Emma Törzs

This grant is a jump-on-the-bed, tell-your-whole-family, weep-silently-in-the-shower, consult-a-financial-advisor, wear-like-invisible-armor kind of gift. It also brings up a lot of questions for me about privilege and talent and dark timelines and WHITHER ART? etc., and makes me want to say earnest things like “You can count on me!” and “I won’t let you down!”

But who is “you?” And who is the intended audience for this statement? For a moment I’ll assume it’s other writers interested in applying for the grant, because that’s what led me here in the past. To you I will publicly admit something embarrassing, which is that last winter I finally and totally failed to sell a first novel I’d spent a lot of time and energy on. This feels like a dirty secret, or a curse; like confessing my failure aloud will doom all my books forever (I’m tossing salt over my shoulder as I write this). But it’s meant a lot to me recently when authors have sung me their own woeful ballads of the novel unpublished, so hopefully someone out there will read this and take heart. Applying for this grant was an act of confidence at a time when I had almost none to spare. Now, all fired-up on government money, I have confidence in excess, so please borrow some if you need it.

If the audience for this statement is the people who make up the National Endowment for the Arts, well then: truly madly deeply, THANK YOU. What you give, I will try my best to give back.

You can count on me! I won’t let you down!