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.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.
The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.
VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?
GUS: I’m sure I have.
VANESSA: I see.
GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.
VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!
GUS: That’s a new one.
VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?
GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.
VANESSA: I don’t.
GUS: I’m not a racist.
VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.
Often they seem to be falling forward
but I pretend not to notice
how well they use their bodies:
the girl, that tall delicate boy,
even the father in pink satin –
ardent, flashy. Now something scares me
and I turn away.
In the dream
they walk the beach –
my children and their father –
equally exposed, ridiculous suits
in the same ice-cream colors.
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.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.
The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.
VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?
GUS: I’m sure I have.
VANESSA: I see.
GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.
VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!
GUS: That’s a new one.
VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?
GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.
VANESSA: I don’t.
GUS: I’m not a racist.
VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.
Often they seem to be falling forward
but I pretend not to notice
how well they use their bodies:
the girl, that tall delicate boy,
even the father in pink satin –
ardent, flashy. Now something scares me
and I turn away.
In the dream
they walk the beach –
my children and their father –
equally exposed, ridiculous suits
in the same ice-cream colors.
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.