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 used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.
And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.
And we divorced in the survives and O
It was a comedy and first you ever slept with me
And marry me and marry me and O
How fat I used to be
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.
And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.
Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,
They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.
The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb
Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood
At a crucial joint, which anyway was out
Of square or measured wrong; then bending down
To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above
His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.
But certain afternoons, with men arrayed
Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam
In sawdust winnowing behind the blade
And catch the hammer cocked above a beam
In a still life of the legendary glamour
Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given
Long since and far away, where the poised hammer
Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.
And we divorced in the survives and O
It was a comedy and first you ever slept with me
And marry me and marry me and O
How fat I used to be
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.