Pictured above is a public performance of “The Wrong Box” at the Saranac Lake Free Library, in culmination of Sam Balzac’s 2023 Support for Artists grant. Pictured from left are Linnae D’Auria, Tyler Nye, Jen Chia, Laura Cetti, Mukta Phatak, Jason Brill and Hannah Eakin. (Provided photo — Sally Urban)

KEENE — At least two prestigious New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists grants were awarded to creators working in the North Country region this year.

The grantees are published fiction author Sara Schaff, who teaches various forms of creative writing at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and theater artist Sam Balzac, who grew up in Jay and attended Keene Central School before embarking on a professional career in the arts in New York City. The two are hard at work crafting their projects — a novel and a musical, respectivel — to present them here in the North Country before the end of the year.

Exploring the legacy of British colonialism and slavery through fiction, Schaff will use her NYSCA Support for Artists grant to work on her novel, “The Devil is a Gentleman.” Set in late Victorian England and Georgian London, the book is a work of historical fiction and a literary mystery.

The present action of the story is set primarily at Brunswick House, a country estate that has recently changed owners. The novel concerns the mysterious deaths of three recent Brunswick House governesses, as well as the constellation of lives touched by the house, its family, and England’s history of slavery in the Caribbean and colonialism in Ireland.

Schaff is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and the author of the story collections “The Invention of Love” and “Say Something Nice About Me,” a CLMP Firecracker Award finalist in fiction. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, LitHub, The Rumpus and elsewhere.

A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, she has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan and St. Lawrence University, as well as in China, Colombia and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling.

Pondering the most-pressing existential questions of our time for his part, Balzac is thrilled to be awarded a second Support for Artists Grant, having won through ALCA in 2023 in the composer compositions category for his original musical score for “The Wrong Box.” In keeping with the grant’s guidelines, which require a public presentation by the end of the calendar year for which the grants are awarded, Balzac produced a concert version of “The Wrong Box” that he and 10 other actors performed in Saranac Lake in December 2023.

“I’m pinching myself that I get to do this again,” Balzac said of winning the grant in a press release. “To get anything going as a theater writer in New York City, you really have to have your hand in a lot of different projects, and it can be hard to focus on the stuff that’s riskier or solo-driven. Getting these grants has been a game changer in being able to dedicate time to projects I just would never have been able to prioritize.”

Balzac is fresh off of one of those other projects, a musical adaptation of TV actress Felicia Day’s landmark web series “The Guild,” which was recently performed live at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles and internationally streamed for one week only. Balzac, who is writing lyrics for the musical, also performed in the reading alongside Day, Kirsten Vangsness of Criminal Minds, Phil LaMarr, and other celebrities he’d seen on his TV screen and YouTube while growing up.

“It was a truly surreal experience,” Balzac said, who is hoping his creative juices from working on “The Guild” will spill over into his work on this year’s grant project, Existential Questions of the 21st Century, for which he must complete the libretto.

“I’ve been working on this project for years, and the songs in it have gotten a lot of positive feedback,” Balzac said. “But I’ve just never cracked the book. So watching our book writer Allison Frasca in action for The Guild, and being part of the storyboarding process with her and Felicia and the rest of our team, it’s really inspired me in terms of how to pack scenes with jokes and how to be really concise with storytelling. I’m really, really hoping a little of that is carrying over into the work I’m doing by myself.”

As part of his Support for Artists Grant in 2023, Balzac self-produced a free reading of “The Wrong Box “with a mix of North Country- and New York City-based performers at the Saranac Lake Free Library with the aid of Pendragon Theatre. This year, he’s hoping to do something similar, but with a radical twist.

“Existential Questions, which is an absurdist show and deals a lot with misanthropy, was really conceived out of a feeling of hopelessness about the planet and climate change,” he said. “And I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how art and activism interact, so what I’d like to do is find a way to use the show to get people more involved in an active way in saving our planet.”

Balzac envisions this as a panel-style talkback after the reading with representatives from different environmentally-focused organizations that are active locally.

Producing a reading like this requires additional funding that is beyond the scope of the grant, Balzac said, which is intended to fund the creation of the work itself and doesn’t cover theatrical production costs.

Balzac is currently raising money on Indiegogo and welcomes support in any amount. Interested parties can contribute at bit.ly/ExistentialQs.