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.
All right, maybe I do. Maybe I do talk first and think later. Yes, it’s true, I admit it freely. It’s because I’m from the city. Now, you can say to me, Glory B., it’s no crime to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, to figure out how it relates to the topic being discussed, or if it does at all, or if what you’re going to say has the slightest factual basis whatsoever. I’ve got that argument down cold, because listen, words are my music. When I talk, I improvise. It’s not so much what I’m saying as how it sounds. Take jazz, all right, let’s use jazz as an analogy, parallels are always good. Now, what I mean is, what—do you think every time Bird sat down to blow he had the whole musical score right in front of him? Did he have the whole thing thought out? He did not. Well, he probably did not, I’m not entirely familiar with the man’s work, but probably, most likely he improvised is what I’m saying.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
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.)
I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
All right, maybe I do. Maybe I do talk first and think later. Yes, it’s true, I admit it freely. It’s because I’m from the city. Now, you can say to me, Glory B., it’s no crime to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, to figure out how it relates to the topic being discussed, or if it does at all, or if what you’re going to say has the slightest factual basis whatsoever. I’ve got that argument down cold, because listen, words are my music. When I talk, I improvise. It’s not so much what I’m saying as how it sounds. Take jazz, all right, let’s use jazz as an analogy, parallels are always good. Now, what I mean is, what—do you think every time Bird sat down to blow he had the whole musical score right in front of him? Did he have the whole thing thought out? He did not. Well, he probably did not, I’m not entirely familiar with the man’s work, but probably, most likely he improvised is what I’m saying.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
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.)
I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…