Baby won a Whiting!

I woke early on a September morning with an achingly full bladder. I fully intended to return to bed after I peed, but while I did that, I checked my phone. That’s when I saw the email “Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant - Congratulations!” and literally fell off the toilet. I must have bellowed like a wounded animal because my partner startled awake in the next room. “What’s wrong?” he yelled, already pulling on clothes, readying himself for the emergency.

Every year, the New York-based Whiting Foundation awards $40,000 to up to 10 nonfiction writers “in the process of completing a book-length work of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction for a general adult readership.” The grant is “intended for multiyear book projects requiring large amounts of deep and focused research, thinking, and writing at a crucial point mid-process, after significant work has been accomplished but when an extra infusion of support can make a difference in the ultimate shape and quality of the work.”

Any nonfiction writer with a book under contract with an American, Canadian or UK publisher can apply. This includes indie and academic presses. The Foundation doesn’t publish statistics on how many applications it receives each year but I imagine it’s in the hundreds — maybe thousands? Past grantees have included Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Andrea Elliot’s Invisible Child, Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty, Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves, Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife, and Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing.

I very nearly didn’t apply. Who would see that list of luminaries and think “yeah, I belong there”? But both my editor and agent sent me gentle nudges to do it. So, mostly to make them happy, I did.

It’s no exaggeration to say the award feels life-changing. Financially for sure—roughly a full year’s salary just to work on this book. What a dream—what a dream. But the validation is almost as valuable to me. I’ve written before about the many rejections this book received from publishers. How it almost didn’t exist at all. How it definitely wouldn’t exist if not for the small voice inside me that insisted I keep going, that this book deserved to live, that — to misquote Rilke — no rejection is final.

Until the Whiting, it felt like the only people who cared about this book and its coming into being were me and my editor. That was fine, great even—a lot of writers don’t even have an editor on their side. But now I know the Whiting committee also saw value in this book. I still have no idea how many people were on that committee or who they are (like the best angels, they remain anonymous). But they care about this work, they’re invested in the work, they’re investing in the work. And that is a tremendous gift all on its own.

The strangest thing about winning things is that it emboldens you, makes you believe you can more easily succeed at other things. It’s logical to believe that: everyone wants to publish / support / award / see Percival Everett, now that he’s won every award there is. Who wants to do that for a little-known writer from Denver? But now I’m starting to think: Well I won that award, so maybe [new institution X] might also take a chance me. Now, I’ll surely apply to more things, which means I might actually win more things. I’ll take more risks in my writing, which means some of those risks might pay off.

Rejection is a constant in a writer’s life. Within weeks of hearing about the Whiting, I was rejected from two residencies. (Form rejections too, the worst.) But more and more I’m starting to see how this all works. The more wins I accumulate, the more wins I will accumulate. It’s a strange, mercenary logic but the arts is not exempt from such forces.

I hate to be all inspirational-speaker but I think the occasion warrants it. I need to tell you (and myself) to be ambitious goddamit! I’d always considered myself an ambitious person. But in realizing how I very nearly didn’t apply for this thing that’s already transforming my life, I see that I’d kept my dreams very small. My book was this little weird project that I never talked about, that I drew no attention to IRL. I don’t think most of the people in my life even fully know what it’s about. Perhaps I didn’t feel validated in working on it because I didn’t seek it out. More than that, I didn’t allow it.

I hope the biggest change this grant will bring about is in the scale of my own ambition. Not in terms of how many copies it will sell—I know that’s far beyond my control. But in what I hope it will do. More than ever, I want it to move and surprise and educate people, most of all myself. I want it to provoke, to linger, “to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake,” to borrow the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I want it to be both intimate and rigorous, both deeply felt and thoroughly researched. I want the characters and places in my book to feel seen. I want to do justice to them.

My particular position in relation to this book—as a foreigner writing in and about Africa, as well as an outsider reconsidering notions of family, identity and internalized racism, all in a place that’s not home—demands great care. The risks of getting it wrong—of misinterpreting situations or behaviors I witnessed—as well as the risk of overly centering myself at the expense of people and places already marginalized in Western literature are significant, and intimidating. But I believe these risks are worth taking to surface the intimate threads weaving together our communities: south Asia, Africa and North America’s common history of colonization continues to shape not only our economies, landscapes, and public institutions but also the most private realms of our lives: how we conceive of family, how we joke, who we view as “civilized,” and how we survive profound violence, neglect, and erasure.

I don’t expect to get it right on the first try, which is why the time to read, think, re-consider, re-write, and seek out a variety of feedback is so critical to this project. This grant will buy me that time.

Ultimately, I want this book to be the best thing I’ve written, the best thing I could write given my current levels of skill, energy and knowledge. I want to become the person who can write this book.

Wish me luck.