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.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.
Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.
“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”
And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”
BLIND LOUIE: Lissen I’m a be straight up with you, Diane, I need money, as much as you can spare - now – see, I’m puttin’ my shit out heah – ‘cause I’m sick, man, real sick – I gotta go cop – I’m sorry to be like this but I can lie and say I need it for somethin’ else y’know stand here, and try and cop a plea and perpetrate a fraud. I’m not doin’ that, Diane. I’m a junkie.
I pictured in my mind the house at the bottom of the hill, a dark house I had not set foot inside for many years, a house as large and spacious as a medieval fortress, with enough square footage for at least one or two more Catholic families. It was not a cheaply built house, as my adoptive father liked to say. It did not come cheaply built. My parents are somewhat rich, but, like most Midwesterners, they are the cheapest people I have ever known. Despite their lack of financial stress, they are extravagant in their cheapness, their discount-hunting, their coupon-scissoring, their manuals on how to save. It was important, they said, to think about the catastrophic future, to always have a backup account filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think about it too much depressed me. My entire existence was infected by this cheapness, this so-called frugality. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these values of cheapness or frugality were what allowed once-orphans like myself and my now-dead adoptive brother to grow up, and to thrive even, in the comfort and security of the not cheaply built house. But there would be no more thriving for us, as one of us was dead.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.
Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.
“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”
And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”
BLIND LOUIE: Lissen I’m a be straight up with you, Diane, I need money, as much as you can spare - now – see, I’m puttin’ my shit out heah – ‘cause I’m sick, man, real sick – I gotta go cop – I’m sorry to be like this but I can lie and say I need it for somethin’ else y’know stand here, and try and cop a plea and perpetrate a fraud. I’m not doin’ that, Diane. I’m a junkie.
I pictured in my mind the house at the bottom of the hill, a dark house I had not set foot inside for many years, a house as large and spacious as a medieval fortress, with enough square footage for at least one or two more Catholic families. It was not a cheaply built house, as my adoptive father liked to say. It did not come cheaply built. My parents are somewhat rich, but, like most Midwesterners, they are the cheapest people I have ever known. Despite their lack of financial stress, they are extravagant in their cheapness, their discount-hunting, their coupon-scissoring, their manuals on how to save. It was important, they said, to think about the catastrophic future, to always have a backup account filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think about it too much depressed me. My entire existence was infected by this cheapness, this so-called frugality. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these values of cheapness or frugality were what allowed once-orphans like myself and my now-dead adoptive brother to grow up, and to thrive even, in the comfort and security of the not cheaply built house. But there would be no more thriving for us, as one of us was dead.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.