If you missed the first Salon of the semester, no worries, Salon Notes is here to fill you in.
Alison Hawthorne Deming admitted to us, “My life as a writer has been very strange.” Her family, descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne, is chock full of well-to-do writers and intellectuals. As a teenager, she strayed. After two months at college, she dropped out and began a picaresque life: a shotgun wedding, flight with her two-year old daughter to Vermont, work as a dishwasher, a welfare mom, then as a sex educator and program manager for Planned Parenthood. This last job lasted her 14 years; she was writing all the while.
After completing the MFA program at Goddard, she received the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which supported (and still supports) early-career writers.
“Having a year of freedom,” she told us, “has a profound effect on your imagination as a writer.” She published her first book in her mid-40s, after a steady career in public health. “Without fellowships, I don’t think I would have been able to do it.”
When Shannon Cain, fiction editor at KORE press, heard the news, she broke out into a cold sweat and began jumping around her house. She won the National Endowment for the Arts grant. “Everything changed after that,” she said, “agents came out of the woodwork…I interviewed them all, very New York, very caffeinated.” After three interviews, she picked the agent who treated her stories as works in progress, and avoided agents who were eager to send her babies into the world too soon.
They both confessed that there’s no secret on how to win fellowships. The competition for most of them is top-notch, and Shannon reminded us, we’re up against the cream of the crop. Having both worked as judges, they told us about a quarter of the manuscripts are at that level: good. From there, it gets very, very difficult to narrow down the winners. For the NEA grant in particular, 1000 manuscripts are read; 20 are chosen. Alison chimed in—it matters what you put on page one, because “when you’re on the jury, your mind goes numb.” They both agreed, “It all comes back to the work.”
There are tales of cronyism about these things, but for the most prestigious fellowships, Alison said, “It’s not like it’s a cabal,” and Shannon gave us some insight, “We’re all under microscopes. For the judges, integrity is important. We’re hypervigilant about our ethics.”
And they were both quick to temper the value of fellowships. Shannon told us, “There’s always something tricky about measuring success…it does a lot for your self-esteem to win a fellowship…it doesn’t mean success, it means you found your audience.” Alison was blunt, saying “I won’t lie about recognition or success. I love it. On the other hand, you can’t be living for that. You will never get enough.”
Even when you get a fellowship, it’s easy to freak out about how much time you suddenly have on your hands to write. Shannon would accept those moments when she found herself doing nothing with her day but “sit in the shed, fiddle-fart around. I would feel crappy until I finally realized this was my pattern.” Goal-setting worked for her, so she would aim to write 1,000 words each day. Alison had a more physical approach, “I have two necessary distractions. I go out and get my hands dirty [by gardening], or I play the piano.” Working with her hands in a way that avoided writing would refresh her to write some more.
Despite success, their biographies admitted something writers are loathe to consider, that any list of successes is followed by an exponentially longer list of failures. Alison didn’t start publishing until (what we would consider) “late” in her career. Shannon submitted 240 stories for publication in the last four years. Only six of them were published. She summed it up by saying, “I’ve been rejected everywhere.” They both noted that for women in particular, it is difficult to “be firm with your children and your loved ones [about your need to write].” There’s always something working against writers; they strongly suggested we surround ourselves with family and friends who are sympathetic to our need to write.
The benefits of a fellowship are clear, said Alison, “to pull yourself out of the velocity and distraction of a sort of culturally-enforced ADD life.” She then mentioned some extreme fellowships – the National Science Foundation’s grant that sends writers to Antarctica for five months; a fellowship in Oregon that requires you being comfortable with a chainsaw.
If that’s not your thing, then still, she said, “I don’t think there’s any better gift you can give to yourself than that freedom and time to write.” Alison ended her story by telling us, “I’ve sold houses to be able to have another year to write.” The stock market is troubled and we may not have houses to sell, but Shannon shared some positive news: a friend of hers, a fiction writer, signed a two-book contract with Random House last week, on the day the Dow sank 700 points.
For a smattering of fellowship and residency options, check our pages here. For a more comprehensive list, Alison recommends The PEN Guide to Grants and Awards for American Writers, AWP’s Grant Listing, and Poets and Writers Grants and Awards page, all linked below.
PEN Guide to Grants and Awards for American Writers
http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1763
AWP’s Grant Listing
http://www.awpwriter.org/contests/index.htm
Poets and Writers Grants and Awards Page
http://www.pw.org/grants?apage=*&
Quick contest plug: KORE Press has a fiction short story chapbook competition coming up. The deadline is October 31st.
