2 from Seattle win $500,000 "genius grants"

A few days ago, two Seattleites — James Longley, a documentary filmmaker, and Heather McHugh, a poet — received the kind of phone call that changes a life.

They each had just been awarded $500,000. No strings attached; do whatever you want with the money.

It's time for the annual "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Seattle did pretty well, with two of the 24 awards this year.

The winners' names are kept secret until they receive the surprise phone call.

As always when the calls are made, the lucky recipients were asked to take the phone where they could be alone, to take the call while sitting, and, if they happened to be holding a baby, to put the baby down.

"This is a very special moment, and one has to be careful," said Dan Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, from his Chicago office.

For sure, it's better not to be holding a baby when being surprised by a $500,000 gift.

Something else that the foundation does is actually make sure that the winners can be reached by phone.

Geniuses are not exactly 9-to-5 office types.

Longley, Socolow believes, recently arrived in India to work on a documentary about women in the poorest areas of New Delhi who become surrogate mothers. The foundation figured out how to reach Longley before he left Seattle.

Neither Longley nor McHugh could be contacted Monday by cellphone, although McHugh finally responded by e-mail Monday night.

"I don't do phones," she wrote back. "Feel free to e-mail."

There was no response from McHugh to a further e-mail sent her as deadline neared.

Socolow said she may be in Canada, "working in a room, working on her poetry."

To contact the poet, Socolow said, he e-mailed her asking for a call back, and it "wasn't right away" that McHugh called and he could tell her she'd won the grant.

"I don't think she's online that much," Socolow said. "This is a poet, to her credit."

Both Longley and McHugh have well-established credentials in their fields.

2 Oscar nominations

Longley, 37, has gone to the world's hot spots to make his films.

He was nominated for a 2007 Oscar for his documentary "Iraq in Fragments," which offers intimate portraits of Iraq after the American invasion through the eyes of locals. In 2008, he again was nominated for an Oscar for a short documentary about an Iraqi woman and her 10-year-old son who was dying of AIDS.

"I like to know what's going on in the world and to form my opinions based on direct experience," he told The Times in an e-mail in June. At the time, Longley was in the middle of protests in Tehran after the disputed Iranian elections.

Longley wasn't harmed in the protests, he said, but his translator was sprayed in the face with pepper spray, punched, kicked in the groin and beaten across the back with a truncheon.

Longley studied film and Russian in college, and he worked as a film projectionist, an English teacher in Siberia, a newspaper copy editor in Moscow and a Web designer.

For "Iraq in Fragments," Longley told on the film's Web site about one of his documentary's subjects — an 11-year-old boy who worked as an auto mechanic.

"Mohammed's was a very common story in Iraq, a country which had suffered decades of foolish wars, despotism and suffocating economic sanctions that weakened the social infrastructure," Longley wrote.

"Mohammed Haithem had a sort of Dickensian quality that I thought perfectly matched the Best/Worst of Times feeling in postwar Baghdad. ... Every morning for months on end I would drive out to the shop where Mohammed worked and [I] waited around for hours, gradually becoming part of the furniture until nobody paid attention to me and my camera."

UW writer-in-residence

McHugh, 61, already has had plenty of accolades in her life, among them being a National Book Award finalist and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She is on the University of Washington faculty as the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program of the English Department.

That certainly is a mouthful; McHugh herself is described as being quite unpretentious.

A 2000 Seattle Times story said she refuses to carry business cards proclaiming herself poet and professor.

McHugh grew up in rural Virginia in a family that loved the arts. She is the middle child of a marine biologist and a stay-at-home mom. At age 5, she assembled her first poetry book, with cardboard cover and ribbon binding.

She entered Harvard at age 16, and by age 18 had seen one of her poems published in The New Yorker magazine, an accomplishment for anybody at any age.

McHugh said she believes "wondrousness" is available to everybody, not just poets.

"In the middle of an ordinary day, wrench yourself out of the dead language and back into the language where you can never repeat anything!" she told The Times. "That state of mind is hard, partly because the Wal-marts recur and McDonald's recur. So, the thing is, find the one French fry like no other and really enjoy it."

The Times' story said McHugh actually likes hanging out at McDonald's, where "they let you have a booth, and they leave you alone." For every couplet she wrote, she said, she rewarded herself with a French fry.

Genius-grant recipients receive quarterly payments of $25,000, with the first payment on Jan. 1. They have to pay taxes on the money.

This year's recipients range in age from 32 to 69. In the 29 years of the awards, recipients have been as young as 18 and as old as 83.

So far, 805 people have received the award.

The 2009 winners also include a papermaker, a painter, a computer vision technologist, a mathematician, a molecular biologist and a short-story writer. The UW Creative Writing Program has had three previous MacArthur Fellows, with UW having a total of 12 winners.

The selection of winners is done "anonymously and confidentially," Socolow said, by people asked to be nominators, evaluators and selection committee members.

The foundation has about 1,000 "active" individuals considered "worthy of attention," said Socolow, and evaluations can take a year or more.

The foundation does not ask for any kind of accounting of how recipients use their $500,000.

So no questions about a recipient deciding to spend the money in the sandy beaches of the South Seas?

No, Socolow said.

"There might be a reason why they went to the South Seas," he said. "Maybe it was to advance their painting."

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com