RACCd: Allyson Mitchells work is featured in Alien She, coming to Portland in 2015!
  • Allyson Mitchell
  • RACC'd: Allyson Mitchell's work is featured in Alien She, coming to Portland in 2015!

It's arts grant season, which is like Christmas for people who make things, if you had to write out a very detailed plan of attack and list of necessary funding items in exchange for a present. Does that sound terrible? It is! Writing applications for grants is hard (and sometimes thankless) work, so it's always nice to see local artists and organizations doing good work get dollars to continue doing that work. Yesterday, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) announced the recipients of a grand total of $693,959 in project funding. Here are some of the projects freshly funded by RACC that I'm most excited to see IRL in 2015:

Brenan Dwyer's Potty Talk Series 3: Potty Talk, Portland's premiere sketch comedy web series run by women, has made consistently hilarious shows over two seasons. For series three, Director/Creator Brenan Dwyer has some big plans for screening Potty Talk's sketches offline, including a public premiere at the Hollywood Theater.

Leni Zumas: Leni Zumas writes strange, beautiful, uncomfortably funny fiction, and I can't wait to read Red Clocks when she's done with it. Per her grant proposal description: "Red Clocks imagines an America where the Personhood Amendment has become federal law. Abortion is illegal and in‐ vitro fertilization treatment is so limited that most doctors refuse to perform it at all. A healer in rural Oregon is charged with the death of a woman who sought her help for infertility. She is accused not only of murder, but of witchcraft."

Tavern Books: They're getting funding for the Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry series, a new series to promote work by young women poets.

Nicole J. Georges: Nicole Georges' new book Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home sounds great. Shockingly, it's about her dog: "She was never a good dog, but she was always the best dog... I rescued her from a Kansas pound when I was just 16 years old and described her to friends as the baby I would’ve otherwise had in high school. We raised each other. I became responsible, protecting and caring for an animal unfriendly to strangers and afraid of the world."

Justin Hocking: The Graywolf Press-published writer/former director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center has a new short-story collection coming out, The Book of Wisdom and Other Stories, "[exploring] the resonance between personal, interior crises and larger environmental crises."

Pacific Northwest College of Art's "Alien She," an exhibition of Riot Grrrl-related ephemera: The riotgrrrl show we've all been waiting for, "Alien She" will examine the history of Riot Grrrl in the Pacific Northwest—its ideology and its art—and will include work from Miranda July, Faythe Levine, Allyson Mitchell, and Stephanie Syjuco.

Grants also went to Ecotrust, Siren Nation, Kaj-anne Pepper, Coho Productions, Disability Art and Culture Project, Late Night Action with Alex Falcone, Hand2Mouth Theatre, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, Portland Playhouse, and many more worthy community and individual arts projects. You can see the full list, plus project descriptions, here.