Individual Artist Fellowship Grant

My goal is to produce an additional seven essays, which will move my essay collection/memoir close to completion. The measurable outcome would be seven finished essays, bringing the total of completed essays to fifteen out of a planned sequence of twenty. A culminating activity would be a reading of selected essays (spring of 2016, Grand Rapids), including several of the pieces completed during the grant year. There's a hunger to learn more about this disease and to share stories and struggles, as evidenced by the lively discussion prompted by my essay excerpts during a 2014 reading at the local library. Most people have been touched by dementia, whether it's a spouse, a parent or other family member, a friend or a neighbor. During the process of writing and revising the seven essays, I will seek comments on my drafts regularly from an accomplished group of area English professors, editors, and published writers, as I have done with the essays produced thus far. In addition, I will give a reading which will include some of the new essays (in Grand Rapids, spring of 2016). The venue will be either the Grand Rapids Library, the library at Itasca Community College, or the Acorn Gallery at Oak Hill, the assisted living facility where my husband resides. The success of the reading will be measured both by attendance figures and by my presentation's impact, to be garnered by audience responses to a brief written survey.