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.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
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.
BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?
ADHAM: Let’s not get political.
BEDER: Who’s getting political?
MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name
MAC: That was a fantasy?
MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry
Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.
Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.
How then, did this happen?
Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
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.
BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?
ADHAM: Let’s not get political.
BEDER: Who’s getting political?
MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name
MAC: That was a fantasy?
MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry
Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.
Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.
How then, did this happen?
Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers.