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.
“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.”
Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
Able God walked in slowly, dazed, then he stepped outside and turned to look at his neighbors, who were sitting in the narrow alley. He scanned their faces for answers, but they turned away, shifted on their low stools, and one after another, went into their rooms.
Inside, Able God paced the house, frustration coiling around his head. Had he had any doubt that the police were aware of his involvement, what he saw erased it. He looked out through the louvered window. He blundered his way manically through the chaos, tossing things aside. He pulled up the mattress, rifled through his clothes, heaped one on the other.
He noticed they had not taken his hidden wrap of marijuana, but his chess pieces were spilled all over the ground. He tried to gather them into a plastic bag, but his whole body trembled now, his eyes smarting with tears. The chess set was not meant to be scattered; the pieces were meant to be neatly arranged. How had the police known where he lived? Maybe Akudo had been arrested, but if so, why was the madam protecting her whereabouts?
…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.
You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.
You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.
People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.
But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.
You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.
Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.
“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.”
Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
Able God walked in slowly, dazed, then he stepped outside and turned to look at his neighbors, who were sitting in the narrow alley. He scanned their faces for answers, but they turned away, shifted on their low stools, and one after another, went into their rooms.
Inside, Able God paced the house, frustration coiling around his head. Had he had any doubt that the police were aware of his involvement, what he saw erased it. He looked out through the louvered window. He blundered his way manically through the chaos, tossing things aside. He pulled up the mattress, rifled through his clothes, heaped one on the other.
He noticed they had not taken his hidden wrap of marijuana, but his chess pieces were spilled all over the ground. He tried to gather them into a plastic bag, but his whole body trembled now, his eyes smarting with tears. The chess set was not meant to be scattered; the pieces were meant to be neatly arranged. How had the police known where he lived? Maybe Akudo had been arrested, but if so, why was the madam protecting her whereabouts?
…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.
You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.
You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.
People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.
But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.
You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.
Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.