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 feel I could eat women.
Driving alone, I’m hungry,
hawking bus stops and sidewalks.
Eyeballs grinding, I harden.
My mind, a bulging ice box.
My computer, a deep freeze.
The bingeing grows out of hand –
my wastebasket coughing up
the napkins hiding the bones.
It happened inside a single room.
For me. Forgive me
If you feel with this assertion I diminish you
Or the integrity of your story.
But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,
On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—
Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—
Counting the tiny holes
In the radiator cover, dark eyes
Piercing through painted-white metal.
When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.
Not even other nothings, like me.
Do you think I take from you?
I do not take from you, I am you.
It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.
Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.
“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.
“Hush up, Jeannie.”
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.
CHOTON
I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…
He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.
…if that’s a penis then…
He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.
I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.
RAHEEM
Okay.
CHOTON
It’s a little nunu.
RAHEEM
Well I like your little nunu…
RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.
CHOTON
Ow. Careful.
RAHEEM
What?
CHOTON
No it’s— it’s just sensitive.
I feel I could eat women.
Driving alone, I’m hungry,
hawking bus stops and sidewalks.
Eyeballs grinding, I harden.
My mind, a bulging ice box.
My computer, a deep freeze.
The bingeing grows out of hand –
my wastebasket coughing up
the napkins hiding the bones.
It happened inside a single room.
For me. Forgive me
If you feel with this assertion I diminish you
Or the integrity of your story.
But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,
On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—
Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—
Counting the tiny holes
In the radiator cover, dark eyes
Piercing through painted-white metal.
When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.
Not even other nothings, like me.
Do you think I take from you?
I do not take from you, I am you.
It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.
Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.
“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.
“Hush up, Jeannie.”
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.
CHOTON
I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…
He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.
…if that’s a penis then…
He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.
I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.
RAHEEM
Okay.
CHOTON
It’s a little nunu.
RAHEEM
Well I like your little nunu…
RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.
CHOTON
Ow. Careful.
RAHEEM
What?
CHOTON
No it’s— it’s just sensitive.