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.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude.
KEVIN
What
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy.
KEVIN
A pale what
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
I did not know one person in Montana. I sat in the house and tried to write a novel about high school; I went for walks, drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to the radio. At night, a neighbor’s horse shifted his weight from hoof to hoof out in the trees, and sometimes cropped grass so near I could hear him chew. The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. For years in New York I had dreamed of Montana. Actually, I had also dreamed of joining the Army, going to truck-driving school in New Jersey, building a wooden sailboat, playing the great golf courses of the world, and moving to Fiji. I had examined all those ideas and then rejected them. Montana made the most sense to me.
PEACHES
If you are one of those people who come to shows just so you can cough your way through them, please take this time to unwrap your cough drops and remind your body to shut itself the fuck up. However, this is still a show that you are allowed to be a part of. If you feel like laughing, laugh. If you wanna shout, bitch, shout, we will gladly hold your mule. Talk to us if you want. This is your church. And for those of you who are quiet, obedient and unresponsive in your church, consider this yo black church, yo sanctuary, yo juke joint, yo kitchen table, yo trial shaker, yo money maker, yo elevator, yo resuscitator.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude.
KEVIN
What
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy.
KEVIN
A pale what
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
I did not know one person in Montana. I sat in the house and tried to write a novel about high school; I went for walks, drank quarts of Coors beer, listened to the radio. At night, a neighbor’s horse shifted his weight from hoof to hoof out in the trees, and sometimes cropped grass so near I could hear him chew. The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. For years in New York I had dreamed of Montana. Actually, I had also dreamed of joining the Army, going to truck-driving school in New Jersey, building a wooden sailboat, playing the great golf courses of the world, and moving to Fiji. I had examined all those ideas and then rejected them. Montana made the most sense to me.
PEACHES
If you are one of those people who come to shows just so you can cough your way through them, please take this time to unwrap your cough drops and remind your body to shut itself the fuck up. However, this is still a show that you are allowed to be a part of. If you feel like laughing, laugh. If you wanna shout, bitch, shout, we will gladly hold your mule. Talk to us if you want. This is your church. And for those of you who are quiet, obedient and unresponsive in your church, consider this yo black church, yo sanctuary, yo juke joint, yo kitchen table, yo trial shaker, yo money maker, yo elevator, yo resuscitator.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.