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.
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
I know snow as soap opera, the comedy
of white heap shovelled into strophe
and anti-strophe for long blocks – snow
as envy, a shaken blanket making a lasting
echo over clean avenues.
At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him —i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.
Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”
“Sounds excessive.”
“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.
I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
I know snow as soap opera, the comedy
of white heap shovelled into strophe
and anti-strophe for long blocks – snow
as envy, a shaken blanket making a lasting
echo over clean avenues.
At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him —i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.
Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”
“Sounds excessive.”
“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.
I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)