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.
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.
The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”
I’m sure you won’t believe this,
but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:
What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?
Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.
I’m sweating even as I tell you this.
I’m not cool.
I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,
I’m a small American frog.
I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.
I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.
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.
The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”
I’m sure you won’t believe this,
but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:
What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?
Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.
I’m sweating even as I tell you this.
I’m not cool.
I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,
I’m a small American frog.
I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.
I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.