20.17 Blog #21: Grant For The Arts and The Land Of Should

If you’re anything or anybody like me, you live in the Land of Should.  I should do this, I should do that.  It’s the burden of a guilty expectation.  It’s taken me a long time to unlearn what I should be doing on a career-scale.  “I should be earning xyz, playing these festivals and getting those kind of gigs” etc.  I still live in the Land of Should on a personal level, but having a set of expectations doesn’t help give you a structure for ambition.

One of these goals in life was that artists should have Grants for the Arts.  The route to being a successful artist is a pot of money from the Powers That Be that seemingly validates you as a professional.  The trouble was, the vastness of the G4A was a scary prospect.  Too scary to get my head around.  How to approach it, how to digest it, how to find support for it?  Not because it seemed a very unpunk thing, but because I liked immediacy.  And I guess I shy away from hard work sometimes if I’m not naturally already pretty good at it.  Thanks for friends who told me to just get on with it.

But, with huge support from Kirsten Luckins over at Apples & Snakes, and advice from a number of other amazing people, the event I co-run, SAY OWT, has received a Grant For The Arts from Arts Council England.  It felt a lot of emailing, timetabling, rewriting and messages flying-back-and-forth.  A lot of maybes.  This actually felt a lot more could than should.  We could do these events is a lot better ‘bluesky’ thinking than we should do these events.  It’s more ambitious to think could than should.

The programme we’ve put together is not just a dedication to the exciting and raw slams we’ve fostered, but also open mics featuring crossover events with other nights across the UK, workshops, special events and scratches, plus opportunities for poets to be our Local Guest and part of an Anthology.

This massively exciting for me and Stu to start juggling these new responsibilities, but I guess it’s understanding this doesn’t mean we’ve ‘made it’ and suddenly are grown-ups with our G4A.  If anything, it’s more complicated!  We’ve run 3 seasons of Say Owt, and yes we’ve cemented a night but it’s time to push onwards and really define what it could be; a supportive, quality and experimental scene.  And not what it should be.