Discretion Is the Better Part of Lannan Foundation

We all missed it.

On Sept. 11, an announcement about six winners of $35,000 did not catch our attention. There was no media hype, no champagne, no gala, no news at 11.

“LOS ANGELES--The Lannan Foundation today announced the recipients of the 1990 Lannan Literary Awards celebrating literary excellence in fiction, nonfiction and poetry.”

In an era of aggressive self-promotion, a private family foundation was guarding its own privacy, plus the privacy of its lucky winners.

Such discretion is by Meghan A. Ferrill’s design. Ferrill, since 1987 the director of the Lannan Foundation’s literary program, is responsible for the selection and distribution of $450,000 annually in grants and awards.

However, Ferrill is no paper-pushing bureaucrat. She works much like the poets her program serves, intuitively following the emotions and inner voices so crucial to literary pursuits. She believes that a poet’s precarious writing life can be undermined by sudden celebrity.

So before the official announcement last week, Ferrill nervously phoned Dublin and alerted poet Seamus Heaney to watch for a $35,000 check in the mail.

“What do you want me to do?” Heaney asked Ferrill after she explained his 1990 Lannan Literary Award for poetry. “Do I have to come to L.A.?”

Ferrill understood Heaney’s anxiety. What’s the catch? Heaney was asking. Surely the Lannan Foundation wanted publicity, would exhibit its winners. Wasn’t that what corporate sponsorship was all about?

But Ferrill assured the Irish poet that he was safe from L.A.’s notorious celebrity worship.

After expressing his amazement, Heaney told her how he hoped to spend his $35,000: “I would love to use the award to secure space and silence.”

The perfect response, the kind Ferrill loves to hear.

“That’s what a writer really wants and needs,” Ferrill explained to a reporter on the eve of the announcement. “Nothing’s more valuable or more expensive than time to write.”

And that’s exactly what the Lannan Literary Awards will do for Heaney and fellow recipients John Hawkes, Barry Lopez, Carolyn Forche, Derek Mahon and Peter Reading: provide time to write what they wish in their own space and time.

This was business as usual for the philanthropic organization founded in the early 1960s by Chicago financier and former ITT Chairman J. Patrick Lannan. His passion for contemporary art and literature made him chairman of the board of the Modern Poetry Assn. Upon Lannan’s death in 1983, a substantial endowment from his estate increased the foundation’s asset base to more than $100 million. When J. Patrick Lannan Jr. relocated the foundation’s headquarters to Los Angeles in 1986, its literary philanthropy also expanded.

Today, no other literary program in the United States compares to the Lannan Foundation’s. Besides the awards program, there is a 26-volume video series of English-language writers and poets reading from their works, ranging from Allen Ginsberg to Octavio Paz. Generous funds support readings at the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Poetry/Literature Series, at the Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice, at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the poetry series sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The foundation supports San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center and provides grants for the Streetfare Journal, visual displays of poems located in public transportation systems nationwide.

It’s not just the financial commitment that sets the Lannan Foundation apart from most other literary supporters. There are no application forms to fill out. The Lannan style is low-key but personal--patronage like Renaissance artists enjoyed.

“This isn’t a clinical program,” Ferrill emphasized. “The awards aren’t clinical. The grants aren’t clinical. I’d go crazy if I thought I had to conform to some sort of system. We’re talking about people. It’s not just projects or grants or applications. It’s people. It’s creative life. And to be able to support it and nurture it is amazing.”

Admittedly ill-at-ease with the press, Ferrill sits uncomfortably behind her desk in the foundation’s Westside headquarters, a converted industrial building that also houses gallery space. (Currently on exhibition is “18 Oktober 1977” by German painter Gerhard Richter and “The Tables” by New York sculptor Tom Otterness. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free.)

An attractive 33-year-old with an infectious laugh, Ferrill would rather read a book or talk to a poet or editor than be interviewed.

“It’s an amazing experience to talk to these people,” Ferrill said of the writers she meets, “and to be in this position. Somehow, I sense that my grandfather would approve of what I’m doing.”

Ferrill describes her maternal grandfather, Lannan Sr., as “a very private person with a life apart from ours.” She remembers growing up in a Chicago home crowded with poetry books. She would read these without fully understanding but was “intrigued by the language.” After graduating from the University of Iowa with degrees in English literature and journalism, Ferrill spent a year in London on a graduate writing program sponsored by Temple University. There she met her future husband, Jan Peter Kooyman, and relocated in Amsterdam. The next three years were spent working for a Dutch publishing house and for an international film distribution company.

After her grandfather’s death, Ferrill’s uncle, Lannan Jr., reformulated the foundation with the goal of increasing its philanthropic range. He asked if she would fly to Los Angeles and discuss initiating a literary program dedicated to the encouragement of English-language writing. The foundation was already influential in the world’s art community.

(The Lannan Foundation rescued the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in Washington, D.C., after its peremptory cancellation by the J. Corcoran Gallery of Art.)

But when Ferrill arrived in Los Angeles in September, 1987, there was no literary program, no grants or awards, no guidelines. Its staff was just five employees. Upon being offered the position, Ferrill asked herself, “God, can I do this? I’ve always been a reader, but what qualifies me to run a program like this? But then, what qualifies anyone?”

Ferrill and her uncle agreed that the Lannan Foundation should not use existing program models. They would develop their own unique family style. She immediately began traveling to meet writers and editors.

Ferrill also decided there would be no grant applications for the Lannan literary program. “Literary centers and programs are so labor-intensive anyway,” she found, “and there’s just such a heavy end on the administrative side that it didn’t seem fair to ask them to fill out another laborious application.”

Daniel Halpern, editor of the literary journal Antaeus, became one of her many unofficial advisers. Ferrill soon developed a literary network stretching from California to London. But as word went out that the Lannan Foundation would be funding projects, she began receiving mounds of letters and applications. Rather than simply examine them, Ferrill traveled to the sources and personally interviewed applicants.

“The San Francisco State Poetry Center had asked for this huge grant before I got to Los Angeles,” she remembered, “so I had to go up and find out who they were. They wanted $65,000 to redo their catalogue for a distribution of only 250 copies! So we gave them a grant to develop four direct-marketing mailings to high schools, libraries, ethnic studies programs.”

Prior to Ferrill’s arrival, the Lannan Foundation had explored the videotaping of poetry readings. They began with Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. The tape was still in rough cut when Ferrill arrived, and she was horrified to discover that the commercial television crew cost the foundation $40,000 for an unfinished tape. Her literary budget of $450,000 annually wouldn’t survive long at that rate.

But then she was introduced to poet Lewis MacAdams, former director of the San Francisco State Poetry Center and currently a video director for EZTV. She had been impressed by his co-direction of the documentary “What Happened to Kerouac?”

“I’ve always felt poetry is a popular art, and the Lannans are the first to agree with me,” MacAdams explained.

MacAdams offered to tape poetry readings for a minimal fee. The project would record writers reading their own work and would include an interview. EZTV’s John Dorr and MacAdams would co-produce and co-direct. Nearly 26 volumes later, the series has become a major educational tool at high schools and universities.

Next, Ferrill met with Alan Mandell, consulting director for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, whose series of Monday night poetry and literature readings by prominent writers have become popular literary events.

“I found Meghan to be a breath of fresh air,” Mandell remembered of that initial meeting. “She has a kind of almost infectious enthusiasm for poetry and literature.”

The Lannan Foundation began endowing the LATC reading series and had a stage on which to tape major writers. Each reading was videotaped, an interview with the writer was added, and the cassettes were made available to the public for $29.95 through the San Francisco State Poetry Center.

Before initiating an awards program, Ferrill conducted an intensive yearlong dialogue with other foundation members. What kind of an award should it be? Best book of poems? Lifetime achievement? How do you conduct an equitable decision-making process?

Gradually a “nominations network” was created, composed of about a dozen professionals who serve anonymously for free. Their suggestions are fed to a seven-member committee, four of whom are Lannan board members. The final decision is left up to the committee.

“We don’t compromise,” Ferrill said of the committee’s nomination process. “There’s lots of lively discussions. We’re a compatible group.”

The six awards are divided into three prizes for English-language writers who are accomplished in their careers, and three fellowships “for lesser-known writers whose work we’ve chosen to encourage,” Ferrill said. Prize categories are poetry, fiction and nonfiction. None of the writers know they’re being considered for the awards.

“I was completely blind-sided, then embarrassed because I couldn’t find the language to express my gratitude right away,” said this year’s nonfiction award-winner Barry Lopez by telephone from his home in Oregon.

“The gift sharpened my desire, my will to work harder as a writer in terms of my social responsibilities,” he added. “It also increased my own desire to be more generous to younger writers.”

Ferrill’s most enthusiastic comments revolve around the friendships she’s managed to create through her position. For example, a recipient of one of the first literary awards was 89-year-old novelist and teacher Kay Boyle. Now residing in what Boyle terms “an active retirement village” in Mill Valley, her special award for “outstanding literary achievement” enables Boyle to complete numerous writing projects.

Ferrill visits Boyle whenever possible. “Every time I leave Kay,” Ferrill said, “I hope I can do something, contribute something in my life. She has done so much in this ongoing commitment, is so thoughtful and so intelligent.

Ferrill displays a handwritten letter from Boyle that reads in part: “I have been able to keep in touch with the dissident students in China. . . . Their appreciation to me is more important by far than if I had been awarded the Nobel Prize. It is such a wonderful thing when young people turn to very old people in understanding and gratitude, and I am glad that I have lived to see the day this miracle happened to me.”

The Chinese students of whom Boyle wrote were thanking her for sending them tapes of poetry readings recorded by the Lannan Foundation.

That’s the personal touch Ferrill’s work is all about.