NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Kevin Wiberg.

This is a little book with a big heart and a lot of common sense.

In the fast-paced, high-stress world of securing competitive funding, it can be easy to chase opportunities and lose sight of what matters most—the people and communities who rely on the success of your work. While chasing the dollars is often driven by the organizational imperative to survive, it is an ineffective and uninspired strategy to engage grantmakers.

As my career has moved from grantseeker to grantmaker, Barbara Floersch has identified critical themes and strategies that I continue to look for when evaluating proposals. Don’t assume a grantmaker knows who you are and what you do; but do assume that most grantmakers will be deeply grounded in the fields, populations, and issues that your organization addresses.

A critical part of your organization’s work is to demonstrate competency, document a solid grounding in data trends from national to local levels, promising and best practices, identify who else does similar work, and how your organization collaborates with others to produce efficient and impactful outcomes. These are just a few of the critical lessons Floersch has shared with thousands of grantseekers around the US and internationally. I credit Floersch’s teaching and mentorship over the years with my success in securing millions of public and private dollars and these lessons continues to inform my work as a grantmaker.

A real strength of Floersch’s new book is her engaging and authentic communications style. She practices what she preaches, and I’m so pleased she continues to share her knowledge with a genuine interest in your organization’s success in addressing critical and compelling social issues and needs.

You Have a Hammer: Building Grant Proposals for Social Change by Barbara Floersch, Rootstock Publishing, January 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Wiberg lives in Vermont and is the Philanthropic Advisor for Community Engagement at The Vermont Community Foundation.

Guest Post by J. Gauner.

As a literary pilgrim and a John Steinbeck scholar, John J. Han has traveled to Japan since 2007 to attend the annual Steinbeck conference and roam to some famous literary sites and Zen temples to pay his respects to iconic writers such as Matsuo Basho, Masaoka Shiki, and Yasunari Kawabata and delight himself in learning about Japanese culture. His literary travels have borne fruit, a collection of ten photo essays titled On the Road Again, which follows the footprints of Matsuo Basho’s well-known work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a poetic narrative in the form of haibun.

Han’s collection visually presents the literary sites he has visited. The unique lenses bring the reader the mindscape of the author’s literary pilgrimage and sensibility to Japanese literature and culture.

Like a tour guide who has a backpack of stories, Han leads the reader to see the sites and “listen” to his narratives. Sometimes he offers his own haiku to accompany his photos. For example, his response to the replica of Basho’s hut sounds pleasant, though slightly ironic:

a long pilgrimage
to Basho’s hut
a fake front

Another interesting part of Han’s book is that some captions provide useful information for better understanding of the sites presented by his photos. Below is the one accompanying the photo about Masaoka Shiki writing his death haiku (used also as the book cover):

Shiki died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-four. In this scene, displayed in the Shiki Museum, he writes three death poems (jisei) in haiku form on September 18, 1902, one day before his passing.

Han includes Shiki’s three death haiku in the caption to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. For some photos, especially the ones on the Basho and Shiki haiku rocks, it would make the tours more curious if he includes haiku in the captions.

Han’s literary pilgrimage helps him understand that “one of the best ways to maintain international peace is to learn about each other’s cultural heritage.” He believes this learning can start with a visit to famous literary sites because “literature is one of the best ways to understand and connect with people of another country.” Han gets his mission into literary travels in On the Road Again.

On the Road Again by John J. Han. Cyberwit, 2020.

Guest Post by Claude Clayton Smith.

I was 13 in 1957 when my junior high English teacher asked us to read a book about someone in the career to which we aspired. I enjoyed school, so I figured I’d become a teacher. Happily, I found what I thought was the perfect book at our town library—My Life As A Teacher by John Erskine. But no doubt its opening sentence spun my 13-year-old head:

Nothing in education needs explaining more than this, that a teacher may be neither a professor nor an educator, that a professor may mature to the age of retirement without teaching or educating, and that an educator, without loss of reputation, may profess nothing, and never face a class.

Sixty-four years later, after ten years of teaching English at the secondary level and thirty as a professor at the university level, I appreciate what Erskine was saying. But all I could remember from junior high was that he had taught at Amherst College.

Re-reading Erskine confirmed my best instincts. “I wanted to be a teacher,” Erskine wrote, “and I wanted to write.” In the classroom he developed writers by “encouraging each individual to discover for himself the manner and the style which was natural and characteristic.” The teacher’s part was “to connect the reading with the pupil’s experience.” What could be more simple or obvious?

Erskine began teaching at Amherst in 1903, and later, at Columbia, became the father of the Great Books course. There were negatives, certainly. At Amherst, Erskine found his students ill-prepared and had to institute a course in spelling. (“The elements should have been acquired in high school English.”) Erskine also soon discovered that: “No professor is thought so necessary as the coach.”

It’s now 2021. What else is new?

My Life As A Teacher by John Erskine. J.P. Lippencott Company, 1948.

Reviewer bio: Claude Clayton Smith, professor emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four others. His website is: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.

Guest Post by Michael Coolen.

“I remember coming to one village whose streets were black with priests, and its taverns full of seething atheists.”

Almost every page of Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: A Memoir is filled with redolent writing. Like many writers supplanted by magical realists, deconstructing whiners, and much less gifted authors, Laurie Lee is receding into the past for many readers who don’t even know his name, much less his exquisite writing.

As a composer and pianist for many decades, I draw inspiration and comfort not only from contemporary music, but from music from the distant to ancient past. Similarly, from time to time I seek out writers from the distant past, Virgil, Herodotus, et al., whose writing confirms to me that Time is just a word we use to measure grief and laughter and insight and children and love.

A friend with similar tastes introduced me to the writings of Laurie Lee just recently. I did not even know who he was. And now I can’t wait to read everything he ever wrote, where every page can contain sentences like the following: “Segovia was a city in a valley of stones—a compact, half-forgotten heap of architectural splendours built for the glory of some other time.”

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: A Memoir by Laurie Lee. Nonpareil Books, 2011.

Reviewer bio: Michael Coolen is an Oregon writer/pianist. He is also a composer, with works performed Carnegie Hall, MoMA, the Christie Gallery, Europe, Japan, and Russia.

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