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.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
We don’t have the remotest idea of what we might find or do there, but America—Canada in our minds is automatically subsumed under that category—has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold, the goose that laid the golden egg. There is also that book about Canada from the war. And, my father reminds my mother, whose impulses really draw her toward Israel, in Canada there is no war, and there never will be. Canada is the land of peace. In Israel, there’s a constant danger of war, and they take even girls into the army. Does she want her daughters to end up on a battlefield? Does she herself want to go through a war again?
Daddy was often eager to play catch, since he felt society expected this from a loving, caring father. A confidence that soared and a glovehand that fell, still there was no baseball near either. Duplicity has killed more black men than gin. In a southpaw, what they appreciate most is this sort of "live arm." From his mouth words rushed like richly fed rapids, leaving him ever vulnerable to ascription.
NAT TURNER
What do you mean by your copyright?
The right to copy?
THOMAS R. GRAY
Yes, well, the right to publish and distribute, which involves copying necessarily.
NAT
And who can grant such a right?
THOMAS
The copyright office, naturally.
NAT
...
THOMAS
It protects the rights of the man who has done the work.
NAT
And is God not a sufficient witness of our works?
THOMAS
Uh,
No.
“Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.”
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
We don’t have the remotest idea of what we might find or do there, but America—Canada in our minds is automatically subsumed under that category—has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold, the goose that laid the golden egg. There is also that book about Canada from the war. And, my father reminds my mother, whose impulses really draw her toward Israel, in Canada there is no war, and there never will be. Canada is the land of peace. In Israel, there’s a constant danger of war, and they take even girls into the army. Does she want her daughters to end up on a battlefield? Does she herself want to go through a war again?
Daddy was often eager to play catch, since he felt society expected this from a loving, caring father. A confidence that soared and a glovehand that fell, still there was no baseball near either. Duplicity has killed more black men than gin. In a southpaw, what they appreciate most is this sort of "live arm." From his mouth words rushed like richly fed rapids, leaving him ever vulnerable to ascription.
NAT TURNER
What do you mean by your copyright?
The right to copy?
THOMAS R. GRAY
Yes, well, the right to publish and distribute, which involves copying necessarily.
NAT
And who can grant such a right?
THOMAS
The copyright office, naturally.
NAT
...
THOMAS
It protects the rights of the man who has done the work.
NAT
And is God not a sufficient witness of our works?
THOMAS
Uh,
No.
“Then in the second half of the show,” my father recalled, “MacKnight would hypnotize subjects who came up from the audience, and he’d get them to do all kinds of things, and some of them I think he really did hypnotize but others would sort of fake it. He had people who traveled along with him, and I was one of them. I was supposed to sit in the audience and then come up onstage. And the audience must have known very well that I was a phony, because I had just done my magic act in the first part of the evening! But then I went out and sat in the audience, and he said, Will any volunteers come up, and up I would jump along with someone else. Of course, I was supposed to be hypnotized, but I never was. I wanted to be. I thought, Gee, I mustn’t fake this, because it was supposed to be for real, but he could never get me to be really hypnotized, so I always did have to fake it.”
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.