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.
Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
“Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.”
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.
Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
“Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.”
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.