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.
A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!
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.
Annalee is sorting through a box of seed packets. She has a swollen lip; her boyfriend punched her this morning because she had run out of bacon. She walks over to Wynn’s truck and inspects her lips in the sideview mirror. “It’s really strange to have somebody hit you,” she says. “When I was in high school, a boy hit me once and I remember thinking, If he hits me again I’m going to kill him. Then he hit me again and I didn’t do anything.”
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)
but we are still at sea we climbed into the rocking
boat again the things that we could not afford
to remember in the vernacular
sun
sinking backwards into the world’s
light industry Eros in idle hands
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.
A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!
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.
Annalee is sorting through a box of seed packets. She has a swollen lip; her boyfriend punched her this morning because she had run out of bacon. She walks over to Wynn’s truck and inspects her lips in the sideview mirror. “It’s really strange to have somebody hit you,” she says. “When I was in high school, a boy hit me once and I remember thinking, If he hits me again I’m going to kill him. Then he hit me again and I didn’t do anything.”
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)
but we are still at sea we climbed into the rocking
boat again the things that we could not afford
to remember in the vernacular
sun
sinking backwards into the world’s
light industry Eros in idle hands
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.