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.
Ösel Jessica Plante-Curl (she/her) is a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of the Women Writers Fellowship. She works at Portland State University and teaches poetry workshops at University of Portland. Her first collection, Waveland, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2021. She is currently working on a second collection of poetry and a memoir. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, Blackbird, Narrative, and Passages North, among others. She earned a MA from the University of North Texas, an MFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What is the most exciting thing about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
I’d have to say the affirmation that others see value in my voice. It’s a great shot in the arm and helps keep me going on this path of being a writer, which can often feel like an isolating, internal struggle with my own thoughts. That the award comes from my chosen home state makes it all the sweeter.
How would you describe your creative process?
I need spaciousness in order to sort through my thoughts and I need to feel inspired. Reading great writing is a fast way to get the inspiration part. I love when a piece of writing makes me feel jealous and stops my breath. I also like to garden or walk, activities where my body is busy that also allow my mind to let loose. That all being said, there’s no substitute for actually getting the words down on the page. When inspiration does strike, it’s best if it finds you while you are writing, as the saying goes.
What keeps you motivated and inspired as a writer?
I think it’s a combination of things: one part competitiveness, another part being unwilling to let myself down. I have so many ideas in my mind and I honestly just want to earn their respect by turning them from nothing but synapses firing to a thing someone can read and take in—that osmotic process between a writer and reader.
What are you working on right now?
I’m mostly writing a memoir called Oh Honey. It’s about making the mistake of falling in love with an emotional sociopath who enjoyed breaking my heart. In the aftermath I ended up shaving my head, buying a one-way ticket to Costa Rica, and spending a few months backpacking solo through Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Peru, trying to figure out what had happened and who I was. It was rough. I’ll never again ignore my gut instincts about a person. The book speaks to these experiences and the childhood trauma that was at the center of my vulnerability and heartbreak.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep applying. After all, all three of these things are free.
EXCERPT FROM WRITING SAMPLE: ‘WHEN I COME BACK FROM THE DEAD’
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
“Evident everywhere in Ösel Jessica Plante-Curl’s poetry is her prodigious talent for casting the ordinary into the language of strange prophecy, making the knowable world feel impossibly weighted with mystery [. . .] I would follow this confident, oracular speaker anywhere—out into the ordinary world of birds shitting into iced tea on OkCupid dates, deep into a self she describes as “sails of rain,” or sideways into a surreal landscape where “tulips greet me / with the same empty cups I’ve never been / able to drink from” and darkness is “diced, cut into even slices.”
– Emily Skaja
