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.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.
Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We
were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,
thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was
Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth
an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or
was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets
together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,
such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow
from a shinbone.
We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.
We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait.
“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?”
I did not know one person in Montana. I sat in the house and tried to write a novel about high school; I went for walks, drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to the radio. At night, a neighbor’s horse shifted his weight from hoof to hoof out in the trees, and sometimes cropped grass so near I could hear him chew. The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. For years in New York I had dreamed of Montana. Actually, I had also dreamed of joining the Army, going to truck-driving school in New Jersey, building a wooden sailboat, playing the great golf courses of the world, and moving to Fiji. I had examined all those ideas and then rejected them. Montana made the most sense to me.
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.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.
Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We
were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,
thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was
Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth
an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or
was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets
together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,
such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow
from a shinbone.
We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.
We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait.
“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?”
I did not know one person in Montana. I sat in the house and tried to write a novel about high school; I went for walks, drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to the radio. At night, a neighbor’s horse shifted his weight from hoof to hoof out in the trees, and sometimes cropped grass so near I could hear him chew. The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. For years in New York I had dreamed of Montana. Actually, I had also dreamed of joining the Army, going to truck-driving school in New Jersey, building a wooden sailboat, playing the great golf courses of the world, and moving to Fiji. I had examined all those ideas and then rejected them. Montana made the most sense to me.
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.