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A parasol for writers

During his Lannan Foundation residency, Rubén Palma wanted to take full advantage of Marfa’s mild climate. So the Danish writer worked on the patio behind the foundation’s Summer Street house, which he occupied for six weeks last summer. Outside, he could enjoy the weather as well as watch the people passing by while he worked on his novel.

“Everybody was so kind. I found it very idyllic,” said the Chilean-born author, who fled to Denmark over thirty years ago as a political refugee.

Douglas Humble, manager for Lannan’s Marfa residency program, was often among the passersby. Palma said Humble regularly stopped by just to ask, “What can I do for you, so you can work the best possible way?”

During one such courtesy call, the manager noticed Palma was having trouble working outside because the sun’s glare obscured the text on his laptop screen.

“So Douglas built a kind of parasol,” Palma said. “Three times he built it. The first attempt was blown out by the wind. And then he built another. And then another, just so I could sit outside the house and work.”

Besides impromptu parasols, Lannan provides everything its writers-in-residence need and asks nothing in return. Lannan gives writers airfare to El Paso and a rental car. Each writer lives alone in one of the foundation’s four homes during the two-week to three-month residencies. The northwest Marfa homes are fully furnished. Their kitchens are fully stocked, from dishes and an espresso machine down to olive oil, salt and pepper. Humble is on call to make their time in Marfa problem-free. And a stipend covers any incidental expenses and makes it possible for writers to take extended time away from their routine obligations.

Giving writers that uninterrupted time away is one of the chief aims of Lannan’s residency program, now in its seventh year in Marfa. By providing an all-expense-paid break from normal life, in a level of material comfort that would thrill anyone, the Santa Fe-based foundation creates what Palma calls “the optimal working conditions for a writer.”

The generous care and provisions Lannan gives writers makes the residency program unique. And it is made even more unique by its location in Marfa, an isolated but welcoming community that adds an indescribable element to each resident’s experience.

 

The foundation’s history in Marfa

With over $241 million in assets as of 2004, Lannan now gives almost $10 million a year through its literary, visual arts and indigenous communities programs. Each year, their residency program brings a dozen or so writers to Marfa. Charles Bowden wrote two books in a Lannan house. Monique Truong finished her debut novel, The Book of Salt, in one. David Foster Wallace, Laura Flanders, Rick Moody and Robert Creeley all spent time as Lannan residents in Marfa. The foundation’s interest in the town goes beyond their residency program. The library’s projection equipment and theatre director André Gregory’s week-long visit last spring were all made possible in part through Lannan funding.

“This is a philanthropic family that wants to give their money away, and this is where they want to give it,” Humble said as he described the foundation’s history in Marfa.

But the foundation used to have different philanthropic interests.

J. Patrick Lannan Sr. was primarily a patron of the visual arts, and the foundation he established in 1960 reflected this. During his lifetime, the Chicago-based entrepreneur and financier assembled an impressive collection of artwork at the Museum of the Lannan Foundation in Florida. After his passing in 1983, the foundation became a family foundation with Lannan’s son, J. Patrick Lannan Jr., as president.

In 1986 the foundation donated a significant part of its art collection to a Florida community college and relocated to Los Angeles, where Lannan Jr. then lived. The move was representative of the new direction Lannan Jr. would take the foundation, which has now gifted or auctioned most of its original art collection.

Humble explained that Lannan Jr.’s interests were more literary than his father’s. “So they started having readings in Los Angeles and started slowly changing the face of Lannan Foundation from a visual art foundation to a literary foundation,” he said.

Lannan’s Readings and Conversations series began in 1989, the same year the foundation made its first literary awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Lannan Jr.’s interest in serving indigenous populations led to another new program in 1994 that funded projects in Native American communities. Three years later, the foundation moved its headquarters to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The writers residency program started around that time in Galisteo, New Mexico, but the foundation was still looking at other locations, including Marfa. The foundation had a history in Marfa through their involvement with New York’s Dia Foundation, a major benefactor of the Chinati Foundation. Lannan Jr.’s fondness for minimalist art was also probably part of the foundation president’s attraction to Marfa.

Humble said the foundation must have been eyeing the West Texas town as a location for the residency program in 1997, since they bought their first house on Summer Street in 1998. English poet Peter Reading then spent a year in that house as Marfa’s first Lannan resident. The year-long residency was the first and only residency of its kind, since the program’s structure was still being developed. It wasn’t until 2000 that Lannan began housing all writers in Marfa.

“The program was slow in starting out and the houses weren’t always occupied,” Humble said. “The process for choosing writers needed to be worked on. And then also, I think the isolation might have put off some people.”

The selection process has since been hammered out, and the residency has garnered considerable esteem in the literary world. Humble said the four houses Lannan now has for residents are almost always occupied, and 80 writers have been selected for the program since he came to Marfa with Lannan six years ago.

Writers are selected by a literary committee composed of foundation board members and staff, as well as people outside the foundation. The committee doesn’t accept applications. Individual members suggest writers based on their own reading to the rest of the committee for consideration.

“It’s a personal process,” Humble said. “But whoever has been considered and asked to come here can be assured that they’ve been vetted by fifteen or twenty people, actively talking about their work.”

The committee looks at work by poets, novelists, essayists, translators, activists, journalists and artists. The main criterion is that the writers – whether they be from South Africa, New Zealand or the United States – write in English. Those chosen reflect a broad range of styles and genres, though science fiction, mystery and a few other genres are never considered.

“I think the choices come out of the words. The literary committee, they’re looking at the book before they’re looking at the person,” Humble said. “It’s about the literature first.”

While there are exceptions, the committee looks primarily at what Humble said could be best described as mid-range writers, who are still teaching somehow for a living.

“If they’re making a great living off their own writing and they have their own nest where they live, then why would they do this?” Humble said. “So this is really tied to how people that are asked can benefit from this – either by the isolation, being away from the spouse, their kids, the fax machine, the buddies that want to come over and have a beer. That’s what this offers.”

The committee also generally looks for writers who have published. “Somebody who’s suffered the test of sitting alone writing either a novel or a book of poems,” as Humble described. The committee sometimes selects writers who have only published a few short stories but might just need the “extra push” of a Lannan residency to finish a book.

“They’re looking to write the novel,” Humble said of such writers. “And this pushes them over the edge.”

When a writer is selected, the committee calls and offers them a choice of two weeks to three months in Marfa, the amount of time away Lannan has found most writers can and need to spend away from the rest of their lives. The offer is rarely turned down. Usually the residency is scheduled within a year, but occasionally writers will say they can’t do it right away.

“Once you’ve been asked, you’re on the list,” Humble said. “And we try to work with that person’s schedule.”

A writer’s best dream

Naomi Shihab Nye was one such writer with a tricky schedule. When Lannan contacted her two years ago to offer her a residency, the San Antonio-based poet, essayist and children’s author said she was “absolutely thrilled out of my mind.” She was even more thrilled when Lannan accommodated her busy freelancing schedule by letting her spend three weeks in Marfa that summer and another three weeks at a still-pending future date.

Unlike most Lannan residents, Nye was already very familiar with Far West Texas and had traveled to Marfa many times. But she had never seen the Lannan houses and didn’t know what to expect.

“Here I was driving out there with my quilt and coffee cup, which I didn’t need,” she said. “I didn’t realize they were so perfectly appointed, in that you could just sort of drop in from the sky with your writing and be ready to go. I mean, they have everything you needed. There were even CDs, beautiful CDs.”

“I’d taken twelve or fifteen of my favorite CDs,” she continued. “And I had called to ask should I bring my CD player. And they said no, there’s one in the house. But I’d never thought to ask, are there CDs in the house?”

“So to realize that I could get there and have everything and just be able to pack my writing and get right to work was an incredible luxury, like the best dream a writer could ever have I would say,” she said.

Nye especially appreciated the library card Lannan gives each resident. On her first visit to the Marfa library, she found an autobiography of Langston Hughes that she’d been trying to find for years. She also took advantage of the library’s collection of movies filmed in the area.

“Little touches like that made it so exquisite, because to me when you have a library card, you feel a part of the community immediately,” she said. “Oh man, it was just heaven, absolutely heaven.”

Like Nye, Rubén Palma was deeply impressed with the amenities Lannan provides each resident.

“It seems there is a conception that writers must have no comfort. I know many writers, European writers, who have been to places around Europe – in Italy, in Greece, in Ireland – and it’s always a kind of room probably designed for a monk or a priest,” he said.

But the Lannan houses “are real houses, with nice furniture, nice kitchens, wonderful beds and everything,” he said. “There is a library, stereo, TV, and all kinds of things writers also use.”

Humble said writers appreciate how exceptional Lannan’s program is compared to other colonies and residencies. They respond by working especially hard while they’re in Marfa.

“There are some residencies where you have to pay your way there, you don’t get a stipend and you don’t get a lot of privacy. So a program like this is really appreciated,” he said. “They look at the house, and they say, ‘My god, I’ve got to do a really good job with my writing because somebody thinks that I’m worth this.’”

For Palma, the drive to work hard verged on neurotic. While in Marfa, the author of The Trail We Leave worked on a novel that for years he’d rarely found the time and concentration for in Denmark.

“My obsession about working on this novel got even worse in Marfa,” he said. “Because I had the feeling, ‘If I do not work here, if I do not use this time, this wonderful time where I have these wonderful working conditions, then when will I?’”

He was motivated both by taking advantage of the ideal working conditions as well as Lannan’s lack of requirements for residents. He couldn’t believe these terms of the residency when Lannan first offered it to him.

“I said to my wife, ‘Listen, you will not believe this. It is an invitation to the United States and the conditions are so unreal that I cannot believe this,’” he said. “They pay the ticket, they pay for you being there, they pay for your car. I mean, it was too good to be real. But it was real.”

“I was looking to see if there was something I misunderstood. Maybe this foundation will demand something from me, will ask something in return,” he continued. “I’m not used to being treated so well. We don’t live in the best of all worlds, so these things are unusual.”

He recalled that when he got to El Paso and met Humble, he jokingly asked him what the catch was.

Humble said nothing is required of writers except that they work, and that work doesn’t necessarily entail writing every day.

“Sometimes people will say, ‘Geesh, these two months have been great. I was able to take a week out of that and just think or take walks,’” he said. “But that’s part of the writing process, so whatever factors into what they need to do, aside from the actual physical part of putting words on paper, that’s up to them.”

Accordingly, writers utilize their time in Marfa in different ways. During his two-month residency this fall, Linh Dinh’s frequent cycling trips around town became a part of his writing work, both as a way to relax and a way to soak in the nuances of Marfa.

“I’d take like ten bike rides a day,” said the Philadelphia poet, who was born in Saigon. “There’s no street here that’s not intriguing to me. Every house is interesting.”

Besides his ventures into Marfa, his interest in borders led him on trips to Ojinaga and Big Bend National Park. These trips in turn inspired him to write a travel essay about the area in Vietnamese, a departure from the projects he’d originally planned for the residency.

Dinh said, “Being here I felt the influences and flows of Marfa. It took over because I had to write this piece. I had to put everything aside and write this piece while the impressions were still really strong.”

A writer’s territory

Place figures prominently in Lannan residents’ experiences. However they exert their influence, Marfa and the Big Bend enhance the already exceptional program by providing both an isolated, peaceful environment to work in, as well as an inspiring landscape and intriguing community.

Dinh was engaged by the mingling of cultures along the border and the curious nexus of art, landscape, wealth and rural life in Marfa. Palma was inspired by memories of his childhood in Chile, stirred by walking on the railroad tracks or seeing rusted cars on abandoned lots in Marfa. Nye’s routines perhaps best reflect the full range of experiences offered by a Lannan residency.

She went every morning on a bike ride to the eastern edge of Marfa where she would watch the sunrise. She used every bit of the Lannan house to write during the day: the studio in the early mornings, the gravel patio outside some afternoons, the official desk, the kitchen table, the dining room table, the bed. She moved around the house so she could look at the different photographs on the walls. At night, she socialized, having friends over for drinks or dining at Maiya’s Restaurant.

She volunteered to give a creative writing workshop to Marfa teachers. She drank beer with strangers by the golf course, thinking it was a picnic her friends invited her to. She interviewed a couple of twelve-year-old girls for a book of poems, A Maze Me. She fed a neighbor’s cats when they went on a trip. She visited with Ruth Livingston, her friend’s great aunt, and wrote a poem about her which ended up being read at Livingston’s funeral.

“I think it was a visionary thing to know there are many people who would like to go be in a house, be autonomous and have privacy. And if they choose to participate in the life of the town they could but they didn’t have to,” Nye said. “I felt like I participated in daily life as well as I lived in solitude, and it was just a completely delicious combination.”

Nye recalled how Marfa inspired one of her bravest acts as a writer. While there, she tackled the sixth draft of a novel.

“I woke up one day in Marfa, took my ride to the sunrise, went back to my desk and was struck by the absolute realization that I needed to delete the first eighty-two pages of my novel, like one-third of the book,” she said. “And I really thought the clarity of the air in Marfa helped me see that. It helped me do it without fear.”

Those intangible gifts, like that clarity, are what stay with writers after their Lannan residency. Both Nye and Palma said it was incredibly difficult to return to their normal lives when they left Marfa. Nye said she felt physical pain as her son drove her into San Antonio. Palma called the trip back to Copenhagen a “landing back in hell.”

“But still, I have some of the energy, some of the vision I had in Marfa, about my life and my work,” said Palma, looking back on his experience last year.

“It gave me a lot of strength to continue being a writer,” he explained. “I had the feeling that this is the path you want, this is the path you have chosen, to be a writer. Now go ahead and do your best.”

Nye said outside of experiences with her family, the three-week residency in Marfa was the high point of her life.

“It was a tremendous gift, a gift of time and a gift of place,” she said. “To me it was like a huge nourishment. It gave me a sense of quietude and focus that I am still drawing on two years later.”

“It was right at the heart of my life as a writer,” she later added. “It gave me a renewed sense of what it is to be a writer and just a tremendous gratitude that those beautiful places, those havens, those oases exist.”

Nye remembered how she expressed that gratitude to Lannan Foundation during her residency. She sent faxes to their Santa Fe office almost every day thanking them, sharing what she was doing that day, describing how much she loved the house or the sunset she’d seen that morning.

“I was just so ecstatic,” she said. “I just felt like I wanted to express my gratitude to them, because this is not something a writer takes for granted.”

“I have often said to people, if you’re a writer, you’re going to have to claim your space,” she continued. “People don’t give you that time, you have to claim that time. You have to seize it and sometimes you have to fight for it with all the stuff that goes on in regular life. You have to stake out your territory.”

“But the Lannan Foundation has staked out the territory for us, for writers. And they say, here is your space. Here is your time. Use it. Love it.”

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