Applying for a grant as a writer is easy in one sense – after all, you can write a decent sentence – but very difficult in lots of other ways. There will always be more applicants for any grant than there are grants available. Your chances of success are often (not always) better if you have a significant publication or publishing history. And how do you find out what grants are available, which ones can you apply for, and when are the applications due?

I’ve decided this year to publish links on literature-related grants in the US and Australia as an information-filter for writers who have yet to dip their toes in philanthropic waters.  After all, I’ve worked in and around book publishing and the philanthropic sector for quite a while now, so it makes sense to share my knowledge to help writers.

So here’s a few links and relevant blogs on this topic to get started:

USA
Mira’s List – a comprehensive listing of grant opportunities for creative types across the spectrum, not only writers. As Mira says, “I lead you to the water, you do the rest.”

Julia Sukys offers a valuable overview in this post of the different types of grants available to writers in the US and Canada, making the point that you shouldn’t ignore grants for small amounts because “grants beget grants”.

The Foundation Center is one of the world’s leading information sources about grants. It has a fabulous online directory that is free to access if you happen to live in New York and can visit the Center’s headquarters on 5th Avenue. Visiting via the internet, individuals can pay a small fee (around $10) for one month’s searching of the comprehensive Foundation Grants to Individuals Online Directory.

AUSTRALIA
The Australia Council for the Arts is the Australian Government’s arts funding body. It awards grants in 20 literary categories. Its website is a fabulous place to lose an hour  getting acquainted with what’s available. Here is the literature grants search page.

Philanthropy Australia is the Australian equivalent of the US Foundation Center. While it states that private grants to individuals are very limited in Australia, it nevertheless provides this excellent list of places to look for a small pot of gold.

If you have any questions about grants, funding, philanthropy, the whole shebang, please ask me in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

View from the summit of Mt Manuscript

If you’re looking for constructive feedback on your work in progress to take it to the next level, I’ve got some time available in February. I regularly read and write editorial reports on writers’ draft manuscripts for clients as distant from each other as Abu Dhabi, New York and Sydney. As a published memoirist and essayist, my expertise is memoir, but I was a fiction and nonfiction editor when I worked in-house as Picador Editor at Pan Macmillan Australia in a previous life.

Email me at info at virginialloyd.com. Then we’ll talk or email or Skype to establish where you’re up to with your project, I’ll fill you in on the rest of the details, and we’ll go from there.

I’d love to hear from you even if you’re not ready for a manuscript critique. Many people have questions about editing and revisions, which I’m happy to answer if you ask me in the comments below.

What might it be like to write “for the unknown good of our enemies”? This is one of an inspiring and reassuring list of writers’ resolutions for 2012 from the blog of Brevity magazine:

Published by Virginia under Memoir,Writing

I must be missing New York’s cold January weather. How else to explain the two ice packs I’ve clutched to either end of me this past week in a hot and humid Australian climate? Visiting a dear friend in Brisbane, I fell over my own foot while hanging out some washing. The resulting bruise looked like something that might have inspired Picasso’s blue period. And today my head literally collided with a door while N. and I tried to coax a huge spider out of another friend’s ground-floor apartment. These two injuries round out a trio that started a few short weeks ago with my first lower-back injury – the ironic result, according to my dad’s physiotherapist, of returning to regular exercise after a break. And here I was thinking that not exercising was the problem.

They, whoever they are, say that such things happen in threes. Which should mean that my physical travails are now at an end. To celebrate, here’s an exquisite piece of music by one of my heroes, Australian pianist/composer Mike Nock. This track, After Satie, is from his latest CD. More information at Mike Nock’s website.

Tonight I learned that Australian filmmaker Sarah Watt died earlier this month. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake – it was more than three weeks ago. She leaves behind a body of award-winning work, a loving husband, and two teenage children. This moving article in The Age features a photograph I will reproduce below until such time as I’m asked to remove it. (Photo credit: Simon Schluter.)

Sarah Watt with her husband William McInnes

When I first saw this picture of husband and wife, I stopped breathing. Just for a moment. It is an almost perfect replica of a photograph a friend took of John and me within a few weeks of his death, which is now seven years ago. Sarah’s grin, her relaxed pose, the genuine friendliness emanating from her face. The skeleton waiting in its wings. And there’s her husband beside her, similarly v-necked and relaxed, wearing a hat to keep the melanoma away. That knockabout character we know from his TV roles and books is not in this photograph. In its place is a man dreading the inevitable, hoping he might have a faint grasp of what her absence will be like, and now facing the awful knowledge that nothing prepares you for such a loss, no matter how long your beloved has been defending herself from her diagnosis.

As someone who watched her husband succumb to the same type of secondary bone cancer that just stole Sarah Watt, I can only offer William McInnes my deepest condolences, and my empathy. I remember the disbelief, the howling, the physical weakness, the anger. I remember not wanting to go on for one more minute. Somehow I went on.

I can’t imagine what grief is like for William McInness or for either of his children. I can only know what it was like for me. John and I had no children – “it’d be too sad not to be able to pick them up,” he always said when we discussed it – and in the years since I’ve often wondered whether it’s better or worse to be widowed with children, or without. The answer is that there is no better. There is no worse. The loss of your spouse destroys you and it also destroys “you”, that sense of yourself that, however impaired or ridden with doubts or insecurities, helps you to steer a course through daily life. When you’re lucky enough to be in a loving relationship, there are two pairs of hands guiding that rudder, to an extent that neither of you ever suspected.

Learning to steer again took me many years. Everyone grieves in different ways. I hope that despite this family’s public loss, they can find the privacy they need. One helpful thing John repeatedly said to me in the weeks before he died was that he wanted me to be happy. It took years for me to hear him. As I said, sometimes I am a slow learner.

(For anyone struggling with the loss of a spouse who is looking for something to read that might help: I wrote this book and, more recently, this essay on subjects relating to what I’ve written about here. I include the links because I know from the emails I receive from complete strangers that my book has helped people.)

I’m excited that my first guest post on the terrific Brevity blog is now online. It’s a riff on a satirical attack on memoir-writing in the new play Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, which I recently saw in preview. The remarkable Alan Rickman (who I have adored ever since Truly Madly Deeply) plays Leonard, a formidable writing instructor. Although the play celebrates a firmly Romantic view of the writer, it’s worth the price of admission for the wonderful acting and sharp dialogue.

Part of the play’s action turns on a memoir by a former boy soldier turned cross-dressing writer. My post at Brevity asks: Can some memoirs be considered a form of literary transvestism?

The Economist‘s books blog reviews James Wolcott’s memoir of 1970s New York as the latest in a long line of first-person accounts of living in the city.

There are certain precautions memoirists can take to inoculate themselves against the genre’s hazards. … Memoirists are safe so long as they appear to be eulogising someone or something other than just themselves. Of all the strategies employed to avoid narcissism, rhapsodising about a place is perhaps the most popular.

It identifies the “New York memoir” as its own sub-genre, complete with recurring motifs — the memory of low rent, the secret favourite places, the proximity of heroes (the review quotes E.B. White’s phrase the “nearness of giants”), the nostalgia of being young in the city, and the disillusionment that inevitably follows:

If vanity is the main peril of a traditional autobiography, then lamentation is the inevitable risk of the New York memoir.

I suspect this kind of lamentation might also be part of the survival armour one puts on, bit by bit, over decades living in the city. I’ve been struck by how many older New York friends of mine insist that the city is not what it once was — in their case, “once” means the 1970s. Yet they all continue to live here. (For my own part, I wish I could return to 1920s New York, to the time of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.)

Perhaps this kind of blind spot is a necessary tool of survival, a kind of projection that focuses on the external, visible evidence of all the changes around you, rather than on what has changed about you since you arrived, heart in mouth, all those years ago. But to write well it’s essential to become aware of such blind spots. The review concludes:

Mr Wolcott has omitted the slow, tender and quite necessary suspicion that perhaps what made the era so great wasn’t New York so much as the brimming person he was when he first arrived there. The New York memoir, after all, is little more than an excuse—for the writer and reader alike—to celebrate all-consuming exuberance and ambition. The city can certainly engender such feelings, but so can being twenty-two.

Did you know that literary magazine Tin House receives 2,000 stories every month? Or that New York literary agents receive 10-12 queries per day? These are a few of the reality-check gems I picked up by watching the videotaped National Book Critics Circle panel “Secrets of Memoir” held recently at the NYU Bookstore.

The panel moderator, Susan Shapiro, is an NBCC board member and a knowledgeable, savvy and generous connector of people. Through her private classes and professorial teaching, she connects people who have no experience in publishing with those who have lots of it. This simple, slightly bolshy but effective formula has resulted in countless publication credits for her students, including book deals and now eight books of her own including the two memoirs Lighting Up and the forthcoming Unhooked. She moderates a “Secrets of Publishing” panel in addition to this one on the secrets of writing a memoir.

The panellists
The panel included Tin House editor Rob Spillman; Lindsay Harrison, author of Missing; Scribner’s editor Colin Harrison; Sheila McClear, author of The Last of the Live Nude Girls; WME literary agent Rebecca Oliver; literary agent Ryan Harbage (who represents Shapiro), and Publishers Weekly editor and author of Amore, Mark Rotella.

Their main points
For those who don’t have an hour and a half to spare, I have summarised the panel’s main points.

• In memoir, the authorial voice is everything. The panel members sounded like adjudicators at a vocal eisteddford, the way they kept going on about voice. Some comments: “Voice is what’s going to get the agent’s attention.” “Voice makes a huge difference, makes an ordinary story extraordinary.” “I’m looking for a voice that transports me, that elevates beyond the immediate experience.”
• Forget about trends in publishing or trying to tailor your memoir to a gimmick that seems to be in vogue. Lead times in book publishing are so slow, “by the time you see a trend, it’s over,” said one panellist.
• Memoir is a category that people in publishing love, and that agents love to represent.
• It’s increasingly difficult to sell a book based on a blog. In fact the majority of panellists agreed that giving content away for free online made them more skeptical about how they could sell any books resulting from the blog — a position that is tantamount to heresy in some social media circles.
• There was a lot of talk about the dreaded “platform”, which everyone seems to loathe but find impossible not to discuss. My conclusion was that aspiring memoirists do not necessarily need to spent years building an online following, that in fact it’s possible to develop a platform rather quickly (eg by getting a piece published in the “Modern Lives” column of the New York Times). So be alert but not alarmed.
• There is a lot of scope for what Colin Harrison described as the “repertorial memoir”, a first-person narrative in which we learn about or are introduced to a different world (whether it’s a place or an experience). “Memoir does not have to have a traumatic or familial arc,” he said.
• Try to get a chunk of your manuscript published as a stand-alone piece in a literary journal. Rob Spillman said that after every new issue of Tin House he fields calls from agents asking if authors featured in the issue have representation. He likened the small magazines to “sieves” that, even before agents, do a lot of filtering of unsolicited submissions.
• In terms of getting an agent, they work mostly on gut feeling and instinct.  It’s not fair, but it’s not going to change. Ryan Harbage said he usually knows by the end of the first page whether or not he wants to read more of your manuscript.
• One-page query emails are best. A short pitch that summarises the book, giving the reason why you have chosen to approach the agent, is best (such as an affinity with other authors the agent represents). Don’t send a query unless you have a proposal ready, and do your research to find the basic elements of a nonfiction book proposal.

I am constantly worried that I spend too much time reading online. It can’t be right to switch on the computer first (or second) thing in the morning, or to check email last thing before bed. Conducting a life lived in the two opposing time zones of  Sydney and New York is partly the cause, but the rest is my own sheer inability to shut down.

Overture: Migraine
A migraine two nights ago took these fears to a new level. Lately I’ve had to (see? I feel I must, rather than choose to) catch up at night on what I can’t get to during the day because of my short-term day job (which I’ve taken, for the usual reasons, at a place that literally refers to itself in the third person as the Organization — and yes, I’m keeping notes).

In the hour of the migraine’s overture, before the symphony of by-now-familiar symptoms began,  I discovered the great resource of The Craft Essays over at the Brevity nonfiction blog. Specifically Sherry Simpson’s 2008 contribution “Tiny Masters: An Artful Trick to Writing the Personal Essay”. It’s a personal essay-writing 101 for beginning writers, and for those like myself who sometimes need a reminder to keep things simple.

Tiny Masters?
Simpson borrows this enchanting phrase from the prolific Susan Orlean, who once stated she was mostly interested in “writing about people who were masters of their ‘tiny domains’” – such as the orchid thief who is Orlean’s best known subject.

Simpson’s technique is simple:

1. Write a list of 10 things you can do well. “Include talents, skills, hobbies, qualities of character.”
2. Free-write about one of them, describing the how, when and where of your mastery.
3. Write about a person you associate with this mastery.
4. Write a specific event (a scene, in other words) that involves both your mastery and the person in 3. above, incorporating some dialogue.

How I wish someone had been so practical and instructive when talking about writing with me when I was in my teens, when I mooched around with pen and paper, scribbling godawful poetry with the gnawing dread that I might have nothing to say. Ever. For one thing, I’ve now realised I could probably try writing about my lifelong relationship with migraine. (A subject the sui generis Oliver Sacks chose for his first book, which today is an illuminating read both for the complexity of migraine and for the rather dry and academic origins of his style, which in subsequent books was distilled into bestselling chronicles of the obscure and debilitating neuro-scientific disorders of his patients.)

Brevity is looking for essays on craft
By the way, for those with something to share about the craft of creative nonfiction, the folks at Brevity want to hear your pitch:

Want to write a craft essay, or do an author Q&A or podcast interview for an upcoming issue of Brevity? If so, send your essay topic or author-interview idea and a brief bio note to craft editor Julie Riddle at brevitymag+craft@gmail.com.

Here’s a quick roundup of an odd assortment of opportunities for writers, all on the subject of Australia:

Griffith REVIEW is seeking submissions for Edition 36: What Is Australia For?

What Is Australia For? will sketch out visionary ideas for the future, uncover neglected stories from the past, and provide an exciting forum for new voices to make their case.

Email submissions to griffithreview@griffith.edu.au by 16 December. I have already written about how terrific this journal is – as a reader and as a writer.

For Indigenous fiction writers, Melbourne editor Chris Flynn is curating a forthcoming edition of San Francisco journal McSweeney’s, part of which will be devoted to contemporary Australian Indigenous fiction. This is a really exciting development given the Indigenous writing talent that exists today in Australia and the international visibility of McSweeney’s. As with any other submission, writers should familiarise themselves with the journal before submitting. That and other useful stuff can be found here in Chris Flynn’s call for submissions, which are due on 31 December.

Creative Nonfiction, in association with Australian-based performance company Tashmadada, is offering two generous prizes for essays about Australia. For a $20 reading fee per submission there’s a prize of a whopping $6,500 for best essay, and an impressive $2,500 for the best essay by an Australian writer. Which means non-Australians are welcome to “have a go,” too:

We’re looking for a variety of perspectives—from locals, expats, tourists, or anyone else—and will consider essays of all forms and focuses as long as Australia’s landscape, people, and/or culture are prominently featured; the stories are true; and submissions are previously unpublished.

Essays must be vivid and dramatic. Writing should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information, and reach for some universal or deeper meaning. We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice. Essays must be 4,000 words maximum and submitted by January 31, 2012.

If you’re not already familiar with this magazine, do yourself a favour and check out a few copies. For Australian-based Australians, taking out a subscription via a submission will be cheaper than trying to source individual copies domestically. It’s a sad fact but true. I am swimming in magazines and journals in my Brooklyn abode due to the wonders of American subscription prices. And, given that I am almost at the point of becoming a dual Australian-US citizen, I probably have a few things to try wrangling on to the page in time to meet one of these deadlines.