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.
Spring of 1954, my mother stood at the threshold of Henry Picotte’s abandoned chicken house, a bouquet of hens dangling in either hand, and eyed the enormous prairie rattler coiled on the dirt floor. Killing the snake would be inconvenient, hampered as she was by a midterm pregnancy and the hysterical chickens swooping left and right around their new hoe, but a weapon would not have been hard to find. Stout diamond willow sticks leaned against every gatepost on the place, anywhere a man might step off a horse. Such readiness suggested an extended family of snakes, more than she wished to dwell on with her hands full of squawking chickens. Stepping back out, she hollered for my father to bring a spade.
I have come to see family history as similar to architecture in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention. You might not even notice that it’s there. Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street—designed by Carrère & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in New York—with your nose in a book, or busy with the catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with family history. One can go about one’s life with no thought of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)
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.
“What do I want you to do? You really want to know? I’ll tell you. Just look me in the eye and tell me one thing. Just do it. Tell me whether you and Cynthia have made love. Tell me. Go on.”
“The answer is no.”
“You swear?”
“I swear.”
“I believe you,” she said quietly, and for a moment Richard thought it was over until she turned around and screamed at him, “THEN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LOVE WITH ME?”
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.
Spring of 1954, my mother stood at the threshold of Henry Picotte’s abandoned chicken house, a bouquet of hens dangling in either hand, and eyed the enormous prairie rattler coiled on the dirt floor. Killing the snake would be inconvenient, hampered as she was by a midterm pregnancy and the hysterical chickens swooping left and right around their new hoe, but a weapon would not have been hard to find. Stout diamond willow sticks leaned against every gatepost on the place, anywhere a man might step off a horse. Such readiness suggested an extended family of snakes, more than she wished to dwell on with her hands full of squawking chickens. Stepping back out, she hollered for my father to bring a spade.
I have come to see family history as similar to architecture in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention. You might not even notice that it’s there. Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street—designed by Carrère & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in New York—with your nose in a book, or busy with the catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with family history. One can go about one’s life with no thought of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)
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.
“What do I want you to do? You really want to know? I’ll tell you. Just look me in the eye and tell me one thing. Just do it. Tell me whether you and Cynthia have made love. Tell me. Go on.”
“The answer is no.”
“You swear?”
“I swear.”
“I believe you,” she said quietly, and for a moment Richard thought it was over until she turned around and screamed at him, “THEN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LOVE WITH ME?”
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.