upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

Margaret Holley

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1998 Honorable Mention

I have a persistent fascination with our most precious resource - time - and with the ways in which we grow and develop over time, even when we feel we are merely repeating ourselves and making no headway. My essay "Driving to Brandenburg" grew out of this fascination with the possibility of creative change over time, a subject that preoccupied me for months as I commuted to and from work, day after day, back and forth along the same roads, listening to music and pondering my own life.

For me, as a woman, creative nonfiction has become the medium in which I can both feel and think with unlimited range. The essay calls upon my intelligence, my sympathies, my ability to learn, and my sense of connection with the world at large in both space and time. I feel free to write out of questions and mysteries, to approach that which I do not yet understand but which calls to me in some deep way. Creative nonfiction is an enormously exciting and moving medium that requires me to be a poet, a philosopher, and a vulnerable person all in one piece of writing.
 

The river of six concertos bubbles over its stones. It floats me for weeks between home and work, back and forth, a shuttle weaving its textures into the day. Swinging from woods to freeway to woods, morning and evening inside this sound, I forget about where I'm going. I drive for the motion, the lifting of weight, flying through white wool-brained February and sudden brilliance, the grand watery polyphony of woods in winter.

Bach could improvise on the same theme continuously for two hours or more. He would sit down at the organ and play something familiar as a warm-up. Then, choosing a theme on which to extemporize, he would begin by pulling out all the stops to play it first on full organ in prelude-and-fugue or toccata-and-fugue form, the free and the strict. After that he developed the theme on various solo stops and in a variety of other forms -- duet, trio -- moving from one manual, one tempo to another. Then he interwove this theme gradually with the melody of a hymn, surrounding the hymn tune with increasingly elaborate variations, unfolding new and ever more complex chorales and fantasias in three and four parts. Finally, he liked to climax the session with another fugue, the same theme newly developed on all the stops again, to show off the full resources of instrument and musician.

 

- from Driving to Brandenburg, 1996 (personal essay)

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The Window of Opportunity (WOO) grant provides financial assistance of up to $1,500 to Leeway grant and award recipients to help them take advantage of imminent, time-sensitive opportunities to support their art for social change practice. The Community Care Fund (CCF) provides financial assistance of up to $1,250 to Leeway grant and award recipients to support with immediate and essential emergency needs. [read more]

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Upcoming events
04/025:30 pm - 7:00 pm

4/2 Transformation Award (LTA) Awardee Panel + Info Session (In Person)

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04/185:30 pm - 6:30 pm

4/18 Transformation Award (LTA) Info Session (Virtual)

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