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.
Zoë Ballering (she/her) is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Fiction and the winner of an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship. Zoë’s debut collection of stories, There Is Only Us, was selected as the winner of the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her short stories are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review and Story Magazine and have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Hobart, and Craft. Zoë holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University and currently works as a Senior Assistant Dean of Admission Communications at Reed College.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
I’ve certainly experienced my share of rejection as a writer, and so it feels amazing to submit my favorite story—a story brimming with animals and irreverence and chick sexing and mom-daughter angst—and to basically have proof it landed. I feel certain that I made a member of the judging panel chuckle. That pleases me. As someone who was born and raised in Portland and loves Oregon more than anywhere on earth, I am so honored to be part of this community of local writers.
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
Beginning a story always feels hard, because I never know where I’m headed. Sometimes I end up with a pretty scene or a pleasant nugget of language, but nothing real. But if a story is good, then somewhere around the middle I will see the end—and then it will feel as if I’ve been struck by lightning. There won’t be enough time to write. I’ll worry that some kind of accident will keep me from finishing. Everything I experience as I move through the world will feel as if it were made for my story, as if it were meant to be woven in. These are the glorious writing moments. They are rare, but they make the hard times bearable.
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
The book I love most is André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs. It has the feel of a fable and yet it’s absolutely devastating. It’s the story of a wager between gods: Apollo believes that any animal that is given human intelligence will die unhappy; Hermes disagrees. The story follows the fates of the fifteen dogs they experiment on. Alexis has so much to say about the nature of love and the drive to make art. When I was a baby writer, I believed that only solemn stories could be literary. I love Fifteen Dogs because it reminds me that deep thought can exist within the strangest and most charming vessels.
Are there any Oregonian writers you look to for motivation or inspiration?
Ursula K. Le Guin forever! Her prose is clean and beautiful, she is clear-eyed in her understanding of what drives people to act, and she never bores. You want dragons or dreams that shape reality or a withering critique of capitalism? Le Guin has you covered. In one of her most famous craft essays, she advocated for the writing of “carrier bag fiction”—fiction that holds things in relation—and I find her wisdom absolutely essential when I sit down to write my weird stories.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’m working on my second collection of stories. I haven’t yet discovered what the overarching theme will be, but certain mini themes have emerged so far: the grief of extinction, absurd reality TV, lost fathers, found fathers, intense friendships between teen girls, and the very wild world of online dating.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Everyone goes through the doldrums, whether these are creative doldrums where nothing you write seems good or submission doldrums where nothing you submit gets published. There are periods of my life where I thought I would never be chosen; then I was. If you find yourself in the doldrums, don’t despair—they always end eventually. Therefore, you might as well apply for an Oregon Literary Fellowship, even if it seems intimidating. And if you get rejected, you might as well apply again.
WRITING SAMPLE EXCERPT: ‘ARK’
Oh God, I thought, what would my mother think? It was her cockerel that I’d mistaken for a pullet. She’d loved birds my entire growing up, always kept chickens, always given them fanciful names. She was the reason I’d majored in wildlife biology with a special focus in ornithology. She’d even encouraged me to apply for a spot on the ark. My day-to-day duties mostly involved mucking the avian compartment and scrubbing guano off the deck, but my official job title—Diluvial Bird Handler—conveyed a high level of prestige.
The truth, of course, was that I didn’t have much skill as an ornithologist. I lived at home and worked as a waitress after I got my degree. Every few months I’d shoot off an anemic application to an avian preserve, halfway wanting it, halfway not. I liked the tips. I liked being on my feet. I liked going home and not worrying about the harm that chewing lice caused to birds with damaged bills. I had no ambition other than to make ends meet. I even liked how it sounded, that phrase. Making ends meet, taking the tails of my life and lifting them up into a smooth little circle. A modicum of success seemed to me like the perfect measure. The only time I ever felt bad was thinking of my mom. She, too, had a smooth little circle of a life. She was a baker, a keeper of birds, and although the smallness of her circle never shamed me, one day I realized that I filled its center completely.
I thought I could bear being called a chicken extinctor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t think I could bear for her to hear it. And I thought of my mother high up on the side of Mount Ishtob, and I thought how much I missed her, and it was at that moment that I formed my plan.
“Patriarch Noah,” I said, “My mom has a whole flock of chickens. She took them with her when she and the rest of the settlement evacuated to higher ground. If we could circle back for a quick second, I can dash up the mountain and grab a hen, just to be sure that we can repopulate the earth if God really drowns all the chickens.”
“Karis,” he said, “when God has finished there will be no seedtime and no harvest, no hot nor cold, no summer nor winter, no day nor night, and no more chickens.”
“Right.”
“Very well,” he grumbled. “God commanded me to save two of every animal, a male and a female, and I shall fulfill God’s will. Bring back a hen or you lose your spot on the ark.”
Ten days later, we dropped anchor half a mile from Mount Ishtob and Tersa and Ophir lowered me down on the rowboat.
“You have until nightfall to reverse this extinction event!” screamed Naamah from above. “We’ll leave without you if you don’t come back in time!”
Either I was anxious or the tapeworm was turning somersaults inside of me. Regardless, I felt ill. I grasped the oars and rowed. I was not, however, a very good rower, having never manned a rowboat in my life, and for a while I got caught up in the current and drifted farther out to sea than the ark itself.
I glanced at the sky. The clouds made it hard to gauge the time of day, but I guessed I had four hours before sundown. I could hear Naamah shrieking, also the animals making all of their animal sounds.
“Well what do they expect?” I complained to the tapeworm. “I’m not a rower, I’m an ornithologist.” I swished my oars through the murky water. Only the sea creatures had flourished in the flood—I imagined fish flippering insensibly beneath me, one world expanding as the other shrank.
JUDGE’S CITATION
“Humorous writing is tricky waters. It’s easy for conceits to get blown out of reality or clever voices to become tiring. Zoë Ballering’s entry showed an assured sense of humor, one not easily imitated, as it takes the familiar and leads us into original territory. In the past, I would have eagerly dismissed the sale of a bible romp. Perhaps this dismissal still rings true in some part of the brain, but a writer like Ballering has the talent to make that end look downright foolish.”
– Scott Gloden
