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 used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.
—Albert was down below in the trenches in Verdun, was how he started it.—Faith, he was, with rats crawling all over him and soldiers dead and dying and screaming beside him in all the smoke and the blood and the corpses piling up, but Albert came back to us alive and in one piece but not too long after he was back he happened to be walking from Powers one night and the devil appeared to him in the shape of a ten-foot pig, stepped from behind a tree on Garvey’s ditch on the hill road—
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
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.
… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.
—Albert was down below in the trenches in Verdun, was how he started it.—Faith, he was, with rats crawling all over him and soldiers dead and dying and screaming beside him in all the smoke and the blood and the corpses piling up, but Albert came back to us alive and in one piece but not too long after he was back he happened to be walking from Powers one night and the devil appeared to him in the shape of a ten-foot pig, stepped from behind a tree on Garvey’s ditch on the hill road—
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
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.