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.
Jordan Jacks is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Fiction and the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship. Jordan’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He was the 2015-16 James C. McCreight Fellow in Fiction at The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and has taught at UW-Madison, St. Albans School, The Cleveland Institute of Art, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned an MFA in Fiction.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
I’m somewhat new to Oregon—my family and I moved to Portland three years ago—so this fellowship feels like a welcome, an encouraging pat on the back from my new literary community. It’s nice to be supported and introduced in this way: Hi everyone!
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
It used to be regimented and regular; I kept banker’s hours at my desk. Then I had children, and my practice became sporadic and hard-won. I scrounge writing time the way I scrounge meals off my daughter’s half-empty plate, taking what I can, when I can. Mid-morning, between work calls. Late afternoon, in the day care parking lot, with seconds to go until they start charging me extra. When I have an evening free, I like to write at The Sandy Jug, under the velvet painting of Kenny Rogers.
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
Jean Stafford, especially The Mountain Lion; Joy Williams, especially Breaking and Entering; Barry Hannah, especially Airships and Ray; James Salter, especially Dusk and Light Years; Charles Portis (any and all); Lydia Davis (any and all); Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark; Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys; Russell Edson, especially The Very Thing That Happens; Mary Robison’s Subtraction; Flaubert; Grace Paley, especially Enormous Changes At The Last Minute; Leonard Michaels, especially I Would Have Saved Them All If I Could and Shuffle; Philip Roth’s The Ghostwriter; Denis Johnson, of course; Richard Ford until about 1996; all of Donald Barthelme; Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man and Witness; the poems of my old teacher, Louise Glück. And Cheever, always Cheever—the perfect stories, the even more perfect Journals.
Are there any Oregonian writers you look to for motivation or inspiration?
Do y’all count Carver? I know he spent most of his life in WA and CA, but he was born in Clatskanie . . . I’ve been re-reading him recently after many years of over-exposure and then total avoidance, and I’m struck now by how strange and funny he is, how much weirder than I understood in college. I’m also a big fan of Don Carpenter’s noir classic Hard Rain Falling, and I recently read his late novella (which also includes three stories) The Class of ’49, a devastating and wistful snapshot of Portland teenagers in the late forties. It’s obviously autobiographical, very Richard Yates in the PNW, and I keep coming back to it. The sad precision of those sentences!
What projects are you working on right now?
I’m currently trying to finish a short story collection (just two stories to go). I have a novel in a drawer that I wish someone would buy. And I’m inching my way towards something new and long.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Shoot your shot!
WRITING SAMPLE EXCERPT
from ‘Gulf Shores’
I was sleepwalking down in the parking lot when I met the boy whose arm had been bitten off. This was in June of 1995, at a condo complex in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I was dreaming about the beach, about walking around on it, trying to sell umbrellas for twenty dollars a pop. They were on my back like a quiver of arrows.
Oh, the nights of my life. I have suffered through them. I take drugs for it now, I try not to drink too much. But back then my parents had to lock me in my room, jam a chair against the door.
The boy whose arm had been bitten off jumped out of a Ford Ranger that didn’t have any paint on the body. It had only one headlight. Even as he was coming towards me the truck continued to roll, edging up like a cat. There were two people inside, a man and woman in darkness.
“The fuck,” the boy whose arm had been bitten off said. “Are you crazy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Lagoon Run was a wooden place across the street from the beach, a few miles west of The Hangout and the Pink Pony Pub and all the nicer, newer hotels. Like all the buildings that far down the strip, it was weather-beaten and gray, elevated on splintery stilts. It looked like a dirty pelican crouching over a bunch of broken shells.
We went there once a year. My mother was from Foley. We came from Houston in our station wagon to visit her brother and her mother. But that year her mother was dead, and Uncle Kenneth was only free on weekdays. On weekends, he had to be in jail.
Uncle Kenneth was a fisherman. The Proud Maria, his boat, didn’t belong to him. It belonged to a guy on a ventilator in Orange Beach named Darius. Uncle Kenneth drove lawyers from Mobile around in it until they’d had their fill of mullet and redfish and then he parked it back at the marina. On Thursday night he’d hitch out to the condo with a Styrofoam cooler of Coors and a trash bag full of shrimp. My mother would boil the shrimp inside while my father commandeered one of the grills out by the lagoon. Uncle Kenneth and I would pull up other people’s crab traps on the pier, taking whatever we found. After a couple of beers Uncle Kenneth was friendly and childlike. He barked at passing dogs and howled in the general direction of the moon. He told dirty jokes and slept on the pull-out sofa.
On Fridays we’d drive back up to Foley, my father behind the wheel, my mother in the front, Uncle Kenneth and me in the backward seat. Uncle Kenneth drank whatever beers were left in his cooler, crinkling the cans and putting them back in the shrimpy water. At the second red light in Foley he’d tip his trucker hat to my mother and pop the hatch, jump out in one motion. We’d turn right and he’d turn left, a short guy in denim cutoffs and white sneakers, his skin the same color as the red clay peeking through the grass. Sometimes the hatch was still open when we started to move.
When I asked my mother where he was going she always said he was going to Pizza Hut. I didn’t find out about weekend jail until years later. It was for the relatively minor offences of working people: petty theft, public drunkenness. You checked in on Friday and you checked out on Sunday. You could even bring a change of clothes.
Kenneth had been busted that summer for breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s trailer in Orange Beach, making off with all the pictures of the two of them together, all the condoms he’d left there, and a baggy full of pills that he said belonged to him. Someone told me at his funeral.
JUDGE’S CITATION
“Jordan Jacks’ stories excel in describing the modern South, of making markers out of the ordinary in a way that does not embellish or dress up preconceived ideas of a region. His sample showed a confidence that allows a reader to suspend their inner statistician and consider what will happen, not what should. I hope this is where contemporary Southern writing continues to take aim; if not, I remain in Jacks’ cast.”
– Scott Gloden
