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.
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.
UPBRINGING
In an alternate version of this story
I grow up in Denver, Colorado, fenced in
by calcareous mountains and thread-thin air. Who might
I have become had we driven eighteen hours overnight to flee
the Red Zone, Chiron lighting the sky, Detroit’s bass chasing behind?
I imagine Denver homes are large. Ivy clings to the wall
like sap. I imagine I could have walked to school unguarded, no knife
pressed to my ankle in fresh Js my mama wouldn’t buy in the City.
Once the factories stripped the grass of its green, she was willing to leave
her mama on Jane Street and my aunties scattered from Cadieux to Van Dyke.
A diamond band convinced her to stay, but she models
what could still become of me: slips and stockings,
subdivisions, propriety. I could have run when I had the chance
but I’m a daughter of the East Side, that old girl set in her ways.
I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos
across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.
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.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
The bowhead whale lives for centuries and could potentially grow forever. Researchers say their spines don’t set, so even at two hundred years of age they might still grow. Yesterday, through a dear friend, a complete stranger gifted me a whale vertebra that might be from the eternally possible spine of a bowhead whale.
What a heavy piece of oracle. Yes. Honor the bowhead whale whose large proportion of body fat keeps them warm enough in the Arctic to outlive the various weapons used to kill them over time. I have said it before, I will say it again, fat is a winning strategy. New research suggests that young bowhead whales may even take nutrients from their bones, to further grow their baleen (the food filters in their mouths) in order to be able to eat more krill, grow more fat, live more better. Evolutionary geniuses.
My own backbone has been teaching me something too. My pediatricians diagnosed me with scoliosis as a school-aged child, and we may never know if I was born this gorgeously crooked or if the early weight of heavy books caused a shift in how I would carry myself through this life. What we do know? The books certainly were heavy and I haven’t yet put them down. And also I walk, sit, and move in the world in a way that overstretches part of me, compresses the other side.
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.
UPBRINGING
In an alternate version of this story
I grow up in Denver, Colorado, fenced in
by calcareous mountains and thread-thin air. Who might
I have become had we driven eighteen hours overnight to flee
the Red Zone, Chiron lighting the sky, Detroit’s bass chasing behind?
I imagine Denver homes are large. Ivy clings to the wall
like sap. I imagine I could have walked to school unguarded, no knife
pressed to my ankle in fresh Js my mama wouldn’t buy in the City.
Once the factories stripped the grass of its green, she was willing to leave
her mama on Jane Street and my aunties scattered from Cadieux to Van Dyke.
A diamond band convinced her to stay, but she models
what could still become of me: slips and stockings,
subdivisions, propriety. I could have run when I had the chance
but I’m a daughter of the East Side, that old girl set in her ways.
I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos
across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.
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.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
The bowhead whale lives for centuries and could potentially grow forever. Researchers say their spines don’t set, so even at two hundred years of age they might still grow. Yesterday, through a dear friend, a complete stranger gifted me a whale vertebra that might be from the eternally possible spine of a bowhead whale.
What a heavy piece of oracle. Yes. Honor the bowhead whale whose large proportion of body fat keeps them warm enough in the Arctic to outlive the various weapons used to kill them over time. I have said it before, I will say it again, fat is a winning strategy. New research suggests that young bowhead whales may even take nutrients from their bones, to further grow their baleen (the food filters in their mouths) in order to be able to eat more krill, grow more fat, live more better. Evolutionary geniuses.
My own backbone has been teaching me something too. My pediatricians diagnosed me with scoliosis as a school-aged child, and we may never know if I was born this gorgeously crooked or if the early weight of heavy books caused a shift in how I would carry myself through this life. What we do know? The books certainly were heavy and I haven’t yet put them down. And also I walk, sit, and move in the world in a way that overstretches part of me, compresses the other side.