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.
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
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 was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
I saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me
through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands
were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,
to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,
the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,
administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened
like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me
or away. As if he’d come through wind,
his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain
inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,
the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls
smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then
a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.
And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on
is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,
once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one
with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath
I felt the other hovering.
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
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 was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
I saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me
through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands
were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,
to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,
the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,
administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened
like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me
or away. As if he’d come through wind,
his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain
inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,
the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls
smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then
a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.
And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on
is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,
once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one
with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath
I felt the other hovering.
The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.