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.
We are the nothing-to-lose ones,
the try-anything-once ones,
weed seeds inside our cells –
dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –
roots sunk in, for it is the tips
that count, reaching out to tap
new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,
the stomata, those little mouths
opening, closing, sucking in air
in the evening when we boil
wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.
Like cures like, we hear in the morning
when we brush ourselves with
vegetable fiber in the shower,
beat ourselves with our fists.
(This is no crazier than anything else.)
A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.
MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name
MAC: That was a fantasy?
MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry
…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.
I love American newspapers, the way each section
is folded independently and believes it owns
the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-
national pages: the Chinese government has posted
signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.
I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say
the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces
unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although
no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter
busting inside them. I go back to the sports section
and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face
keeping all the wrong emotions in check.
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
We are the nothing-to-lose ones,
the try-anything-once ones,
weed seeds inside our cells –
dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –
roots sunk in, for it is the tips
that count, reaching out to tap
new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,
the stomata, those little mouths
opening, closing, sucking in air
in the evening when we boil
wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.
Like cures like, we hear in the morning
when we brush ourselves with
vegetable fiber in the shower,
beat ourselves with our fists.
(This is no crazier than anything else.)
A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.
MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name
MAC: That was a fantasy?
MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry
…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.
I love American newspapers, the way each section
is folded independently and believes it owns
the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-
national pages: the Chinese government has posted
signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.
I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say
the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces
unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although
no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter
busting inside them. I go back to the sports section
and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face
keeping all the wrong emotions in check.
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.