J-prof wins NEA grant for fiction writing

By Hannah Heimbuch
J-School Web Reporter

photo by Michelle Gomes

Professor Michael Downs works at his home office completing a collection of short stories based on the 1944 circus fire in Hartford, Conn., that killed 168 people.

E. Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham. This is part of the group that J-School Professor Michael Downs joins after receiving a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA grant is a fellowship in prose literature, one of 50 handed out this year among the more than 900 writers who applied for them.

Downs likens his success to a toss of the dice and a lucky roll, but some might say it’s more than that.

“Since I was a little kid I wanted to write made-up stories,” said Downs, who won his first writing award in second grade for “The Day the World Went Poof.” Many years later, in sixth grade, Downs decided that journalism might be his shot at making money from his words before his paychecks were posthumous.

He graduated from the University of Arizona with a double major in journalism and political science. He worked for such newspapers as The Hartford Courant, the Arizona Daily Star and the Missoulian. 

From 1995 to 1999 Downs completed his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arkansas and in 2000 became a full-time visiting professor at the University of Montana’s J-School, where he teaches sports writing, reporting and current events. Downs also teaches an online course in journalism for American Indian students through the Reznet program.

When he’s not a journalist or a professor, Downs is a fiction writer. He’s published short stories in at least eight journals across the country, including the Gettysburg Review and the Georgia Review. He is on the 11th and final story in a collection of stories he hopes to publish soon. (Parts of these stories can be found online posted on Downs’ blog, “The Greatest Show”.) After that 10-year project wraps up, Downs would like to start a novel.

In his application to the NEA, Downs described how difficult it is to switch thinking caps from journalism to fiction. He compared it to “trying to prepare for a triathlon while playing football five days a week.”

“The journalism mindset is very fast in the way it makes connections,” he said, “and fiction requires you to go much slower and go deeper.”

Downs will leave the J-School for the fall 2006 semester, giving himself the opportunity to put down the journalism mindset and start that novel – which he said will take place in Hartford, Conn., where he was born.

“What all writers want more than anything else is time,” Downs said.

Also among this year’s fellowship recipients is Debra Earling, a professor in UM’s creative writing department. In the past, Judy Blunt and Brady Udall, also of the English department, have each received a grant. Blunt received her undergraduate degree in journalism from UM in 1991.

The NEA program was established in 1965 with the aim of supporting the arts in America. The NEA started with a fund of just under $3 million, but has swelled to a 2006 budget of more than $124.4 million. The grants mostly go to support organizations and projects, but some do receive individual grants to pursue art in a manner they may not otherwise have time to. The categories are numerous, and include dance, design, media arts, museums, music, theater, traditional arts and visual arts.

In 2006, Montana writers and organizations received a total of $125,000 from NEA grants. Many of the grant programs are offered in two-year cycles (for instance prose literature and poetry alternate), which accounts for some of the year-to-year differences. In 2005, Montana received more than $750,000 from the fund, including a $594,900 endowment to the Montana Arts Council in Helena.

The NEA has a history of supporting some of the most excellent artists and artistic groups in America. Since 1990, of the 60 writers who received National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Critics Awards, 41 were also recipients of fellowship grants. All but three received the endowment sometimes long before they won a national award.

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