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.
Whatever group of friends I told, what always fascinated people was not the boy’s dying but this image, this juxtaposition of school and cemetery, side by side, and a hill cutting them off from the ward. It was as if they thought that, away from our parents, we kids fraternized with the dead. There would often be one person who thought that I was embellishing, that I was making up these details for the benefit of a story, to create some sort of meaning. That skeptic seemed to assume that the hill—which I now knew to be just a hillock—the school, the cemetery were symbolic of something that I had overcome, something I had escaped. But the Botalaote cemetery was separated from Motalaote Lekhutile Primary School by only a narrow dirt road, and behind them the hillock cut them off from Botalaote Ward. Those were the facts.
You would like to go home. These drug runs are getting tiring. Besides, Mississippi makes you nervous. You look past your sun-darkened elbow out the window of the van at the house Rusty has sent you to. It is low, thick-looking, and made of red brick. Looks like a kiln. Stiff yuccas sprout from the bristling yard, and a dead palm tree bends against the right corner of the house. Timmy leans his sweaty face from the back, over your shoulder. “Rusty sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t he?” he says, breathing hotly on your ear.
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.
He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.
He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.
Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.
“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”
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 van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.
Whatever group of friends I told, what always fascinated people was not the boy’s dying but this image, this juxtaposition of school and cemetery, side by side, and a hill cutting them off from the ward. It was as if they thought that, away from our parents, we kids fraternized with the dead. There would often be one person who thought that I was embellishing, that I was making up these details for the benefit of a story, to create some sort of meaning. That skeptic seemed to assume that the hill—which I now knew to be just a hillock—the school, the cemetery were symbolic of something that I had overcome, something I had escaped. But the Botalaote cemetery was separated from Motalaote Lekhutile Primary School by only a narrow dirt road, and behind them the hillock cut them off from Botalaote Ward. Those were the facts.
You would like to go home. These drug runs are getting tiring. Besides, Mississippi makes you nervous. You look past your sun-darkened elbow out the window of the van at the house Rusty has sent you to. It is low, thick-looking, and made of red brick. Looks like a kiln. Stiff yuccas sprout from the bristling yard, and a dead palm tree bends against the right corner of the house. Timmy leans his sweaty face from the back, over your shoulder. “Rusty sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t he?” he says, breathing hotly on your ear.
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.
He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.
He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.
Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.
“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”
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 van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.