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5. To Hear This Different Story: Interview with Daniel Heath Justice
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is the chair of the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia and previously worked at the University of Toronto. In addition to various essays in journals and edited collections, Daniel is author of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2005), a study of Cherokee literary expression, and The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (2005–07), an Indigenous epic fantasy. Smaro Kamboureli: Our first question is a sort of request: could you describe your experiences in applying for arts funding in Canada and applying, for example, to the Canada Council, provincial bodies, and other sources of support for writers like you? Daniel Heath Justice: I have pretty limited experience applying in Canada. The one grant I received was from the Ontario Arts Council for working on the second part of the third volume of my fantasy trilogy novels and that was the sum of my experience. It was actually quite easy. By that point I was a Canadian permanent resident and I didn’t know I could apply and my editor said, “You need to apply for this, there’s funding available specifically for Aboriginal literature, so apply.” I wasn’t too sure about applying, because I get a good paycheque from the university, but it was helpful for that summer; I didn’t need to teach a summer course and I could focus on the book. So I applied and got the good news. It was a good, very productive summer. But that was the only arts funding I’ve applied for. Kit Dobson: The only arts funding both in Canada and the United States? DHJ: Yes, I never applied for funding in the States. SK: Is there a particular reason for this? Is that because the system works differently or you didn’t need it? 75 Interview with Daniel Heath Justice 5 ToHearThisDifferentStory To Hear This Different Story 76 76 DHJ: I didn’t need it. I did pretty well with my academic paycheque, and I’m just a little skittish about applying for funds that could go to full-time writers, folks who struggle more than I do to pay the bills. SK: That’s a very important principle. Other people talk about this issue in different ways. At the same time there are authors who are trying to make a living as full-time writers, and so they try to keep subsidizing their writing and their lives through grants. I don’t know if that’s the case at this point, but twenty years ago or so I knew quite a few writers who would just rely on such subsidies. This would suggest that there is a difference in how writers view funding agencies, whether a funding body is there to support the writer for a given project or whether it is there to become a frequent, if not habitual, source of subsidy for someone’s life and writing. DHJ: Well, I think also at that time I was very thrilled to be writing fiction because it’s a deep love of mine. But I think I was also a little skittish about calling myself a “writer”—I was a scholar. It’s a very arbitrary distinction, and now I don’t have that concern. But at the time I was writing genre fiction , and there are all of these expectations about genre writing, so I think that was part of the reason why I didn’t apply for those funds. But also knowing that the pots don’t get bigger is important; generally, they shrink, and I don’t fundamentally need the money. Then you have to worry about taxes. I got a beastly tax bill this year, and that always keeps me a little bit wary of applying as well. KD: Do you have a sense of what it was that helped make your application a successful one? DHJ: I think it was very carefully written, but I didn’t really know beyond that. I tried to be attentive to what the grant agency really wanted. I think probably there weren’t many applicants for that type of category. KD: So it was a smaller category grant for the sort of work you’re doing? DHJ: In my memory it was. It’s been a while since I looked it up, but it was an Aboriginal literature category and I...