I submitted my very first grant application yesterday. Yay me! Actually, yay us! Because it's for a film project that I'm working on with one of my herland comrades. And I've decided on my first grant writing ground rule: Don't look the grant over right away after you've sent it; give yourself at least a day to bask in the glory of completion before you start noticing the things that you wish you'd done differently.

Next rule: Always expect the unexpected. Not original, granted, but my mother says that you can expect one catastrophe per grant. Well, we had ours in terms of a technical glitch with our Project Description (only the most important document in the application), which resulted in only having half an hour to revise it instead of the entire evening that I had set aside. Not that the important information isn't there, not that it lacks passion or poetry, but we meander in and out of third person and as a text editor that drives me crazy (and it's a little embarrassing to find in my own work).

Another thing that I wish we'd done differently: explained our project title. See, we came up with this cool title of Kwe Jibon. Kwe is an Anishinaabemowin word that means women and reflects part of my cultural background. Jibon is a Bengali word that means life (as in life force or spirit, not the prosaic day-to-day living) and reflects part of Ranjene's cultural background. So the combination loosely means The Spirit of Women, which we chose because it's about celebrating the lives of these particular women, rather than dwelling on the way they died. The film will have a different title, but that will be informed by the results of our research, since this is a documentary and documentaries are, by their very nature, evolutionary processes. This particular omission is not crucial, since our cultural backgrounds are irrelevant for an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant, but I can't help but think there might be a few jurors scratching their heads about why we've got this strange phrase all over our grant application.

And I kind of wish that we'd included a Table of Contents for our Supporting Documents. Being emerging filmmakers writing our first grant, we wanted to be thorough and in addition to our reference letters and demo reels, we had a couple of samples of ways that we had organized previous projects, various promotional information about our screenings along with some of our initial research for this project and some documentation to support our budget figures. With that much information covering such a wide range of topics, I realized as I looked over it that it might have been helpful to have provided a table of contents.

But still, we've accomplished the completion of our very first grant! Now for the waiting…