February 11, 2010
Three RI-based writers to ‘further their work’ with prestigious MacColl Johnson Fellowships
Matthew Derby, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Christine Montross each will receive $25,000 awards; among the largest grants in the nation for artists
Three Rhode Island-based writers – recently-named recipients of prestigious MacColl Johnson Fellowships from The Rhode Island Foundation – reflect on the role the written word has played in their lives while anticipating their futures with the $25,000 fellowships in hand. Fellowship recipient and Pawtucket resident Matthew Derby notes, “I can pinpoint the moment when my writing career began… (It was in reading) a copy of Carole Maso’s The Art Lover that I really understood the full range of possibilities in narrative. It was my gateway into a new world of experimental literature that I’d always been looking for.”
Providence resident Marie Myung-Ok Lee began her writing career at a young age. “Ever since I banged out my first novel at age nine, I knew I wanted to be a writer,” the fellowship recipient explains, noting also that at age 16 she had a story published in Seventeen.
The third fellowship recipient, Providence resident Christine Montross shares how her careers as a doctor and as a writer are intertwined. “Writing and medicine enrich one another…both are fields in which one is asked to look closely at small things, and to draw larger conclusions from those observations.”
The fellowships are intended “to fund an artist’s vision or voice.” They are awarded on a three-year cycle to composers, writers, and visual artists. In addition to the three fellows, three individuals also were named as finalists in recognition of the artistic merit and strong showing of their work.
The fellowships’ namesakes, Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson, both were dedicated to the arts all their lives. Mrs. Johnson, who died in 1990, earned a degree in creative writing from Roger Williams College when she was 70. Mr. Johnson invented a new process for mixing metals in jewelry-making and then retired to become a fulltime painter.
Before he passed away in 1999, Johnson began discussions with The Rhode Island Foundation to design what has become a $1.2 million artist fellowship program in music composition, literature, and visual arts, offering among the highest no-strings awards in the nation, for Rhode Island-based artists.
Guidelines and applications for the 2010 fellowships, which will be awarded to visual artists, will be available on the Foundation’s website after June 1. Application deadline is September 1.
Fellowships will enable recipients “to further their work”
“The Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowships are among the largest offered in the United States and provide significant financial support that enables artists to further their work,” states Daniel Kertzner, grant programs officer at the Foundation who administered the selection of MacColl Johnson Fellows. “The Fellowships enable Rhode Island artists to focus more time and resources on the creative process and contribute to their professional development. They echo the value the MacColl Johnsons placed on the role of artists in the community,” Kertzner notes.
The fellows and finalists were chosen from 41 applicants by a panel of four out-of-state jurors who are recognized practicing writers, professors of writing, and a publisher. Applications were reviewed based on artistic excellence, literary development, and creative contribution to the literary field, as well as the potential of the fellowship to advance the career of emerging to mid-career artists. Writers with original compositions in fiction, poetry, spoken word poetry, playwriting, and screenwriting were eligible for the fellowships.
Matthew Derby’s work is “preoccupied with notions of power and privilege”
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| Matthew Derby | “The stories I have been writing…have been preoccupied with notions of power and privilege, and the point at which two vastly different cultures collide. I see good fiction as a vehicle to explore more deeply the issues that most trouble us at this point in history,” Derby explains, adding, “My primary goal in my writing is to explore the shrinking distance between cultures, the resulting imbalance of power, and its effects on the people who are least able to make a change.”
The fellowship will enable Derby to take a leave of absence from his work; conduct a national reading tour in spring, 2011 to generate interest in his short fiction collection and more firmly establish professional contacts; and expand his author website.
Derby, a graduate of the master of fine arts program at Brown University, is a web developer and designer by day. He has been pursuing a career in writing since the mid-1990’s. Super Flat Times, a collection of his short stories, was published by Back Bay Books in 2003.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee explores her Korean ancestry
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Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Photo © Miriam Berkley | “Coming into contact with talented writers who made their ethnic backgrounds a focus of their work inspired me to explore in my fiction what it means to be Korean and Korean American (and) meeting other Asian American writers…helped me see ethnic and Asian American literature as something relevant, that my experiences and heritage could be part of my art,” Lee says.
The fellowship will allow her to interview some of her father’s now-elderly physician colleagues about what life was like practicing small town medicine in the 60’s and 70’s and to travel to North Korea for research for her current novel, Chaos Theory.
A graduate of Brown University, Lee has published adult literary fiction since 1996, including Somebody’s Daughter. She is co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, was a MacDowell Colony fellow, served as a National Book Award judge, and received an artist fellowship in fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts in 2003.
Montross “differentiates madness from sanity”
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| Dr. Christine Montross | “As a psychiatrist, I am constantly called upon to differentiate mental illness from mental health. As a poet, I find fertile ground in this uncertain terrain. But as patients, we all expect definitive answers from our physicians. These conundrums that I face and their repercussions have set in motion a new series of poems which aim to explore the ambiguities of the human mind,” Dr. Montross states.
The fellowship will allow her to work on a new series of poems called “Lunacy and Light,” in which mental illness will be juxtaposed against the current and historical ways in which doctors have diagnosed and classified it, and to travel to Paris to continue her research into the origins of psychiatric treatment.
Dr. Montross earned a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Michigan and her M.D. from the Brown University School of Medicine. While pursuing her MFA, she was named a finalist for the National Poetry Series; while pursuing her medical degree, she wrote Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, a nonfiction book on her experience dissecting a human cadaver.
Panel names three finalists
Three applicants also were named MacColl Johnson finalists. Although they are not receiving cash awards, they are being recognized for their works’ artistic merit and strong showing in the jury process. Finalists, all Providence residents, are:
- Kelli Auerbach, a graduate of the Brown master of fine arts program, brings her background in music, dance, and art to bear on her writing. A visiting assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching has been a core component of her work as an artist.
- Kate Colby writes poems that are deeply rooted in place – particularly New England – and explore the interconnection between the personal and the historic. She has a master of fine arts in writing from the California College of Arts.
- Gillian Nehassaiu deGannes is a multi-disciplinary literary and theater artist whose work draws upon her experiences as a person of the African Diaspora and the child of immigrants. She is a graduate of both the Brown master of fine arts program and Trinity Repertory Conservatory.
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