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.
THERESA
I’m worried she’ll be a fish out of water.
ROBERTA
When do we meet her? When’re they movin’?
THERESA
Not now. Soon. We’ll see. They’re waiting to see if Mingjing can transfer jobs.
ROBERTA puts down her cookie.
ROBERTA
What’s her name?
THERESA
Minjung.
ROBERTA
Theresa.
THERESA sips tea.
THERESA
She’s in architecture, works for a big firm out there
ROBERTA
(indicating the under-eye skin) Those dark circles, no wonder.
THERESA
But she might give it up and teach.
ROBERTA
You seen her only once?
THERESA
Tim never said any—why would I think
ROBERTA
Such a rush.
THERESA
My brain’s exploded.
ROBERTA
I knew it: how far gone is she?
Note: A male actor plays the roles of both THERESA and her son TIM. A second male actor plays the roles of both ROBERTA and her son ROBBIE.
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
Prendergast painted the Public Garden;
remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve: massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans. Brilliant bits
- jewels? slices of sugared fruit? – bloom
into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters. His city’s essence:
all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
is capable of. Our city’s lavish paintbox.
Bristling outward
his sadism roots him deepest.
Some will hurt whomever they choose.
God-headed and radiant
but shimmering little to offer.
Don’t build your bed of crisis
or lie on the down of his ire.
Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We
were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,
thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was
Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth
an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or
was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets
together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,
such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow
from a shinbone.
THERESA
I’m worried she’ll be a fish out of water.
ROBERTA
When do we meet her? When’re they movin’?
THERESA
Not now. Soon. We’ll see. They’re waiting to see if Mingjing can transfer jobs.
ROBERTA puts down her cookie.
ROBERTA
What’s her name?
THERESA
Minjung.
ROBERTA
Theresa.
THERESA sips tea.
THERESA
She’s in architecture, works for a big firm out there
ROBERTA
(indicating the under-eye skin) Those dark circles, no wonder.
THERESA
But she might give it up and teach.
ROBERTA
You seen her only once?
THERESA
Tim never said any—why would I think
ROBERTA
Such a rush.
THERESA
My brain’s exploded.
ROBERTA
I knew it: how far gone is she?
Note: A male actor plays the roles of both THERESA and her son TIM. A second male actor plays the roles of both ROBERTA and her son ROBBIE.
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
Prendergast painted the Public Garden;
remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve: massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans. Brilliant bits
- jewels? slices of sugared fruit? – bloom
into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters. His city’s essence:
all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
is capable of. Our city’s lavish paintbox.
Bristling outward
his sadism roots him deepest.
Some will hurt whomever they choose.
God-headed and radiant
but shimmering little to offer.
Don’t build your bed of crisis
or lie on the down of his ire.
Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We
were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,
thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was
Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth
an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or
was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets
together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,
such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow
from a shinbone.