We’re thrilled to introduce the 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipients with individual features on our blog! Out-of-state judges spent several months evaluating the 500+ applications we received, and selected eight writers and two publishers to receive grants of $3,500 each. Literary Arts also awarded two Oregon Literary Career Fellowships of $10,000 each. The 2024 Fellowship recipients will be recognized at the 2024 Oregon Book Awards ceremony on April 8.
Evan Morgan Williams (he/him) is a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow in Fiction and a recipient of the Laurell Swails and Donald Monroe Memorial Fellowship. He has published over seventy-five short stories in literary magazines, including The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, and The Antioch Review. He has published three collections of short stories: Thorn, winner of Chandra Prize at BkMk Press in 2014; Canyons: Older Stories in 2018; and Stories of the New West, published by Main Street Rag in 2021. Williams holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and he is a three-time mentor in AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. He is retired after twenty-nine years of public school teaching.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What is the most exciting thing about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
Receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship tells me that the writing community sees the value of my work. I would write my stories regardless, but it means a lot to know that my work is being read and valued. Speaking of value, the Fellowship will allow me to fund several things in the coming year: a self-funded residency at Playa Summer Lake, a small micropublishing project, a new laptop, and, if there’s anything left, a few more treats at Keeper’s.
How would you describe your creative process?
I can’t really claim a process. If I wrote by process, my stories would sound the same. I try to do a lot of listening, noticing, reading, and taking notes from what I read. I try to stay attuned for silent calls within myself. Then there is the difficult part, the writing, the labor, the gathering of elements, details, dialogue, even the syntax, that will form the possibilities of the story. Finally, there is revision, where the story makes its own intentions known to me. The process is always different because the emerging story’s possibilities are what I listen to the most, and there’s no telling what they might be.
What keeps you motivated and inspired as a writer?
I write to experience that immersive moment of flow, which some athletes refer to as “being in the zone,” when the story, in the very act of being composed, feels more real than the reality around me. In such moments, I’m not just using words to convey a story, I am making the story in real time. Hemingway does this. Lucia Berlin does this. I should add that the same immersion can be had while reading. The dialogue between reading and writing cannot be overemphasized.
What are you working on right now?
Having retired after twenty-nine years of teaching in a distressed public school, I am working on a collection of stories based on that experience. I proceed with caution. My students’ stories don’t belong to anyone but themselves. I have actually discussed this issue with some students, and I promised that I would never appropriate their stories. So I am taking up the challenge of writing about an intensely compelling experience while honoring the autonomy of the characters. It won’t be an easy proposition, but it’s an aesthetic challenge that I welcome.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
For many of the Fellowship categories offered by Literary Arts, narrative personal statements are no longer required for the application. This removes what might otherwise pose a barrier—it certainly felt like one to me, because I’m horrible at that stuff—and it focuses the selection process on the strength of the writing sample alone. Therefore, make your writing sample the best version of itself. I am grateful for the smooth, simple, clean selection process.
EXCERPT FROM ‘THE LIMOUSINE’
Into this absence of mystery, my dad brought home a shiny black limousine.
We heard it blocks away, the throaty churn of a V-8 and a smooth automatic transmission. We were reenacting the Battle of the Bulge, the street our theater of war, but we froze, and Bobby let a grenade—a baseball—roll by. Debbie and the girls, consigned to be Germans, lay down their pop guns, which they didn’t know how to use anyway. My mom and my cousin Sarah, arguing behind the screen door, went quiet. Sarah had come from a so-called broken home, and my mom, barely thirty, had not scripted for herself the work of rearing a teenager. Sarah had met a boy from the latest tract to sprout, and she wanted to attend a drive-in movie with him, and what was wrong with cherry lipstick anyway. The churning came closer. My mom must have set her jaw.
I need to describe the Fifties. You got your slice of heaven. You worked for it nine to five. You had been to war and earned, at least, a chance not to toss your life away, as Mr. Thompson, downing gin in his rumpus room, seemed bent on doing. The spoils of war were an invitation to forget—an injunction really—and the war was a mystery never mentioned by grown-ups, but hinted at, for the beautiful homes and beautiful wives and beautiful children under the beautiful blue sky were plainly reward for something. The most I could pry from my dad was that he had been a sniper and had kissed a French girl during the liberation of Paris. Nothing more. My cousin Sarah, when we were alone and she had lit a cigarette, fanning the smoke out her narrow window, spoke of a box of letters she had found in the bomb shelter that told everything about the war, but my parents had forbidden me from going down there, and Sarah, bored with the topic, placed her lipsticked cigarette in my mouth and said to suck it in, then blow it away from my hair and clothes, and I wondered how she could know about the box, or why I should worry about my hair or clothes, or what other secrets competed with the truths I had always believed, and whether those truths were the happier ones. But my cousin Sarah told me to never tell, and I heeded this, another injunction. Still, I was stuck: exhaling the dizzying blue smoke, I preferred the happiness I had already known, but that happiness now escaped me like the smoke through my cousin’s window.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
“‘The Limousine’ is alive with feeling and perspective. The height of its technical prowess is its retrospective narrator, Jimmy, who infuses the story with clear-eyed memory as tangible as a postcard and the wisdom of narrative distance.”
– Alexia Arthurs
