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.
Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.
GO MIN
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
I wasn’t born here, did you know that?
I’ve never told you that before
I was born on an island nearby
Really close, only a few hours away on a boat
A matchmaker bought my brother a drink
So he told her that he had the perfect bride for her client
An exceptional swimmer
A hearty bruise-woman
For a guarantee of lifetime of income
He gave me away
My big brother sold my life for a drink
And that’s my immigration
A little immigration of my own
Just to be beaten up by the sea waves all day
And then beaten up by my loser drunk husband all night
Silence
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
What do you want to do in your next life?
In my next life
I want to drive a car
A little red one
Drive it everywhere
Go see the mountains
The big buildings
Drive it across the prairies
Take the highway
I don’t have a driver’s license
I can’t take the written test because I can’t read
But when I see someone drive a car on TV
It looks easy
I think I could do it
I think I’d be good at it
Maybe I could drive a cab
Drive people around
What do you think?
You think I’d be good at it?
Beat
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
In your next life
I hope you get to live the way you want
Silence
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.
Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for
And flew out of the stream
It was not dreaming
It had no ambition but confusion
In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun
and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl
when it’s broiled
The Titanic is the one that got away.
Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.
GO MIN
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
I wasn’t born here, did you know that?
I’ve never told you that before
I was born on an island nearby
Really close, only a few hours away on a boat
A matchmaker bought my brother a drink
So he told her that he had the perfect bride for her client
An exceptional swimmer
A hearty bruise-woman
For a guarantee of lifetime of income
He gave me away
My big brother sold my life for a drink
And that’s my immigration
A little immigration of my own
Just to be beaten up by the sea waves all day
And then beaten up by my loser drunk husband all night
Silence
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
What do you want to do in your next life?
In my next life
I want to drive a car
A little red one
Drive it everywhere
Go see the mountains
The big buildings
Drive it across the prairies
Take the highway
I don’t have a driver’s license
I can’t take the written test because I can’t read
But when I see someone drive a car on TV
It looks easy
I think I could do it
I think I’d be good at it
Maybe I could drive a cab
Drive people around
What do you think?
You think I’d be good at it?
Beat
숙자야 (Sook Ja-yah)
In your next life
I hope you get to live the way you want
Silence
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.
Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for
And flew out of the stream
It was not dreaming
It had no ambition but confusion
In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun
and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl
when it’s broiled
The Titanic is the one that got away.