're not going to fund it," he said.
 
In his own grants, Fetzer uses his considerable skills as a writer to craft applications that tell a story. He advises grant writers to "write about what you've been doing, what you are doing now, and how this new project is a movement forward. This puts your project in context," he said. "Everybody is drawn to something moving forward."
 
For more than 20 years, Fetzer has been writing original fairy tales set in the traditional fairy-tale settings of European forests, Arabian deserts, and Chinese mountainsides. His stories have been published in three collections including Tooth & Tongue (Rampant Books, 2002).
 
For a recent project, he wanted to write new fairy tales that took place in an "American milieu where cigarettes were totems instead of the swords in European fairy tales," he said. So he set his American fairy tales in a setting that was half Appalachia and half dust bowl.
 
In his application he explained how his new stories were an outgrowth of his previous work. "My application gave panelists a clear idea of movement and progress," he said. 
 
He didn't go on about how his stories addressed big American issues, which is abstract, he explained. He talked about how the new stories allowed him to draw on his childhood in Texas and Kentucky. That was something the panelists could understand and relate to.
 
Fetzer received $1300 through an Artist Trust grant, which was half his total budget. The grant paid for his time to write the new stories and the costs of a public performance after the stories were completed.
 
Fetzer's five tips for better grant writing:
 
Be simple and direct.
 
Avoid abstraction.
 
Tell a story.
 
Have someone who doesn't know your work read your application and make sure you're not taking anything for granted.
 
Serve on a grant panel.
 
"One of the most instructive things you can do is to read through 200 grant applications. So, call your local arts agency and volunteer to sit on a grant panel," Fetzer advised. After 200 applications, you'll know what works and what doesn't.
 
Fetzer is also artistic director at Seattle's Annex Theater and can be reached through their website.
 
 
Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet Helen Borten

By Gigi Rosenberg

 

When award-winning radio writer and producer Helen Borten walks into an interview, she comes prepared with one thing: her first question. From that one query, which she makes sure doesn't condescend or threaten, she has gotten her subjects to tell her stories they've never told anyone else.
 
To fund her radio documentaries, Borten has won more than half a million dollars in grants for projects that have aired on National Public Radio and Public Radio International. Her latest program was a 33-part series A Sense of Place, which chronicled the lives of Americans from Montana to Brooklyn.
 
Her interview subjects run the gamut from WWII veterans, fly fisherman, Cajun shrimpers, summer camp alumni, prostitutes to the Snake Lady.
 
Is there was one thing that links all her subjects? "I didn't realize this until after the fact," said Borten recently from her home base in Manhattan. "Almost every story is about outsiders. I've interviewed prisoners wrongly convicted, Vietnamese immigrants in Cajun Country. All my subjects are outsiders and underdogs. These are the stories that appeal to me."
 
What are her secrets for successful grant writing? "You have to start with an idea and ask: What's my goal?"
 
Then as you edit, delete all adjectives. "When funders read hype, they just yawn. Hype is meaningless to them. So cut the hype and be matter of fact," she said. The only exception to this rule, said Borten, is that you can always quote other people, preferably well-known people, describing your work. "Let somebody else use the adjectives," she advised.
 
When Borten first started writing grants, she didn't pay enough attention to marketing and distribution, but now as a seasoned grant writer, she knows that you must have a detailed plan so that your project will reach its intended audience.
 
Also, your budget must be realistic. "The budget shows that you've done your homework and that you know what things cost," she said. You want the funder to look at the budget and think: "This is a pro."
 
Borten encourages beginning grant writers to thoroughly research potential funders. "You must pick an appropriate target," she said and that means finding a funder who wants to fund your kind of project.
 
Borten's five tips for successful grant writing:
 
Be concrete and specific.
Thoroughly research potential funders.
Design a marketing plan that demonstrates you know your audience.
Create a realistic budget that shows your professionalism.
Provide the best work sample you can.
 
"The idea is important, but your work sample shows that you can do something," she said. "There's no question that the yes or no will hinge on the work sample. It shows that you can deliver."
 
To hear Borten's radio documentaries, go to http://www.prx.org/user/hebo.

  

 

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet George Taylor

By Gigi Rosenberg

 

Playwright George Taylor was approaching his 50th birthday when he realized he hadn't yet had "the voice or the courage to write a play," a dream he'd had for years. Fast forward 10 years and Taylor's latest play "Renaissance" was a finalist for a 2008 Oregon Book Award and he has received two prestigious fellowships to support his work as a playwright.
 
Although Taylor has dabbled in fiction and written for radio and film, playwriting is his passion. "I get to be an introvert writing alone and an extrovert working with actors and directors.  Playwriting forces me to tell the story with great limitations of time, space, and number of scenes." He also loves the collaboration between audience and storyteller that is unique to theater, he told me over coffee in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
 
Taylor has won fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon's Literary Arts . How did the fellowships affect his writing?
 
"Receiving a grant is a wonderful thing. Money is only part of it.  With fellowships, which are very competitive, winning means credibility. It's a shot in the arm.  After I received the Oregon Arts Commission fellowship, I was no longer embarrassed to introduce myself as a playwright. For a 4th-career playwright, that's very motivational. The grant made it difficult to want to write anything else but the play," said Taylor.
 
"I urge anyone who wants to be a better grant writer to sit on a panel," said Taylor, who has reviewed grant applications for the Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon Cultural Trust. From this experience he learned the importance of keeping his audience in mind. Panel members who review grant applications "go very deep into the budget and the objectives of the project. They want to make sure the grant writer is realistic about what the project will achieve and that the project isn't too big a stretch for the applicant," he said.

Taylor's top five tips for succeeding as a grant writer include:

• Remember the audience for the application.
• Pay attention to pacing.
• Maintain a clear idea of what, as an artist, you want to achieve with the project.
• Get to the point in the application.
• Ask: What is the most important or striking aspect of the project and make sure that that isn't buried at the end of the application. 

"Grant writing always serves more than one purpose," said Taylor. "Writing a grant helps you organize your year, your month, your projects." It forces a writer to ask hard questions about the work like  "Is this thing something I can do? How will this work add to the world of literature?"
 
The grant-writing process is a way to find your own answers to the big questions about your next project. "If you want to know about something, you have to write about it," said Taylor.
 
Find George Taylor at http://www.cyranoworks.com.
 

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet Michele Glazer

By Gigi Rosenberg

 

A couple of days before the deadline for a $20,000 fellowship from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), poet Michele Glazer broke one of the cardinal rules of grant writing. She decided to apply at the last minute.
 
"I was going to wait a few years until the next funding period, when I thought I'd be more competitive," wrote Glazer in a recent e-mail. "But at the last minute -- shortly before 5:00 on the day the application was due, I hand delivered it to RACC’s office downtown."
 
Glazer ended up winning the fellowship that year, the largest and most prestigious grant offered in the Northwest to an individual artist. She used the money to finish her second book of poetry Aggregate of Disturbances (University of Iowa Press, 2004). The one lesson she learned from that experience? "Apply anyway."
 
Over the years, Glazer has won over $70,000 in grants and fellowships to support her work including another $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and smaller grants and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Literary Arts. Does receiving a grant change her relationship to the work or her creative process?
 
"Receiving a grant has had no affect on my 'creative process' as far as what’s essential in 'creative' and 'process.' But a grant is a gift of a stretch of time, and like many writers I seem to need stretches," wrote Glazer.But a grant is a gift of a stretch of time, and like many writers I seem to need stretches," wrote Glazer. "I don't do well writing when I've just got half an hour and there are fifty other things niggling at me. So to that extent, that money allows for a creative process in which I'm most productive. However, the money doesn't make me feel or think any particular way about my work."
 
When preparing most of her grants, Glazer enlists the help of a reader to review the rough draft of her application questions. "It helps to have someone who will say: Michele, you're whining; Michele, you're obfuscating.' Even if I sense those things myself, I can convince myself that it's not as bad as actually it is."
 
For beginning grant writers, Glazer offers these tips:

• Read the application questions and respond to the questions they are asking.
• Eschew jargon.
• Be succinct, precise, and compelling in your language and details. The competition is fierce.
• Don't be cute, mawkish, or verbose.
• Proofread, proofread, proofread.

Glazer is an associate professor in the English Department at Portland State University and directs the school's new MFA program in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. She can be reached at glazer@pdx.edu.  She is at work on a new book of poetry entitled Notes on Tact, & the Made Up World (the space in the title is deliberate) to be published next year. Currently, she's writing a proposal for a residency in Ireland and a grant that would pay her transportation. 
 

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet: Sharon Wood Wortman

By Gigi Rosenberg

The magnificent bridges of Portland, Oregon have inspired poet and performer Sharon Wood Wortman in many grant writing successes. She has won funds to publish a guidebook of the bridges that is filled with poetry and is now working on a one-woman show BridgeStories partially funded with a grant from Portland's Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC).

As a kid, she rarely ventured out of her Lents neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. In fact, her mother suffered from agoraphobia and her grandmother from bouts of gephyrophobia, the fear of bridges (from the greek gephyra, which means bridge).

"My family made it to downtown Portland infrequently, about as often as we flew to New Jersey," Wortman wrote in a recent email. "Today I think of myself as a geomissionary. I believe that helping children figure out their place in the bigger world sooner than I did  gives them a leg up."

Wortman has led bridge walks around the Willamette River since 1991, many featuring the poetry of Northwest writers. "I have no explanation for why these magnificent bridges were here almost 100 years and nobody else had written a book about them," she wrote. "As I began to study and praise them, they built me a life that's now supported by poetry, teaching, publishing, performing, and, I have to say it, finally that most surprising grant of all...love."

Wortman's first success with funding her work was a $1000 grant from RACC to create her website. The next award from RACC for $3700 partially funded a 240-page guidebook of Portland bridges including 77 poems by 70 poets entitled Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass.

Her latest award is a $4600 RACC grant for her solo performance BridgeStories to be presented at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in October 2009 where she has a guest artist residency. The grant pays for her artistic fees, promotional materials, and guest artist collaborators, including Susan Banyas.

How does the grant writing process help Wortman? "It makes me elucidate my project," she said. "After you write the grant, you know what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and who will help."

Do grants make her artistic process less stressful? Hardly. "They free up financial worries but they add stress because you have to deliver," she said.

Wortman's top 5 grant writing tips for writers include:

1. Be tenacious.

2. Don't be afraid to ask for grants.

3. Start small with a small, local grant.

4. Don't listen to anybody who discourages you.

5. If you don't know how to write a grant, take a class or hire a grant writer to help.

The best way to learn how to write a grant is to write one, advises Wortman. She recommends that writers use grants to get out of their comfort zone. "Let applying for a grant push you as an artist."

For more information about Sharon Wood Wortman: http://www.bridgestories.com.

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet, Cheryl Strayed

By Gigi Rosenberg

Cheryl Strayed, novelist and memoirist, has won, over the course of her career, 16 grants totaling more than $30,000 to support her work as a writer. The grants have bought her time to write but have also funded a research trip, childcare and travel expenses to attend a writing retreat and have partially paid to build her website.

How does she do it? "In my early days, I would take one day a month to research opportunities," said Strayed, who realized early in her career that research was key to winning grants. "Grant writing isn't hard when you find the right resources." 

She also took herself seriously from the beginning. "I grew up poor so grants made a difference to my ability to do the work. That was my way up: to take it seriously and not think these things will come to you." Strayed discovered the simple math of getting funded: the more times you apply, the greater your chances of winning, both because your applications keep improving and because your name is in the hat more often.

Strayed latest grant-writing success was winning an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship for $3000 to buy her time to work on her latest project, Wild, a memoir. The book chronicles the years in her 20s beginning with her mother's early death from cancer and ending with her marriage when she was 30. Along the way, she hikes solo along the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In fact, she moved to Portland after literally walking there from the Mojave Desert. The memoir was half-written when she applied for the grant and she is using the funds to buy her time to complete the book. 

One of Strayed's gifts as a grant writer is her ability to be both intimate and professional in her applications. "I aim to be both straightforward and personal," she said. "You don't want to be either too confessional or the opposite--so cold that you don't share anything. You want to present your work in an interesting, real way and not be cute." 

Strayed's list of Dos and Don'ts gleaned from her years as a successful grant writer include:

• Do take yourself seriously if you want funders to take you seriously.

• Do write in concise, clear, and concrete language.

• Do place your project within the context of your career and life.

• Don't be stodgy and convoluted.

• Don't always fill the page on the application form. Remember that more is not always better.

Strayed advises writers to apply for grants even if the competition is stiff. "Applying is good practice," she said. Strayed has applied for grants from the beginning of her career and of course there were many she didn't win. But all the grant writing she did "prepared me for the time when it was my turn." 

Strayed's novel Torch was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006 and was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books by Pacific Northwest authors. Her work has also appeared twice in Best American Essays and over a dozen magazines. For more information: www.cherylstrayed.com.

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet: Sue Mach

By Gigi Rosenberg

Playwright Sue Mach was driving in her car, listening to NPR, when she heard author Paula Fass talking about her book Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.

One story of 4-year-old Charley Ross, abducted in 1874, prompted Mach to write the play "The Lost Boy" based on the bizarre and tragic facts of the case. At the time, Mach was on sabbatical so she wrote the first draft quickly before "I put the play away for a long time," she said in a recent interview.

Flash forward two years to the deadline for the Oregon Literary Fellowships a program of Literary Arts that grants a total of $30,000 to writers with works in progress who need funds to take their projects to the next level.

For Mach to revise her play, she needed to hear professional actors read the first draft. She also needed a director to supervise the reading and an audience to provide feedback so she would know where the play was working and where it needed help.

Mach applied for a $2500 fellowship from Literary Arts and was one of 12 writers to receive funding. In August 2008, at Portland, Oregon's Hipbone Studio, she staged the reading under the direction of Gretchen Corbett with a cast of eight of Portland's top actors.

"The reading had a huge effect on the play," said Mach. "With good actors reading, I was able to hear it and hear when it fell flat."

Following the reading, which was open to the public, Corbett solicited audience reactions. Mach was especially interested to discover what the audience felt the play was about. Their answers enabled her to rewrite the play, which she is now sending out nationally in hopes of finding a theater to mount a full production.
Did the grant provide her with anything else? "A grant is also a boost of confidence," said Mach. "It says somebody read it and believed in it."

What advice does Mach have for the writer who wants to increase her chances of winning a grant? "First, a writer must understand what her project is and articulate it," she said. "For me, The Lost Boy was about the vulnerability of being a parent and the exploitation of that vulnerability. Everything I wrote in the play had to come down to that."

Mach also recommends being concise, writing in your own voice, having a clear idea of the cost of the project, and detailing exactly how the money will be spent even if the application doesn't specifically ask.

When she's not winning grants to support her dramatic productions, Mach is a full-time instructor at Clackamas Community College where she teaches literature, screenwriting, and playwriting. (For more information about her classes, contact susanmach@comcast.net.) Over the course of her writing career, she has received many grants including six that have paid for readings of her plays.

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.

Fund Your Writing Projects: Featured Money Magnet, Kim Stafford

By Gigi Rosenberg

How do grants and fellowships ignite a writing career? Each month, I'll talk to a writer who has used grants to fuel a career. This month I found Kim Stafford on a two-month writing retreat at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology near the Oregon coast.

The first thing the caller asked Kim Stafford was: "Are you sitting down?" Then, she told him that he had been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council to support his next writing project: "Pilgrim at Home: Local Encounters beyond the Epoch of the Car."

The project will find him roaming the neighborhoods of his hometown of Portland, Oregon and recording as a poet, songwriter and essayist what he finds. He will invite the place and the people to speak to him. His project concludes with readings in the four quadrants of Portland to give back to the community what he discovers.

"My project for the RACC fellowship... is to wander," wrote Stafford following the award announcement. "[I will] venture on foot or by bike or bus to Powell Butte, to the deepest shadows of Forest Park, to neighborhoods and river banks, to the source of stream, path, intuitive whim -- and there to report in writing on the people I meet, what I learn from resonant places, what wants to be said through me, and to consider what our local experience might be like after the era of the automobile."

The $20,000 enabled Stafford to resign from one of several teaching jobs and to "make space for the writing, rather than fit the writing around my jobs," he said.

Was there any downside to receiving this grant? "It's both heartening and troubling to receive a grant, I find," Stafford said. "Heartening because this is a project I really want to do, troubling because I feel for my writer friends who also applied. Is my work worthy?"

To apply for a RACC Literature Fellowship artists must be established in their disciplines for at least 10 years and have lived in the Portland area for at least five years. The application process is highly competitive and applicants are chosen by a panel of esteemed Portland-based writers and artists.

What advice does Stafford have for writers who want to stand out from the crowd? He suggests:

1. Propose a project you would love to do, money or no.
2. Apply to an organization you deeply respect, and take the time to get to know the priorities and track record of that organization's giving.
3. Figure out what is missing so far in that history of giving, that only you could provide.
4. Take the time to describe in detail what you would do, a kind of calendar of actions from opening inquiry, through engaged production, to sharing discoveries with the community following the completion of the project.
5. Trust your instincts at every stage of the process. The funder needs your unique way of seeing things.

Gigi Rosenberg's essays and how-to articles have appeared in the Seal Press anthology The Maternal is Political, Parenting, Writer's Digest, The Writer and on Oregon Public Radio. She receives rave reviews for the grant writing workshops she leads at NYC's Foundation Center and Chicago's Self Employment in the Arts. She has performed her monologues throughout the Pacific Northwest and now coaches writers how to give stellar public readings and write winning grant applications.