A Bailout for Me and My Unemployed Friends

My girlfriend works in the newspaper industry and goes to work everyday wondering whether she will be laid off. People are fired every week, and it is not a question of if so much as when it will happen to her. That's not necessarily a bad thing because she doesn't much like her job, and doing this seems way cooler anyway. The writer is thinking mainly about journalists as the recipients of these grants, but as he noted the original New Deal program was stuffed with bigtime novelists. Finally a jobs program for underemployed MFA graduate students! In fact, I'm working on a project--poetry about remythologizing the American landscape (more later)--that seems at least pitchable to this sort of program. And some of the money could be recouped by selling hard copies of the work (kind of like the 9/11 Commission Report except less morbid).