The Hermit Poet

After researching a wide range of writing and art grants, it has become apparent that I’m not Canadian enough. It seems I need to have lived in Canada for 12 months already before I can begin applying for grant assistance. In the meantime, I am ineligible for Canadian support. And, sadly enough, without US citizenship, I’m also ineligible for American support.

Other odd things uncovered in my research — the Canadian Arts Council has a strong bias against electronic literary journals and refuses to count them as part of your minimum 10 poetry publications to qualify for their grants. Which means that they wouldn’t count a poem in the Atlantic Unbound (theatlantic.com) for instance, or Blackbird, or Diagram, let alone work in Boxcar Poetry Review. In a sense I can understand their point of view — mainly that there are so many bad or poorly juried online journals out there, why take the risk — but it also seems a bit outdated to me and somewhat naive — some online journals have a much tougher set of standards and are even more difficult to get accepted into than their print counterparts.
This week I’m planning to send out work to some Canadian journals. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes.