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.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
A man and a woman
are lying together
listening to news of a war.
The radio dial
is the only light in the room.
Casualties are read out.
He thinks, “Those are people
I no longer have to love,”
and he touches her hair
and calls her name
but it sounds strange to her
like a stone left over
from a house already built.
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
A man and a woman
are lying together
listening to news of a war.
The radio dial
is the only light in the room.
Casualties are read out.
He thinks, “Those are people
I no longer have to love,”
and he touches her hair
and calls her name
but it sounds strange to her
like a stone left over
from a house already built.
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.