Visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater and performance artists might know of many grants and fellowships to apply for, but the application process is intensive and time-consuming. If you’ve ever wanted to apply for a fellowship, but were daunted by the process, let me help! Working closely with you and your work, I will translate your ideas about your work, your plans for its development, and its unique strengths into an eloquent, powerful proposal to accompany your work samples into the application process and give you the best possible chance for success. I have a BA in English and two graduate degrees in creative writing, and I have won several fellowships myself, including a Bush Artist Fellowship, a McKnight fellowship, and a fellowship in fiction at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I can work with local artists (in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area) or with artists anywhere, by phone, email, and regular mail. 

 

Artists I have worked with have won grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board , the American Composers Forum, and the Archibald Bush Foundation.

 

RATES:

$400-900 (grantwriting)

$50-400 (consultation and editing)

 

Rates are based on length and difficulty of applications, as well as on the level of involvement of the artist in the process. I require a retainer of half of the estimated full price before beginning any work. At the beginning of the process, I will discuss the application with the artist and give a price based on this information, then secure agreement from the artist on the price before beginning work.

 

A $600-900 grant is a highly personalized grant that includes serious study, on my part, of the artist’s work, and incorporation of my ideas about the work’s strengths into the proposal; in-person meetings (or extensive phone conversations) with the artist (if desired by the artist) to discuss in detail the artist’s plans and ideas; and editing in consultation with the artist.

 

I am equally happy to write applications for $400-500. In writing these less expensive grants, I will produce a document that is clear, eloquent, well-written, and appropriate to the application; but it will be less personalized, include less study of the artist’s work, and will not include meetings with the artist. I will work with an artist over email, asking questions and working from existing artist statements and rough ideas as already expressed in writing by the artist. 

 

 

I also do consultations and editing on applications.  Prices for consultation and editing vary.

 

For more details, or for information about talking to my references, please email me at cherijohnson33@gmail.com. To see a sample of a grant I’ve written, please see below. I look forward to working with you.

 

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Artist Statement 

           

In the spring of 1996, the members of Drinking Song were meeting each other for the first time. We were all students at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. Two of us, Stewart Sedlacek and Seth Johnson, were in the music department, studying classical guitar; James Des Jardins was studying chemistry, but playing with his folk group, Listed, at night in Duluth bars and coffeeshops. The three of us decided to form a group, which went through several name changes and incarnations, but ended up as Drinking Song.

 

Our name comes not from our habits, nor from our clientele, and our repertoire does not really have many rollicking, boisterous numbers designed to inspire our audience to drain their glasses in one gulp or crash them together in the air. (Our sound is actually pretty quiet; we play acoustic, and we don’t have any percussion, rarely even any vocals.) But our name is appropriate, because all three of us, as well as most of our music, comes from the Iron Range, a place fairly unique in Minnesota for its streets lined with not one or two but six or seven or eight bars and liquor stores. In every IronRange town there is a street that is made up almost entirely of bars. Many of the mines are dying out now; but once all of those bars were filled with miners who drank long and hard to forget the long days of darkness underground, and the dangers they faced there. The mines in their heyday attracted thousands of immigrants looking for work, and so the Range is also an area rich in European ethnic diversity: not just Swedes and Norwegians, but Poles, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, and the French, the Croatians, the Czechs.

           

Among the members of Drinking Song, four of these ethnic groups are represented, and two of our grandfathers were miners; our music comes from the training we received in high school and college, but also it springs directly from our connections to the cultural, work, and ethnic history of the Range. The melodies and sounds of our music, which uses techniques and forms from classical music—the theme and variations, the sonata, even a kind of miniature “concerto,” in which James plays a solo part, complete with dramatic caesuras and cadenzas, while Seth and Stewart are the “orchestra”—are nonetheless based in folk music: drinking songs, work songs, mining songs, logging camp songs, bawdy songs from bordellos. Some of these songs we grew up hearing; others we’ve reached out into the community to learn, starting with the families of our friends, particularly those friends with ethnic backgrounds different from our own, in order to find new chords and sounds and rhythms to make our sound richer, but also because we are interested in creating a repertoire that is a kind of musical “soundtrack” of our region and its history.  

 

Our goal as artists is to create, like Dvořák in his “New World Symphony,” Gershwin in “Rhapsody in Blue,” Beethoven in his Ninth, a sound that speaks not only of a people or nation, not only to that people or nation—but a complex, lush, and emotional sound that speaks to the ideas of family and community itself, and is open to ears anywhere in the world. In our piece “J’ai oublié” (“I Forget”), based on a nameless and anonymous French voyageur song that we found, of all places, in a stack of faded sheet music given to us by an 85-year-old Croatian woman from Embarrass, Minnesota, Seth, like a child with a guitar made of a cardboard box with rubber bands, plinks out the notes that accompany the terse vocal lines (we don’t actually include the vocal line in our rendition, but the words were nonetheless important in the creation of our piece): 

           

            I was once a child

            But I forget.

            The river is cold.

            It’s best to forget.

            It’s best to forget

            The boy I was.

            He plays happily.

            To him the cold is sweet.

             

           

 Imbued in those lines is a stark loneliness, which speaks to a deep and abiding melancholy swirling beneath the surface of them. To accompany Seth’s sad yet diffident little plinks, which take on, we think, the sound of a voyageur’s lone voice piercing the cold, James and Stewart play a rich, warm, and nostalgic accompaniment that uses some of the unique sounds of this old French Canadian music and mirrors the singer’s fond memories that, in his present difficulties, he sometimes can’t bear to remember. In this way we bring to life for our listeners the particular experience of a particular individual in a particular time and place, but make it universal, too, with the familiar sounds of the guitar and the universally understood feeling of loneliness.

Fellowship Plan 

            Up until now, our goal as a group has been to focus primarily on local performance: on building an audience and bringing the music of the Range to the Range by playing in bars, clubs, restaurants, and festivals there. We hope to always play many shows in the place where we grew up, but our next goal as a group is to gain a wider audience in order to bring the music of northeast Minnesota to the world. Our first step in doing so is to do a top-notch recording that is a true reflection of our talents and repertoire. It is for this recording that we are applying for this fellowship.

            Our only recordings right now are ones we have done ourselves, in a home studio with limited equipment and expertise. These recordings have been helpful in securing local performances, and we have sold some of the homemade copies at shows. But in order to present ourselves as best as we possibly can to national publications, booking agents, clubs, etc., we need a well-recorded, beautifully made album that features our best playing and a professional look.

            For this recording, which will include eleven of our best pieces (including four, “J’ai oublié,”  “Nines,” “Ghost in the Attic,” and “Per, Per, Per,” that we have included on our Work Samples CD), we would like to work with a studio in Minneapolis, booking several recording sessions and traveling there to record over a time span of two or three months. We will need funds for the recording sessions themselves, including editing and mastering costs; for travel and hotel expenses, as all three of us live in Duluth; and for production, duplication, and marketing costs. We would also love to take time off from our day jobs in order to focus on practicing hard individually and as a group, in order to make these songs not only strong, or entertaining, but truly artistic and reflective of our deepest musical goals.  

            Our vision for our album is to record a collection of songs that are all, as we have said, connected ethnically or culturally to the Iron Range, but also are connected in another way: we have orchestrated so many of these folk songs that we have been able to select eleven that are united by the theme of “Hauntings.” The idea of haunting and ghosts is, we think, an especially powerful one in a community made up mostly of immigrants, who are doubly haunted by the memories and specters of their childhood, because so much of the place, the things, the buildings, and people of their childhood are very far away. “Ghost in the Attic” comes from Seth’s grandmother, who, when she reached very old age, began to speak only in Croatian and to act like a child; whenever she “misbehaved,” and her son called her on it, she waved him away and said, no, it was the “sjena”: a Croatian word for “ghost.”  In “I Forget,” the young voyageur is haunted by the pleasant memories of his childhood, and “Nines” is based on a Polish song about a drinking game in which places around the table are set for all those who died in a terrible mining accident in the summer. In our liner notes for the album, we will include detailed descriptions of these songs and where they came from, including words from some of the people from which we got the songs. We hope to hire a professional writer to put these notes together, so they can be as eloquent as possible as well as expressive of our deep feelings about these people, their stories, and their music.