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130 Stephen Henighan is the author of ten books, including the novels The Places Where Names Vanish (1998) and The Streets of Winter (2004), the short-story collections North of Tourism (1999) and A Grave in the Air (2007), and the essay collections When Words Deny the World (2002) and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (2008). Henighan’s journalism appears in Geist, The Walrus, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Guelph and General Editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series. Kit Dobson: Can we start by talking about your experiences applying for arts funding in Canada? Specifically, in this project we are interested in your interactions with the Canada Council, provincial bodies, or other ones. Stephen Henighan: Very, very early in my career, when I was in my twenties, and living in Montreal as a freelance writer, I did apply for grants. I got something called an Explorations grant, which was quite popular in the ’80s. And that helped me finish my first novel, Other Americas. I used the money to quit my job working in a cheap language school. I quit my job for six or eight months and finished the novel, and then the novel went out to six or seven publishers, and months and months later one of them accepted it. By that time I’d run out of money again, and was working assembling mailboxes in a warehouse. So that was the first grant I got, and I think it was worth $6,300. I still remember that figure because it was about my annual income at the time. I later got a grant of, I think, $10,000 from the Ontario Arts Council for a novel set in Montreal that ended up taking me about fifteen years to finish. I got the grant in 1990. It’s a novel where I wrote an 800-page first draft, which I then had to whittle away for years and years and years. And it was published in 2004 as The Streets of Winter. I never applied for an A grant or a B grant or any of those other ones from Interview with Stephen Henighan 8 LiteratureSurvivesthroughItsVariety Stephen Henighan 131 131 the Canada Council. I could never be bothered to do it. I was always more interested in doing my own writing. I got a $1,500 Ontario Writers’ Reserve Grant to finish When Words Deny the World, and that was basically because the publisher, Tim Inkster, offered it to me and said, “Fill in this form and I’ll get you one.” So that’s my sum total experience with grants. The Explorations, I think, was in 1987, the Ontario Arts Council one in 1990, and the Ontario Writers’ Reserve grant in 2001–02. KD: Do you have a sense then of what distinguishes successful applications from unsuccessful ones? Either for you or for people you know who are working? SH: I think it has become a lot harder to get a grant. There was a time—I know from friends who have sat on juries—when they were choosing twenty out of thirty, and now they’re choosing twelve out of a hundred and fifty applications. So I don’t know for sure what distinguishes a successful application from an unsuccessful one. I’ll tell you what worries me: the general timidity of literary discussion in Canada and the fact that we don’t seem to be able to separate discussions about literary works from who likes who in a rather schoolyard sense. There is always this terrible fear that if you are perceived in any way to slight anyone then this person is sure to be on the next jury that considers a grant application that you’ve written and therefore will do all sorts of horrible things to you to ensure that you don’t get the grant. And I think, more than anything, what we need to look at, in a funny way, is the way that the jury system impacts on our literary journalism and on our book reviewing, which are absolutely crucial parts of a literary culture—if you’re to have any kind of lively discussion going on—and the way in which it deadens that discussion. And that’s my main concern, I think, when it comes to applications of that sort. KD: Do you think that those sorts of things are things writers worry about...

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