On a windy Friday in June, the 2025 Oregon Book Awards Author Tour headed south along the coast to Coos Bay with writer and musician Willy Vlautin. A multi-genre storyteller, Willy is a guitarist and singer-songwriter for the Portland-based country soul band The Delines (and before that, Richmond Fontaine) as well as an acclaimed author of seven novels. His latest novel The Horse recently won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was a 2025 Oregon Book Award finalist for the Ken Kesey Award in Fiction.
The destination for Willy’s leg of the tour was Coos Bay Public Library (CBPL), a creative hub of both literary and literal nourishment for its local community. Patrons of the CBPL not only have access to great books and author visits but also to a free Community Fridge offering fresh local produce six days a week, an initiative spearheaded by the CBPL’s Reference Librarian Paul Addis. Paul is also the founder of the The Beet Food System organization, which funds the Community Fridge and seeks to create equitable and resilient food systems in rural communities.
With this level of attention to whole-person community care, the CBPL was a fitting place for Willy to lead an afternoon writing workshop focused on grassroots approaches to sustain a creative writing practice. Thirteen participants attended the workshop and Willy led lively conversations on crafting dialogue and finding joy in the writing process, interspersed with absorbing, often humorous, personal stories along the way. Several of the participants mentioned that they were in writing groups together, and Willy left time at the end of the workshop for everyone to share and ask questions about their own works-in-progress.
Following the workshop, around twenty people attended an evening storytelling event, also at the library, featuring Willy reading sections from The Horse—a deeply moving story about an aging musician who wakes one morning to find a blind, abandoned horse standing outside his front door. Oregon Book Award Fiction judge Kevin Brockmeier described The Horse as rendered with “honesty, grace, and vulnerability”, and Willy shared with the audience his novel’s haunting and emotional origin story about the real blind horse he once encountered in the desert.
The reading finished with a short musical performance from Willy on acoustic guitar, which included the titular song from The Delines’ latest album Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom. Afterwards, audience members purchased copies of Willy’s books and enjoyed a brief book-signing time, thanks to a pop-up table stocked by Harold Midyette of Books by the Bay, an independent bookstore in nearby North Bend.
As part of Literary Arts’ mission to engage readers and support writers, the Oregon Book Awards Author Tour brings acclaimed authors to towns they might not otherwise visit and establishes connections between Literary Arts and literary organizations across Oregon. Paul, who helped organize Willy’s Coos Bay visit in partnership with Literary Arts, had this to say about the benefits of making these connections:
“Rural communities like Coos Bay are bursting with creativity and artistic individuals but often lack the resources that can be found in cities, like writing workshops run by authors who have published and sold high volumes of their work. Organizations like Literary Arts create opportunities for rural libraries and mitigate feelings of isolation for rural artists by bringing bigger events to our smaller communities.”
The 2026 Oregon Book Awards are now open for applications. Click here to read the guidelines and apply.
