We’re thrilled to introduce the 2025 Oregon Literary Fellowship Recipients with individual features on our blog. Out-of-state judges spent several months evaluating the 400+ applications we received, and selected thirteen 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 2025 Fellowship recipients were recognized at the 2025 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on April 28, and featured at a public reading event on July 8 at Literary Arts.
Victor Lodato is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Fiction and a recipient of the Laurell Swails and Donald Monroe Memorial Fellowship. Victor is a playwright and the author of the novels Edgar and Lucy, Honey, and Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, his stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and elsewhere. His novels have been translated into sixteen languages. Born and raised in New Jersey, he has lived in Oregon since 2010.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
The gift of time. For me, the funding allows me to set aside the time to work, with a little less worry.
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
I work intensely for long, focused periods, and then crash for several weeks. When I’m writing, I like to start early, while I’m still feeling sleepy and dreamy, a state in which I’m less prone to judge myself.
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
Too many to name. I’m also a playwright, so writers like Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett have been influential on my theater work. Novelists I love include Denis Johnson, and the marvelous Jane Gardam (who recently died). I particularly love Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” books, and have read them often.
What projects are you working on right now?
After three long and maximalist novels, I’m now working on a book that is much sparer, told in short vignettes, akin to songs – as much a prose poem as a novel.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Keep applying. I applied for many, many years before finally receiving a fellowship.
WRITING SAMPLE EXCERPT
Outside, the cold air startles her. The men with their sleeping rolls are still in the plaza. There’s no sign of Evan. If she were a normal person, she could just call him—but they no longer have working phones, just dead relics at the bottom of their bags.
A wing of white light cuts through the clouds—a merciless angel, it brings no warmth. She tugs her gloves back on, but they don’t help. One of the drifters has spotted her—an older fellow with a beard that looks like it’s made of mud. He lifts his hand and waves, as if he knew her. She hates to think of herself as one of them.
It’s hard to say why anyone travels like this—the way she and Evan do.
When they first met and she asked if he had family, he said yes.
When he asked the same question, she said no.
Both answers bore witness to a story neither had the strength to tell. And what did it matter? All they needed to know was that she wished to leave behind an absence, and he wanted to become one.
Of course, over time they’d given each other clues, little comments laid down casually in the night like playing cards. No tears or drama. Just facts. Nearly deaf in his left ear from smacks. A bullet hole in her father’s bedroom wall.
Shocked into travelling, she supposes.
In the first few months after her father died, she’d only pretended to run away. She’d pack some things and head down to the Greyhound station on Congress Street, just to see how it might feel. She did it a few times, with all her money in her pocket, after which she’d go back to the old adobe and eat a bowl of ice cream.
Then one day Evan was at the station. He came over and smiled. “Nice board. You a skater?” She said she wasn’t great.
“And a musician, too,” he said. At which point she started to cry, and he held her.
It wasn’t much more complicated than that.
Sometimes, though, she wonders at her decision—to just take off like that with a stranger. But the truth was, nothing had ever been easier. And it wasn’t just some chemical thing. She’d trusted him immediately.
Of course, it was possible she hadn’t been thinking clearly. The blood, the bullet hole in the wall. What if she’d made a mistake?
JUDGE’S CITATION
“Victor Lodato’s fiction gravitates towards characters who, as he phrases it, ‘exist at the far margins of power.’ And yet, no matter how tragic their outcomes, Lodato insists he ‘always reaches for grace’ in his treatment of them. The exquisite short story, ‘Herman Melville, Volume I,’ traces one night in the life of a young woman recently rendered homeless by her father’s suicide. Carting a skateboard, a tattered copy of a Melville biography, and her father’s banjo in a banged-up leather case ‘like a coffin,’ the protagonist suffers all the harrowing insults and predations routinely suffered by the unhoused. But through it all, the ghost (and grace) of Melville’s giant white whale floats, promising that she, too, might someday ‘become like the largest animal that ever existed—and no one, no one, could fuck with you.’”
– Ellen Wayland-Smith
