Work

For a long time my job has been to write grants. Sometimes I tell myself there is a mystique to grant writing, as if the field is imbued with power or meaning in the popular imagination. I know I’m flattering myself.  Most people think of grant writing very little, if at all.

Grant writing is just persuasive writing, building a case sentence by sentence. The only trick is in the framing, how one positions the grant applicant’s desires alongside the grant funder’s desires, so that divergent priorities overlap at the point where money can change hands. That part really is powerful and difficult, and it does have a certain mystique, or it might, if anyone thought about it.  

I started writing grants when I was 21 years old, four years before the age at which they say the prefrontal cortex is fully developed. Writing a grant feels like muscle memory to me, like I could write a grant while bypassing my conscious brain entirely, relying solely on my amygdala.

Remember that Ratatat song, “Seventeen Years”? It begins with a sample of the rapper Young Churf saying, “I’ve been rapping for about seventeen years. I don’t write my stuff anymore, I just kick it from my head, you know what I’m saying? No disrespect but that’s how I am.”  I feel the same way about grant writing.

I do this thing sometimes, when I’m working, where I allow the grant to fully envelop me. There is a way to write a grant at the surface, and I can and have completed many grants at that level. But when the timeline tightens, or there are collaborating partners involved, or the case is otherwise complicated or slippery, I must dive into the grant and let the relationship between me and the grant melt away. I lose myself in the budget justification, toggle back and forth between the narrative and the budget, spiral into the key personnel biographies, submit it just before the deadline, and wait for a funding decision.

I’m always glad for the gap between submitting a grant and receiving a funding decision, but never more so than when I’ve dived into the grant. If I had to find out I’d lost a grant just after emerging from it, I’d be devastated. As it is I get funding decisions long after the feeling of being one with the grant has faded. Other grants have come and gone, and many more loom on the horizon. I accept all funding decisions with tranquility. 

I used to write grants for higher education. Done well, my work was invisible. I edited a faculty member’s words so seamlessly they thought they wrote them that way all along. I added a sentence they meant to write. I flagged the request for proposals, called the meeting, and suggested an idea, all while maintaining my supporting role. 

Sometimes it felt like half of my work was helping to write the grant and the other half was sweeping my footprints away. I tried to be farsighted about this facet of my job. My work paid my bills and also provided me with a daily meditation regarding my own insignificance. It was as if I was employed by a Zen koan. The faculty member won a grant and moved up the academic career ladder, but I wrote a grant and moved closer toward enlightenment. 

There were days when I wanted to say, “That single set of footprints in the budget justification? That was when I carried you.” But I never did. I understand higher education’s many flaws; I have empathy for faculty, for their untenable jobs, for the ways in which higher education has been broken by the pressures and demands of the marketplace. I believe in education despite everything, or at least I want to. 

Now I write grants for a few nonprofit clients. I like the scale of it; smaller grants mean more outside the context of a university. The flexibility is good, too, especially for working around migraines or a toddler’s schedule. I never thought I’d be a business owner, but I guess I am. The business is my brain, writing grants. 

A grant is a bridge made of money. The bridge connects the grant seeker and the grant funder, an idea and a reality, the past (in which you felt the grant in your body) to the future (in which the project begins). The mystique of grant writing has nothing to do with the grant and everything to do with what’s on the other side of the bridge, something half-imagined, better.

I’ve learned new ways to structure budgets. I’ve sought fellowship among other grant writers. I’ve shaken hands with program officers who rejected my grant proposals six months later. But the most important lessons I’ve learned from the grants themselves: how to write while underwater, how to find solace in words on a page, how to accept that I am powerless, how to be feel almost nothing when I open the email and read, “We received many deserving applications. Unfortunately…”