What’s more important?
Music? Theater? Painting?
Writing?
Shall we rank them in importance? Theater often requires music, but not always. Theater needs writing before it needs music. Then again, music requires writing, too. Unless we’re talking improvisation. Musicians benefit from the spatial thinking that visual arts provide, but not necessarily. Visual arts can incorporate music (installation art) or theater (performance art) or even writing, but a painting on a wall may need only a nail. Writers can be playwrights and songwriters, but to be merely a writer, paper and pen is more necessary than a piano or stage. On the other hand, what does “importance” mean? Civilization can continue without theater, no? If we’re forced to rebuild civilization from scratch and allowed to keep only one, which is it: A great song or a great musical?
Before throwing up your hands and complaining that these arguments are dumb, before shouting that ranking the arts is a job for the philistines and the ugliest of Darwinists, know this: Should the White House eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, impossible questions like that are in play.
Take Carrie Spitler, executive director of Snow City Arts, which has provided arts education to Illinois hospitals since 1998. The organization got $20,000 from the NEA last year. Snow City allocates about $30,000 a year to a creative writing program — a modest, three-day-a-week program. Should that $20,000 vanish, the arts would get ranked. “Which means being put in an awful place,” Spitler said. “I have musicians and visual artists and a theater artist and this one writer — and we would have to prioritize.”
Let me help you out:
Writers get the short end of the stick.
Writers are the afterthoughts of the arts world.
Writers are the schmucks, the ones who need only a paper and a pen — right?
Though national and state support for the arts is often associated with stuff like controversial painters, music education and theater in prisons, there is a long, storied history of the federal government providing writers — novelists, historians, poets, journalists — with the grant money to buy something even more valuable than pen and paper. NEA and NEH money gives writers the time to write.
“There’s just nothing else as essential as time for working on a book,” said Reginald Gibbons, director of the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern University (and NEA grant recipient). “The depth of focus and concentration required to write a book is unlike almost anything else, simply because to write a book takes almost every writer so long.”
For instance, Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern, has received two NEH grants in the past 20 years, including $50,000 in 2015 to work on a history of political extremism. “Even before the first grant (in 2001), I had done the research on the book I wanted to write. But I had two kids, a job (at the University of Massachusetts) and no time. Unless I took a sabbatical at half the pay — there was no way that could happen.”
The NEH gave him $35,000, which was just enough money to take the time off to write “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age,” his 2004 history of an obscure act of racism in Detroit that set the stage for the civil rights movement. It cast significant light on the antecedents of 20th century social upheaval. It also went on to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist and win the National Book Award for history.
“My NEH grant allowed me this very ordinary thing,” he said. “It let me get up in the morning and send the kids to school and then, simply, write. It made all the difference.”
Basically, a writer’s working life is often what keeps a writer from writing.
“People who may be a little distant from the arts might not realize that writers are workers, and they want to be producing,” said Sarah Dodson, co-director of MAKE, a Chicago literary magazine. Last year, MAKE received $10,000 to help stage its Lit & Luz Festival, an annual literary exchange between writers in Chicago and Mexico. “Writing can be playful, but do you work for free? It’s not about the cost of materials. For a writer, it’s about having the resources to carve out the time to actually do the work.”
Not convinced?
Consider that the history of literature in Chicago alone — the kind of history that helps provide a big city with the gravitas to be taken seriously — would be far less impressive without those writers who received some form of government support to simply write.
From the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, during and after the Great Depression, the New Deal coughed up the Federal Writers’ Project, one of country’s most successful assistance programs for artists (until it was defunded in 1939 and left to the whims of state governments). Particularly important was the Chicago branch, known as the Illinois Writers’ Project. It was established to support struggling Chicago writers and provide them with not only work on literary projects, but the extra time needed to write.
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Even a small sample of the FWP’s Chicago roster is dizzying: Saul Bellow, arguably the city’s most celebrated literary figure, spent his early 20s (and non-writing time) with the FWP, inventorying magazines at the Newberry Library. Nelson Algren wrote a FWP guide to the town of Galena. Studs Terkel honed oral history interviewing techniques that would later make him Chicago’s most innovative accountant of our everyday lives. Because the Illinois branch was one of the few integrated FWP offices, Chicago poet Margaret Walker and Harlem Renaissance legend Claude McKay found support here too. And when local writer Richard Wright wasn’t researching a “Bibliography of the Chicago Negro” for the Illinois Writers’ Project, he had spare time to write “Native Son.”
In other words, there is no Chicago literary history without government support.
Similarly, since the NEA and NEH were founded in 1965, any list of major Chicago writers who received a NEA grant or fellowship that allowed them the time to write would have a lot in common with any list of major Chicago writers since 1965. Think Angela Jackson and Sandra Cisneros, Jennifer Egan and Stuart Dybek and Eula Biss. In the past decade alone, Chicago writers Daniel Borzutzky and Roger Reeves, among the most acclaimed emerging poets in the United States, have been NEA grant recipients.
Not that receiving one of these grants has ever been a golden ticket to a worry-free, poetry-writing existence. Sure, recipients of “genius” grants from the privately funded, Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation (including Andersonville’s Aleksandar Hemon and Oak Forest native George Saunders) receive $625,000, across five years. But in comparison, since 1966, the NEA has given $116 million total to literary organizations, nationwide. And only $46 million to individual writers. Borzutzky received a $12,000 grant for translation, which allowed him to finish a project. Reeves, who now teaches at University of Illinois at Chicago, said: “I got $25,000, and you pay tax on it. But it gave me the opportunity to have money, propose things, travel — people forget a writer has to be in proximity to a subject, to touch and feel. (The grant) also puts you in conversation with writers and builds community. My life as a writer wouldn’t exist without the NEA.”
When he lived in New York, he developed as a poet through the NEA-funded Cave Canem, which has cultivated African-American poets since 1996. More recently, he returned from Alaska, a guest of 49 Writers, an Alaskan organization partly funded by the NEA that promotes literary development in the state (and often serves rural areas).
“Individual writers need grants,” Reeves said, “but if the NEA went away, it’s these literary organizations that would really feel it.” The traditional funding ecosystem for writers — especially in their first, unsettled years — would break down, strain for support.
And you wouldn’t have to travel to Brooklyn to see the writerly carnage.
Your kids want to be writers?
The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation’s popular Poetry Out Loud recitation competition, created to inspire a new generation of poets, has played to 3.3 million students and is among the best funded poetry-education programs in the country. It’s also a joint program between the Poetry Foundation and the NEA. The Poetry Foundation, itself a recipient of a $200 million private donation in 2002, would not say if Poetry Out Loud would end if the NEA died. But “that’s a concern,” said program director Stephen Young.
You want to write the great Illinois novel?
For a while, the Illinois Arts Council gave out $1,000 award grants to local writers, until that program was defunded in 2014. Last year, the IAC gave only $17,000 in grants to literary programs across Illinois — which was almost half of what it gave those programs only a year earlier. And yes: The IAC is partly funded by the NEA, too.
Just looking for simple peace and quiet to write?
Ragdale, the longtime bucolic artist retreat in Lake Forest that’s hosted many Chicago writers since its 1976 founding, from Audrey Niffenegger (“The Time Traveler’s Wife”) to cartoonist Lynda Barry, has also received around $20,000 annually from the NEA.
What would eliminating the NEA mean for the writer who doesn’t come from money?
Or the reader who doesn’t want to hear only from writers of comfortable means?
“I think writers would find a way,” said Luis Alberto Urrea, who lives in Naperville and teaches at UIC. “Writers write without support. But it would be difficult. Right now, they can take the long hard road like me and starve for 40 years. Or compete for a grant. I’m all for missionary work so writers can eat, but this is not just about receiving money.”
Urrea was born in Tijuana and raised in San Diego, and five years ago, his 2009 novel, “Into the Beautiful North,” was chosen as an NEA Big Read, a kind of communitywide book club similar to the One Book, One Chicago program. His book tells the story of a Mexican woman who, inspired by “The Magnificent Seven,” sets out to recruit a small squad to protect her village; her journey takes her from U.S. border towns to Kankakee.
Since 2012, the NEA Big Read has taken Urrea from Kalamazoo to agricultural towns in Washington, from California’s Central Valley to New York’s Latino neighborhoods. “Often, it’s the first book these people have read,” he said. “And I’m certainly the first author they’ve met. So the more important role of the NEA for writers isn’t only financial. It’s about the soul of the culture, the intellectual health of a nation. It speaks to the strength of a literary community. Eliminating the NEA would be a tragedy. I can’t say it clearer.”
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