The Assemblagist

No flies on me.

We here in Nawth Carohline-​ah occa­sion­ally suf­fer from Arts Depri­va­tion. In order to fund our quest for visual stim­u­la­tion, some addi­tional resources prove nec­es­sary, even absolute.

So some of us will meet at Emerge Gallery in Greenville for Pitt County Arts Council’s meet­ing of the mon­e­tary minds to learn all about Regional Artist Pro­gram Grant apps. click here for info re:other venues with the same work­shop goals.

I received NC Arts Coun­cil fund­ing for the orig­i­nal issue of The Dead Mule (School of South­ern Lit­er­a­ture) back in 1996. The grant appli­ca­tion process was oner­ous and tedious but, to be truth­ful, rather fun to com­plete. Writ­ing grant pro­pos­als is oddly enter­tain­ing to me and I par­layed my inter­est into a pay­ing gig back in the mid-​90s writ­ing props for a Catholic HIV-​Aids foun­da­tion that pro­vided help and day­care for the chil­dren of HIV patients who were under­served, under­nour­ished and mis­un­der­stood. Long time ago… odd job in which to briefly engage.

My pre­vi­ous grants and work­shops fell under the Lit­er­ary head­ing. Ploughshares Inter­na­tional Fic­tion Writ­ing Sem­i­nar (Emer­son Col­lege) in The Nether­lands, the Mule Grant, my grad­u­ate fel­low­ships… my brain changed some­where along the line and Art, visual projects, took the fore­front of my cre­ative activ­i­ties list.

One can’t help but won­der (the one being me) if anes­the­sia cre­ated my lit­er­ary cre­ativ­ity spurts. Eight hours under the knife for lum­bar fusion back in 1989 spawned “Danc­ing with Uncle Vir­gil” and 6? hours of hepatic resec­tion in 1999 birthed even more writ­ing and my career at Pop­mat­ters as Books Editor.

My hus­band says it’s odd how one day I couldn’t “draw a stick fig­ure” and the next, I’m smash­ing out visual pieces of art and floun­der like an obsessed orbi­tron man­gler. I truly don’t know what pos­sesses me but I truly DO know it is Fluxus. Pure fluxus and flummox.

My grant pro­posal? What do I want $$ for? Work­ing on that one … methinks a work­shop would pro­vide much fod­der for increased artis­tic out­put. I’d love to go up to a class or five at Carnegie Art stuffand­non­sense in Pitts­burgh, or maybe a week­long jaunt through John C. Camp­bell Folk School? A Raleigh-​area whizbang class or two? Or per­haps I should finally con­fess before my maker that I truly do need new sup­plies for cre­at­ing art — with arthrit­i­cally deformed hands and gimpy lum­bar fusion, per­haps I’d best plead for ergonom­ics and stop fart­ing around with tools I can hardly use…

We shall see what we shall see what we shall see. Like civic. Or radar. Han­nah, you’re a palin­drome. Chow Bella.

c