Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”
“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”
“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”
I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”
Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”
At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.
Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class.
Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”
“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”
“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”
I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”
Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”
At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.
Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class.
Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.