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.
…one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude’s and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus.
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.
The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”
“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”
“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”
…one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude’s and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus.
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.
The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”
“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”
“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”