My first literary grant by Sheena Wilkinson

                                               

Last month I was delighted to receive a grant from the Authors' Foundation to help me 'buy time' to work on my memoir. These awards, apart from their value, offer us important validation -- someone, not our mum, believes in the value of our work and is prepared to help us. Not because they will make money from it, but because they consider it to be of value. 

I was writing a letter to my old teachers (they won't read it; I am so old that they are mostly dead) for an RLF podcast series, when I remembered an episode from primary school days. The school was in a poor area; I was one of the few children with books in my house and aspiration in my heart. One June afternoon, as the end of the year beckoned, my teacher -- sadly I don't remember which -- took the time to tear out all the unused paper in the class’s exercise books for me to take home – piles and piles of wonderful fresh paper for me to write my own stories. 'You'll put this to good use, Sheena,' she said.

portrait of the artist as a young girl 

                                   

Free paper! All for me. And it was that lovely posh creamy paper with proper blue margins, a far cry from the flimsy notebooks I bought in Wyse Byse. As I staggered home under the physical weight of the paper and the weight of expectation -- I mustn't waste this! -- I felt, not like a charity case, but like an artist claiming the tools of her trade. 

It was, I realise now, my first writer’s grant.

And I did put it to good use.

Researching for this podcast made me remember my first literary 'grant'