Still Little Candles in the Darkness
Eight years ago, during the early months of the first Trump administration, the literary community was put on high alert when the president proposed to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). On a cold February evening in 2017, I joined a relatively small but mighty group of writers in a peaceful protest outside the gates of the White House calling for the protection of federal funding for the arts. My wife was by my side; so were my kids. My daughter and son, ages eleven and nine at the time, held little candles in the darkness. They had to stand still so the flames wouldn’t go out, but even so, they made sure their voices were heard. I didn’t have the heart to tell them—I was just so proud of them—that I doubted the president was even “home” that night.
Back in New York, while we waited to learn whether Congress would pass funding for those agencies, I spoke with recipients of the NEA’s creative writing fellowships—at the time, $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers—about what receiving that level of support meant to them. Joy Harjo, who received her first fellowship in 1977 and would go on to become U.S. poet laureate, said the financial reward bought more than just time to write. “It bought affirmation,” she said. Others spoke of validation, of life-changing reassurance. “As an immigrant to this country,” Peter Ho Davies said, “the NEA fellowships felt like an embrace from my adopted home.” Congress later passed a bill that increased funding for both agencies, and the NEA went on to support more writers, among them this issue’s featured poet, Donika Kelly, who received a fellowship in 2023, the year she started working in earnest on her new book, The Natural Order of Things.
In August I was driving back from Chicago, where my wife and I had moved our son to college, when I learned that the NEA, once again under threat of elimination, had canceled the creative writing fellowship program. For nearly sixty years those fellowships had sent a powerful message that the work of poets and writers is essential to the health of this nation. Time will tell how, or if, that void will be filled. The NEA’s budget amounts to 0.003 percent of the total federal budget. And the fellowship program was a small fraction of that. So I wonder, dear reader, what’s the message now? That the work of writers doesn’t matter? Or perhaps we’re more powerful than we thought. Keep writing, and let’s send a message of our own.
