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.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.
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.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,
the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.
This is like that, that is like this, oh,
let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:
nothing is like anything else.
Even the parrot and the apish ape
mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.
To begin: algae, abalone, alewife —
each the spitting image of itself.
Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)
Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,
nothing is more original than a bog,
more rare than the cougar and crane —
save all the above named.
I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,
deer, the descent of man and estuaries,
flakes of snow (no two like) fire,
flax, gannets and gulls.
Honeybees and the Hoover Dam
are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.
Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,
joshua trees, lagoons and the law
that to liken a lichen is tautological.
Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds
that all of these are idiosyncracies:
the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.
Virtually nothing is extraneous here —
not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.
This is the world of plenitude and power —
every bit of it out of this world:
the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.
As now we inch toward an end — vectors
and a winter that figures to be like no other,
say the selfsame earth is to your liking,
and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,
all things like, beyond compare.
The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.
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.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,
the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.
This is like that, that is like this, oh,
let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:
nothing is like anything else.
Even the parrot and the apish ape
mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.
To begin: algae, abalone, alewife —
each the spitting image of itself.
Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)
Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,
nothing is more original than a bog,
more rare than the cougar and crane —
save all the above named.
I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,
deer, the descent of man and estuaries,
flakes of snow (no two like) fire,
flax, gannets and gulls.
Honeybees and the Hoover Dam
are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.
Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,
joshua trees, lagoons and the law
that to liken a lichen is tautological.
Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds
that all of these are idiosyncracies:
the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.
Virtually nothing is extraneous here —
not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.
This is the world of plenitude and power —
every bit of it out of this world:
the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.
As now we inch toward an end — vectors
and a winter that figures to be like no other,
say the selfsame earth is to your liking,
and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,
all things like, beyond compare.
The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.