ABOUT ADRIAN SHIRK
I’m Adrian Shirk; I’m an author, literary agent, teacher, and theater artist living in the northwest Catskills on a piece of land I once grandiosely named The Mutual Aid Society. I’m the author of two books from Counterpoint Press — And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, a hybrid memoir about American women prophets and mystics, and Heaven is a Place on Earth, a personal odyssey through utopian experiments in America. I work 1:1 with writers and artists at all stages of their careers, and I represent select projects at Driftless Literary. For the past decade I’ve served as faculty in Pratt Institute’s Writing Department where I’ve advised and mentored hundreds of emerging writers and artists.
All of this has given me a working knowledge of what’s out there, the various barriers to access, and that just about anything is possible, that there’s a strategy for it — if you know where to look, if you’re willing to look somewhere you wouldn’t have thought to, and if you keep your relationship to your work nimble, free and alive.
I had the good fortune to come up in Portland, Oregon’s DIY literary and punk scenes at the turn of the century, so my understanding of publishing or art-making in public was relational before it was commercial — zines, small presses, open mics, indie labels, alt distros, friendships, friends of friends, frenemies-to-lovers, generous elders, etc. It shaped how I think about the arts ecosystem: not as a competition for prestige with a few slots at the top, but as an enormous and mostly unmapped terrain full of resources (places, materials, funds, infrastructures etc) and people that are already there, that we are making our way toward, whether we know it yet or not. The Catalog is the memory palace I’ve been building for twenty years, opened up and offered outward, twice a month.
THE WHOLE UTOPIANOTES CATALOG
A twice-monthly curated opportunities list for artists, writers, and fellow travelers of uncategorizable vocations — the largest and most tenderly compiled round-up I know of on the internet of grants, fellowships, free residencies, calls for submission, open reading periods, jobs, gigs, and tools for professional development, referral, and connection.
The name is a nod to two things: the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, with its belief that access to tools is access to power, and also a term I coined in Heaven is a Place on Earth — utopianotes (n.): an ongoing, participatory record of things that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t have been able to happen or exist, but did anyway. There are more than we will ever know. So the ethic of the Catalog is: Here are a whole bunch of things that exist. Do not believe the lies. Do not give way to evil. There is something here for you. There is more than enough for everyone.
INDIVIDUAL PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS
The Catalog is a public resource. Like all public media, a paid subscription sustains its continuation, covers the hours of my labor and keeps it accessible.
Paid subscribers receive:
A humungous monthly opportunities list
A mid-month Extra! Extra! edition of additional opportunities
One free 30-minute consultation per year (annual subscription) — bring me an application you’re working on, a funding question, a project in need of a strategy
One free 60-minute consultation per year (VIP subscription) — open to the above, as well as any writing, manuscript development, publishing, or professional development question
Access to exclusive chats, live tutorials and AMAs, as they come
The consultation is valuable! I’m a literary agent, a published author, and a former decade-long faculty member with a fairly comprehensive and somewhat obsessive knowledge of what’s out there and how to get to it. I’ve spent years helping people find their way into things they didn’t think were available to them. Half an hour tends to reframe the landscape considerably.
Looking for support on a specific project, application, or publishing question? Email me here to book a consultation.
INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS
Academic programs, departments, and arts organizations: if you want your students, alumni, or organizational members to have access to the full Catalog, let’s talk. Institutional subscriptions include everything in the individual paid tier at a cut rate, plus:
A monthly Internships & Academic Fellowships list
