Waylon 1

I just got started looking at grants on COS this morning. This grant-writing aspect of the course is a surprise for me – a welcome surprise. When I was in San Diego with “Stories of Our People,” my collaborator Julian Lang said something that I’ve been thinking about since. He said, “Every artist needs a business wing to their operation.” It makes sense, I’d just never thought of it that way before. Julian’s an expert, or course – he’s the one that wrangled up the funding for our airfare to get to San Diego, and he’s an expert on finding grants to fund his various projects. But where am I to learn these lucrative skills?
I got on to Solar this winter and thought about changing my schedule around to take a small business start-up class here at SBU. But they didn’t offer that exact thing, and the closest alternatives required me to be a business student. So no dice there. Then I got a little frustrated at our program. Don’t get me wrong, the theory and practice classes are useful, and they get me started on some neat projects like “Stories of Our People.” But if we don’t know how to fund ourselves then we’re going to end up folding sweaters at Bloomingdales, and then what’s the point of grad school? I thought, “What our program really needs is a business class.” So imagine my delight when Philip tells us that we’re going to learn how to write grants in his class!
But, returning to COS, I did my initial searches on “Native theatre,” and “Native theater,” and “Native (or) Native American (or) Indian storytelling,” and “folk (or) ethnic performance.” There’s a lot of interesting possibilities, but one in particular looks pretty enticing. It’s an “Expressive Arts” grant through NMAI for collaborations between Native artists for up to $10,000. If Julian and I decided to continue with “Stories” and start dramatizing other families’ oral histories along California State Highway 96, this could just be the dollars to do it.