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Happy Birthday to Me!

June 08, 2006

I've reached the speed limit, which is to say I'm now 55 -- although in many places the limit is receding into the future distance (I'm pleased to say that on my run to Portsmouth a month ago I reached it and passed it on numerous occasions) and here on Martha's Vineyard if you're beating 45 you're illegal.

What I got for my birthday:

• the satisfaction of getting a job to the post office in time to make the Express Mail deadline so it'll get to New York tomorrow, right on the nose (and of submitting an invoice for $1,909 -- yee-hah!)
• a day without rain so Allie and I could go for a ride in the woods
• disgusting caterpillar pictures on the front page of the Martha's Vineyard Times

What I didn't get for my birthday:

• a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant
• the Bakeless Prize for fiction, which comes with a Houghton Mifflin contract

Both form rejection letters arrived earlier this week. You know what I think about contests, and yes, the most important reason for entering is to keep putting your work out there (that momentum thing), but even when you know you haven't a snowball's chance, the possibility slithers into your mind (like one of those nasty caterpillars, or maybe a tick) that maybe, just maybe, one of the faceless judges will read your words and get it -- will not only understand what you're doing but intuit what you're capable of.

Not this time. Some people did get the nod, the recognition, the go for it sign. 1,534 people applied for this year's Mass. Cultural Council grants in fiction/creative nonfiction, poetry, painting, choreography, traditional arts, and drawing/printmaking/artist books, which means that about 1,500 of us didn't get funded. I wish us all the strength and faith and self-belief to keep on keeping on. The Bakeless administrators didn't say how many applied for their prizes, but the winners in fiction and poetry both teach writing at the college level and that makes me a tad suspicious. (No prize was awarded this year in creative nonfiction.)

I fantasize coming into a lot of money -- maybe a MacArthur Fellowship or a legacy from a rich, hitherto hidden admirer. (Fantasy, people; I'm talking fantasy.) Once I'd provided a cash infusion to my own shoestring life, and found myself an apartment with a kitchen so I could bake bread again, how would I foster the creative thinking and writing and art-making that I think this country desperately needs? I'm thinking, I'm thinking . . .

A few thousand dollars here, a few thousand there -- these benefit mostly the recipients, and the administrators get their egoboo for "supporting the arts." Start an independent press, one that will specialize in the Books That New Yorkers Don't See (and Whose Worth They Wouldn't Recognize If They Did)? How about the feminist think tank we were talking about at WisCon?

All that money pouring into the coffers of political candidates who'll do nothing much but fund the advertising agencies and media outlets! What we couldn't do with a fraction of it -- we who know how to survive and thrive and spread the word on next to nothing.

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