6
Introduction by Mary Karr
Receiving the Whiting marked the beginning of my career like a star decal on a map. Before it, I was wandering through a black landscape, scraping and bowing and lunging and clutching at any wisp of literary opportunity. I submitted my lady’s verses by the sheaf. I wrote reviews and essays for little mags. I spent more on postage and entrance fees in a year than I’d raked in from my writing over more than a decade, for I’d been doing all this since I was about twenty and dumb as milk. The call came when I was thirty-four and feeding my three-yearold lunch and getting ready to grade about a hundred essays—a task more fun than writing about the economy for business dudes but not exactly a poet’s dream. The voice was warm but patrician: “This is Robert Pennoyer from the Whiting Foundation.” I said, “Oh fuck you, George,” and hung up. A friend and I had been prank-calling each other from the Nobel and MacArthur committees, and he’d started to bore me with it. When the phone rang again, I picked it up and said nothing. A secretary gave me a 212 number to call back, and when the patrician voice came back on the line and I said, I am so sorry, I could hear laughter coming at me from a speaker phone. Somebody was giving the likes of me big beans—a grant I hadn’t even applied for! Manna from heaven. The year before, my teaching income for four sections of comp and a poetry class at three universities in the academic ghetto around Boston was about $9,000, plus another ten or so, business writing. I woke at five to work on a novel, juggled a baby and husband, and slept in a fitful drowning state I often woke up from screaming. After we hung up, I grabbed my son and squeezed his body to mine and shouted, We won a prize! We went skipping through our small rental, hollering.
