We need readers for our writer hikes on September 18th @ Sokol Park–54 total (we’re getting there). We don’t care you if you’re a student, a faculty member, or just a plain old citizen from Tuscaloosa. If you’re willing to hang out in Sokol Park bike trail for a little bit, read 3-5 minutes of another person’s work, and then join the hike you’re working on, we absolutely would love to have your assistnace. If interested, please email me at slashpinepress@gmail.com.

As of seven years ago, I was lucky enough if I could keep a checkbook. Bills were numbers which were abstractions which, in turn, would make my wife’s jaw hit the floor at my gross, fiscal incompetence. I was a poet, damn it. Leave the fucking money out of it.

Today, I just finished an email exchange with The University of Alabama’s Office of Sponsored Programs. I was talking about budgets and matches. Earlier today, I talked with my co-founder about future plans and how to pay for things–most importantly, how to sustain ourselves and shoestring together resources.

The upshot: grant writing is time consuming and detail dense and requires portions of my brain I thought were as developed as an infant’s sense of balance. It’s something you have to earn, often at no-pay if you want to build something from the ground-up.

But it has, in a weird way, cultivated something else: it requires me to think of art as an act of inclusivity as opposed to one of pure meritocracy; it makes me responsible to my community at large, just not the comfort of my peers; it forces me to look at writers as workers–because we are, we work, it’s about “the work”–and to do my best to see they get some level of reimbursement when possible since those opportunities are not always readily available and coming to Alabama is not always the foremost of everyone’s desires.

Because of grant writing, I’m forced to listen and value voices I could easily dismiss otherwise.

I’m forced to be out of my own head and into someone else’s.

To be really honest, grant writing has broken my belief that poetry is a bubble no one cares about except poets. People give a shit–not in the way one would always like, but people do care–often, it’s tax dollars supporting it.

If you read this blog, you know I work with undergrads in an internship. One component is grant writing. It’s not so they’re more “marketable” per se, but that they see art as something greater than their own predelections. But wouldn’t it also be nice to see a few of them become future cultivators and homes for the arts, some even within the public sphere?

There will always be, unfortunately, some level misappropriation, red tape, politics, and bureacracy. And I think there always needs to be a place for renegade art, the place where local talent gathers and comes together based on shared belief and/or aesthetic. But for me–for my growth, as writer and reader of poetry–grant writing has forced me to be accountable to something larger than myself. Who knew money could sometimes be a force–dare I say–for good?