02/07/2007: "ARTS FUNDING"

Hi All,

I’m sorry that self-flagellating story isn’t ready to go yet---it’s written, it’s been accepted, it will be forthcoming but there are other stories in the cue before me.

So, on to new business. This may end up as a rant---and, like many/most of my rants, it will probably only interest a very tiny demographic of the population, the demographic I generally circulate amidst, and thus the only people it will likely piss off are artist and writer types, some of whom I call friends and others not.

The other day I came across this article:

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070203.ATWOOD03/TPStory/?query=margaret+atwood

…which was linked through this site:

www.bookninja.com (a word on this site: I like it quite a lot. It’s sort of a daily compendium of literary/writing-related articles, culled by the Bookninja. I occasionally find myself a little miffed, as every time I am mentioned on the site, it is usually in relation to my having had my ass kicked in a boxing match---to which I sometimes, cholerically, feel that getting one’s ass kicked is generally enough of an exercise in embarrassment that it might be nice to not have it constantly brought up in unflattering ways. Then again, I did it, I hoped to profit from it, and so I have to deal with the repercussions. Then again, if I ever do chance to meet Mr. Bookninja, I will be delighted to talk about my losing bout in a gentlemanly, face-to-face manner.)

A word about the article itself, and its author: first off, I admire Margaret Atwood. I know I’ve made a few jokes about her, but a Canadian writer taking potshots at Mrs. Atwood is as common an occurrence as spotting a squirrel in your backyard. She’s a fantastic writer, she’s brave, she says what she means and damn the consequences, and the one time I did meet her I was reduced to a puling lump of pudding in her presence. Her article deals with the Harper government’s cuts to arts spending/funding, which she is against. The article, like most everything that comes from Atwood’s pen, is acerbic, intelligent, and wonderful to read.

I don’t disagree with what she’s saying, exactly. Or not at all, really. Okay, maybe a little. I think there should be arts funding, in that, as she points out in the article, there is funding for every conceivable thing out there---she mentions horse racing gets a 70 mil bursary from the Alberta gov’t, so if there’s some dough in the trough for horse racing, surely there’s some for writers.

No, what got my goat was when I returned to Bookninja today and found a huge train of responses to the article---give this to Atwood, too: she can spark controversy---which broke down into two camps: writers who felt they deserved funding and those who felt otherwise.

I am on the “those who felt otherwise” side of the fence.

Not that I don’t think writers deserve funding. But the nature of many of those comments---head to the site and read them yourself, if you’re keen---were filled with so much undeserved, unearned entitlement that it made me want to vomit. Like characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, these people (forgive me: I’m such a writer-ish nerd I can only make sense of such people by comparing them to novel characters).

I don’t know where to start with this. My generalized, latent disgust for this sort of entitled mindset has so many offshoots, so many layers. Who says anyone owes writers a living---even a year off? Even a few bucks to help defray their bills? Who says what any of us are producing is worthy of 500 or 5000 or 20,000 or even 50 tax dollars?

Stay with me. I’m rambling. Maybe a clear stream of thought will come of this, maybe not.

First off, I wasn’t even aware than the government gave out grants to writers until I was 27 maybe, halfway through my MA at the University of New Brunswick. By that point I’d written a horror novel and that was going to be published and I earned the sum of 1,000 dollars for it. I’d sold some short stories, all horror, and received anywhere from 10 bucks to a few free copies of the magazine to 100 bucks max for any of them. Then I’m hearing about these people in the program hitting up the government, provincial or federal, for writing grants. What bugged me, and continues to, was the way these people always came across: like small-time crooks, conmen and women who’d stumbled across the greatest, most magical, unbelievable scam of all time.

“It’s like, you write a grant proposal, tell them what you’re gonna write, slip a few stories or poems in the application packet and wait for the dough to roll in. Voila! Easy money, baby!”

With some of these people---I shit you not---between their MA funding, their provincial and federal grants, they were clearing more than most of my buddies who were working real jobs and whose tax dollars, unbeknownst to them, was being funneled into these fucking lotus eater’s pockets. And very seldom was anything produced; I don’t mean anything of artistic value, anything that was ever published---I mean these people didn’t write much of anything. They were chasing butterflies through grassy meadows, or joining audobon societies, or frittering their time away in the ennervating way trust fund kids and other people with a rich uncle and no obligations tend to. And when you think about it, it’s unsurprising: they’re lazy dogs who’ve convinced someone else to take care of them, feed them, groom them. They’re sitting around all day in libraries and coffee shops and sighing that the muse just isn’t hitting them in the sweet spot, but that’s okay because they’ve got nothing but time and thank God the government understands their intrinsic value to society as an artist, which basically consists of sitting around coffee shops with their laptops and a painstakingly-highlighted copy of some French philosopher, or even better, Al Purdy poems.

A bunch of fucking leeches. The only time any of them really buckle down is when they glance at the calendar and see that season’s rolling round again, at which point they scramble off to the computer … to write another grant proposal.

Here’s the admission that will probably blow my whole argument out of the water in an “in bed with the enemy” sort of way. Or you could look at is as the confession of one who tasted the bitter fruit of undeserved public funding and now feels soiled.

I was given a grant.

This was my first year in Calgary. I spent most of my savings to get out here, get settled, then I got a job I was summarily fired from, then one I wasn’t. But money was tight at this time and I figured, well, if this is such an easy scam maybe I ought to hoss at the trough a little. I'd already gotten an agent and my collection had been taken by Penguin by the time it arrived, but it would be like shipping a winning lottery ticket back. Forgive me. I was weak.

The Alberta Arts fund were passing out the dough like drunken libertines in a bordello. Not a lot, but not bad. I didn’t need it---as bad as it was, I never did; nobody with two arms and two legs and half a noodle in their head ever does and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise; there are plenty of jobs that people, especially artsy people, feel themselves to be above, but there’s no paucity of jobs to be had---but I spent it anyway. I also finished RUST AND BONE using the grant money and maybe half of THE FIGHTER; rent and groceries was what my funding report stated.

But I’ll tell you what made me feel grubby, and why I’ll never take another grant. I was out with my buddy, we’re having a few drinks, I said I’d get the next one. At this point I was working at a school, ESL aide, but my buddy wanted to know what I was doing for money.

ME: Well, I got this job now, but I did get this grant…

HIM: For what?

ME: Oh … nothing, really. Writing. The government gives them out.

HIM: So really, I’m paying for my own beer. Me and every other taxpayer in here.

ME: …yeah.

Never have I felt like such a fucking sponge. And there was NO WAY I felt entitled to it, nor should I. No way could I be in any public place, a mall or a stadium or a restaurant, and when I went to pay for something with grant money feel that, yes, what I am producing with this money will benefit all of you. You wil be more enlightened people for what I will bequeath upon you, plebian horde that you are.

That’s exactly what some of those Bookninja sponges seem to think, or so it seems to me. I can’t wrap my head around that mindset. “It happened that way back in feudal times!” they bleat. Yeah, and people were trepanned and slept in mud huts and smeared mercury all over their faces back then, too. Things change, hombre. Some guy went on about this Czechoslovakian writer who wrote in prison---wasn’t that a form of government support? Yes, I suppose so, and one that is still available here in Canada. Go get yourself thrown in the hoosegow and write that book, partner! If you’re planning on writing an epic, go ahead and murder someone’s ass!

The two people who were arguing from my side of the fence seemed to get pilloried for their so-called “tough guy” stance when it came to this---that being, write on their own time and work a job. Please believe me when I say only in the self-indulged, delusional and neurotic world of grant leeches could this in any way be described as a “tough guy” stance. It is a totally normal stance, to my way of mind.

When I was living down in the States, anyone I told about our grant system was agog---FREE MONEY? FROM THE GOVERNMENT? All the writers I knew down there, Marilynne Robinson and James McPherson and Chris Offut and all the rest, all great writers, all successful in their own right, did it the way most US writers, and most writers in other countries do it---they worked a job, they wrote. Some years they made enough that they could write only; other years, not. They didn’t have this safety net of a grant system, which has become so entrenched that these woefully entitled people think they deserve it here in Canada. Even Atwood remarks in her article that there used to be funding in the US, but it was cut; what she fails to mention is that, to me, the level of artistic output didn’t suffer ONE WHIT as a result. And maybe it’s because I came up writing horror, fraternizing with genre writers for whom such grants aren’t really in the offing: they gut it out, they work their tail off, and they succeed or fail. There is no safety net---or yes, there is: it’s called a job.

The way it is with me is this: I call myself a writer now because I’m fortunate enough, this year, to earn my living primarily as a writer. Next year, maybe not. If not, I call myself a librarian, or a teacher, or a elephant poop scooper or whatever I happen to end up doing to make ends meet. I don’t deserve free money from anyone; I cannot bear to pass people on the street again thinking they’re contributing to my welfare---especially in service of what is basically as selfish a profession as writing; those morons who feel they, as artists, are essential to society make me want to hurl myself though a plate glass window; who the hell is so arrogant as to feel that anything they have to offer or say or spew out of their pieholes is ESSENTIAL to society; get the fuck over yourselves---without me doing anything for them. And if so, MAKE YOURSELVES ESSENTIAL on your own dime. You'll feel better about yourselves, I swear. You'll stand up straighter, seeing as your spines will be hardy and strong, not the constistency of a boiled loofa sponge from your grant reliance.

Writing is a job. Anyone who gets their nose in the air thinking it’s some great service all of us are providing to the citizenry make me sick---and if we are, okay, that doesn’t mean that same society owes us any succor. We do what we do and we make our own way doing it; that’s not a “tough guy” stance, that’s a completely reasonable stance of a person who doesn’t expect society to serve as a kickstand to prop up our pretensions or delusions of grandeur.

Anyone who isn't a total fucking melonhead would have known that writing was a pretty dicey gig as soon as they set their foot in the room. Some people make it, some don’t. No amount of grant money is gonna make you a great writer---although a great grant writer may make a better living for themselves in this country than a decent WRITER-writer. I mean, hey, sword swallowing is a pretty rough gig too, and I’m sure every fledgling sword swallower knows that---you don’t see them with their hands out to the government. Then again, most sword swallowers don’t pass through our liberal arts university programs and come out the other side with this unearned entitlement, like they’ve the proverbial unique and special snowflake, thus deserving of all the money they can bilk out of the government---and now armed with the wherewithal and grant funding forms to do so.

I work hard and write every day---I’m sorry to make this about me, but in the end I can only relate the argument to my own life---and feel the fire on my heels and do the very best I can because, to me, there is no emergency exit. I feel bad enough spending the money my publishers pay me knowing my books aren’t selling well, let alone spending the money some single mother might be paying in taxes. I’m not that arrogant, I don’t think that much of myself or my abilities. If someone, a company, wants to take a chance and publish one of my books, I’ll take the money and hope it lasts long enough for me to write another. If not, I’ve got a brain in my head, a decent back, I can find work. Anyone can. I won’t sponge ever again.

All that said, I don’t mind the grant system. It’s there, it’s not going away. I don’t want it to shrink away to nothing, which is why I like Atwood’s article---it makes people aware of it. I’m sure a lot of writers I respect have taken grants, and if you’ve got kids, other obligations, maybe you need them. As I admitted, I took a grant. But it’s a privilege, one writers in few other countries get, and they get their work out there all the same---when it’s not being repressed, or they’re not working their asses off at their own jobs. We have it SOOOOO easy as writers in Canada. That’s where the entitlement comes from. When an infant gets its bottle taken away, it cries because it wants more and it’s always gotten more. It doesn’t understand that babies in other places get by with a lot less, but still get by. The people arguing about these grant cutbacks aren’t babies; they know how it is other places. They’d as soon ignore it, because it makes them look grasping and needy and avaricious, but it’s there.

So quit it with the self-entitlement. We writers already got a bad enough social image as self-indulgent hippie-types---“What, all you do is sit around and write all day?”---without the added stigma of coming off as entitled assholes who think the world owes us a living, as we are such founts of profundity that the earth will be impoverished if our voices are silenced due to the trivial exigencies of hunger and shelter. Get the fuck over yourselves. Go write something. Get a job. Shut your mouths.

I’m shutting mine now.

All best, Craig.