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.
MERRICK
(resumptive)
So that's why I'm running. To dismantle the institutions that have enslaved us and humiliated us and conned us out of our money for far too long.
WATSON
You're running for election to the government so you can dismantle the government?
MERRICK
(no hesitation, total confidence)
Yes.
WATSON smiles pleasantly.
WATSON
Cool. Good luck.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
When he’d gone they’d kept each other’s ring. Charlotte wore his on a thread between her breasts, she was stunned to find he hadn’t died with her ring somewhere on him. Now she had them both when even one was one too many. Sometimes she put them in her mouth. She put them on her tongue, one inside the other. She bit down on them. Sometimes she smoothed the paper of the letters that he’d written like shrouds over her face as she lay still. Sometimes she tried to hear his voice. She missed his face. She longed to know what it was doing. She held his shaving brush, she tried to touch her stomach with it but she couldn’t feel a thing beyond the cold. She tried to keep the locker closed so it would hold his smell but then she longed to hide herself away inside it. She couldn’t see his face.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
Gruel, crumbs on a table
of ice, a labyrinth of snow:
and infinite distances
in the small box of the kitchen.
Mother chopped pieces
of her heart into the skillet.
Brother and I heard oil sizzle
until we huddled in shame.
She salted the meat with tears.
She cried if we ate
and cried if we refused to eat,
warning You’ll go hungry.
At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.
MERRICK
(resumptive)
So that's why I'm running. To dismantle the institutions that have enslaved us and humiliated us and conned us out of our money for far too long.
WATSON
You're running for election to the government so you can dismantle the government?
MERRICK
(no hesitation, total confidence)
Yes.
WATSON smiles pleasantly.
WATSON
Cool. Good luck.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
When he’d gone they’d kept each other’s ring. Charlotte wore his on a thread between her breasts, she was stunned to find he hadn’t died with her ring somewhere on him. Now she had them both when even one was one too many. Sometimes she put them in her mouth. She put them on her tongue, one inside the other. She bit down on them. Sometimes she smoothed the paper of the letters that he’d written like shrouds over her face as she lay still. Sometimes she tried to hear his voice. She missed his face. She longed to know what it was doing. She held his shaving brush, she tried to touch her stomach with it but she couldn’t feel a thing beyond the cold. She tried to keep the locker closed so it would hold his smell but then she longed to hide herself away inside it. She couldn’t see his face.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
Gruel, crumbs on a table
of ice, a labyrinth of snow:
and infinite distances
in the small box of the kitchen.
Mother chopped pieces
of her heart into the skillet.
Brother and I heard oil sizzle
until we huddled in shame.
She salted the meat with tears.
She cried if we ate
and cried if we refused to eat,
warning You’ll go hungry.
At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.