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.
The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.
Bristling outward
his sadism roots him deepest.
Some will hurt whomever they choose.
God-headed and radiant
but shimmering little to offer.
Don’t build your bed of crisis
or lie on the down of his ire.
She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.
Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin
flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how
sometimes I forget you're gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world
similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.
Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're
already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was
Priam's ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.
Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.
How then, did this happen?
1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.
2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.
3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.
4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.
5. Stay
6. Alive.
The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.
Bristling outward
his sadism roots him deepest.
Some will hurt whomever they choose.
God-headed and radiant
but shimmering little to offer.
Don’t build your bed of crisis
or lie on the down of his ire.
She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.
Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin
flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how
sometimes I forget you're gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world
similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.
Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're
already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was
Priam's ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.
Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.
How then, did this happen?
1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.
2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.
3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.
4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.
5. Stay
6. Alive.