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.
“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.
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.)
And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.
Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes
falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,
that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.
From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.
“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.
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.)
And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.
Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes
falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,
that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.
From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.