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.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on up to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church.
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?”
It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.
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.
I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked, I whistled the answer while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on up to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church.
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?”
It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.
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.
I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked, I whistled the answer while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house.