Help August Go to Tin House This Summer!
Donation protected
Hi, I'm August, formerly Bruce, and I truly appreciate you taking a moment to read my story. I'm a queer disabled writer and ghost nerd. Wow! A lot has happened in the last six months that has radically changed my life and my writing career. The recent big news is that I've been accepted to the 2024 Summer Tin House Writing Workshop! Attending the workshop in person has been a long-term dream/goal of mine since my baby gay writer days. I applied for the Debut 40 scholarship to attend. While I didn't get it, I was told that I was in the "final mix" for it. Less than 10% of the applicants (1400 total) were accepted and I'm one of them!! This is an opportunity I cannot pass up. I'm hoping my community can help me get there!
Attending the summer workshop is the next step in my plan to stay unstuck in my writing career and life. Making connections with other writers, publishing professionals, and agents is a key element to the Tin House workshop as well as continuing to progress in my writing career, which the last six months have been all about. And, well, healing from my suicide attempt and learning to live with borderline personality disorder.
Step one in getting my career unstuck was taking Getting Unstuck in Your Memoir with Katherine E. Standefer aka Kati, who is the author of Lightning Flowers and a writer who understands the struggle of balancing life's difficult moments with the writing we need to do to chart a new course in our lives. I came away from that class with a clear idea of my book, new members to my writing support system, and the new found courage to begin submitting to contests and lit journals again. One of the outcomes of this class and Kati's encouragement was me being a finalist for the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards in nonfiction.
Step two in this great unstuck plan has been taking Greg Mania's Book Proposal Generator Workshop through The Shipman Agency. I did receive a full scholarship for this class! By the end of the workshop I will have a full book proposal to send out to the agents who have requested it as well as query others. I'm so happy with how my proposal and book are turning out.
Step three is attending the 2024 Summer Tin House Workshop. So what will I do be doing there? I'll be part of Lars Horn's workshop (my first choice!) where I'll be able to workshop a 6,000 word excerpt from my memoir, Nightmare Protocol: A Haunted Memoir. There are also craft lectures, activities with other attendees, and networking activities with editors, agents, and other publishing professionals. All of this happening in the woods of Oregon. This is essentially theater camp for writers!
I did attend the 2021 Online Winter Tin House Workshop, which was amazing, very helpful to getting a sense of how to get a book project on the road, and making connections with the amazing people in my workshop. Attending in person would allow for the full experience and to connect with people outside of my workshop.
My community! You have been extremely helpful these past six months financially and emotionally and I promise promise promise that I do not ask for this help lightly. I've been applying for jobs and for one reason or another (some out of my control, e.g. budget cuts), I have not been able to secure new employment. Don't worry, I have some shame and anxiety about it. I'll, of course, continue to apply for jobs as I continue to move forward with my staying unstuck plan.
Any amount you're willing to contribute is so greatly appreciated, and if you aren't able to contribute money at this time, a share with your friends and family would mean the world to me. My life continues to move in exciting new directions and will continue to do so with your help!
Here are the details on how the money will be used:
Tuition:$1600
Room/Board: $800
Total cost: $2400
I'm not including plane tickets at this time because I'm hoping to be able to pay for those myself.
About my writing and my book:
Victorians were fascinated by the intersection of science and the supernatural, and so am I. My work channels concepts from psychology, horror movies, and pop culture to bring these fields into conversation with parapsychology. My innovative work engages with these motifs and frameworks, blending them with personal narrative, to explore the literal ghosts that haunt us and how mainstream society turns people outside of the majority into phantoms.
Haunted memoir, a term I coined to describe the lived experience of being haunted by literal and/or metaphoric ghosts, is a subdivision of speculative memoir, which echoes how I feel in society as a homoromantic asexual nonbinary gainer (someone who derives pleasure from the act of eating or gaining weight) with borderline personality disorder: that I am a subdivision of a subdivision.
One of my strengths as a writer is my ability to synthesize academic research, combine it with personal essay and pop culture criticism, and reanimate these texts into an engrossing narrative for the general reader. My work has been called sensual, political, and praised for sending a clear message: the futures for those of us from minority populations will not be lost.
Uplifting marginalized voices is of great importance to me as further seen through my work as the co-editor of Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives (Jessica Kingsley Publishers/Hachette, 2021). My essay "My Hand on the Glass" about the movie Hereditary and my initial coming out is featured in the Los Angeles Times bestseller, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. My contribution garnered mentions in The Atlantic and Shondaland. Super exciting days when those mentions were published and honestly, just as thrilling to revisit.
My essay "Inventory of a Haunted House, No. 4" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. (Yay!)
Now for the book!
Nightmare Protocol: A Haunted Memoir is an expansion of my Hereditary essay mixed with an expanded version of my essay, "The Asylum is not a Haunted Attraction" where I explore ghosts, horror movies, and other obsessions. Primarily focused on 2018-2023, the time span of the appearance of my father's ghost after seeing Hereditary that culminates in my suicide attempt, hospitalization, and borderline diagnosis. I wonder if my father's ghost is haunting me or am I haunting him?
I'll be workshopping a chapter from the book at Tin House.
Here are links to a sample of my work that are available online:
"The Asylum in Not a Halloween Attraction" https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2023/10/30/asylum-halloween-haunted-house-attraction/ideas/essay/
"Queer Ghost Hunting in Chicago " https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2022/10/24/queer-ghost-hunting/chronicles/where-i-go/
Being in the psych ward pulls you out of time. Although unsettling at first, the separation from my day-to-day life to hospital life allowed me to determine what I wanted my life to be like once I was home. As one of my psych wards buddies said one night when we were discussing what we would do when we got home, "We almost died. We can do whatever we want." For me, this means pursuing my writing career with a focus that I've been afraid to do before. I'm building my career and my life. Attending the 2024 Summer Tin House Workshop is the next big step in my career. Your help can help me get there as well as prepare for whatever comes next.
Organizer
August Grimm
Organizer
Chicago, IL