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.
That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails
as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of
this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know
close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.
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.
That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails
as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of
this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know
close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.
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.