Emergency Working Artist Project Grant

Funding will help achieve the goal of completing the book manuscript with Ojibwe translations and assure it is edited by someone who does the work professionally. I've written six chapters of a planned sixteen chapter work, telling Eddie's story along the way from his childhood somewhere along the hills above the river that flows through Nagachiwanong (Fond du Lac Reservation in northern Minnesota) to his life and work in Red Cliff, Wisconsin. Funding will provide for Ojibwe translations and the services of a professional line editor. As a writer I am always working within deadlines. As a publisher this has become even more important to me because I rely on the coordination of writers, illustrators, graphic designers and the printing company to ensure the work gets done within a defined time frame. I've developed brief chapter outlines of each of the remaining chapters of The Place of Beginnings and Endings, several sentences that describe chapter themes, characters, sequences and events. The characters appear in my imagination and I, as writer, become the recorders of their story, writing down their telling of the story to me. I describe the process as hearing voices without being mentally ill. I write a lot, five books in the last four years. I have another manuscript of children's historical fiction (The Fire, a fictionalized biography of a young Native girls experience during the Cloquet Fire of 1918 on the Fond du Lac Reservation) sitting on a desk at Minnesota Historical Society awaiting review. I will complete ten of the remaining chapters of a sixteen chapter work. And although the chapters do not have formal titles, they have the common interwoven themes indicated earlier in my narrative. If they were to have names they would be: I was raised this way; Returning home; Sara's song; My drunk years; My work in the community; Two kids and their messed up parents move next door; We take them places, feed them sometimes, sometimes they come to us; I try to teach them ricing skills; The boy has conflicts with school; The great circle of these things; Them so called adults next door get all tough with us; Finding them in the car; We took them in and now we are in trouble with tribal social services; Trying to get that foster license from the rez is like pulling teeth; The traditional/contemporary paradox or struggles with the tribal bureaucracy; Life as I understand it; Way maker, or the Place of Beginnings and Endings.