State Of Wonder: Mar 28, 2015—The Fiction Episode, Willy Vlautin, Smith Henderson, Cari Luna&More - a podcast by Oregon Public Broadcasting

We’ve got a special show for you this week: it’s the Wonder homage to fiction. With the Oregon Book Awards coming up on April 13, we spend the hour with the five finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.

The group is made up of three debut novelists, two poets, and one past winner of the fiction prize. We've talked with three of them before, and we brought the other two into the studio to round out the cohort.

1:20 - Willy Vlautin is as skilled and prolific a polyglot as they come. His band Richmond Fontaine has released 10 studio albums; he’s penned four critically acclaimed novels including “Lean on Pete” which won both the Oregon Book Awards’ fiction prize and Reader’s Choice Award in 2011. Hollywood made a movie out of his first book, “The Motel Life.” In this conversation he tells us why he continues to write about hard-luck characters in "The Free" and what it is like to write bar songs for his new band, The Delines, who play Thursday, April 16 at Kelly’s Olympian in Portland.

11:35 - Cari Luna started writing her novel “The Revolution of Everyday” as a Dear John Letter to New York City. She was born there and lived there on and off until 2007, when she just couldn’t afford to stay any longer. Then, after she moved to Portland and got some distance, the book became a love letter as well. It’s about a group of squatters in New York City’s Lower East Side in the ‘90s.

20:11 - Smith Henderson's "Fourth of July Creek" was one of the biggest debuts last summer and made it onto best books lists everywhere from the “Washington Post” to “Entertainment Weekly.” It was so successful, in fact, that Henderson quit his job, moved to Los Angeles, and has three new novels in the works. In this conversation he talks with Dave Miller on "Think Out Loud."

32:00 - Amy Schutzer began writing poetry as a college student. Since then, she’s published numerable poems, a chapbook, and now two novels. Her newest, “Spheres of Disturbance,” is the kind of book that had the Lambda Literary reviewer weeping openly for the beauty of it and the questions it raised.

41:10 - Since we last talked with poet Lindsay Hill about his wildly ambitious debut novel, “Sea of Hooks,” the book won the Pen Center USA Fiction Award, was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and made a number of top 10 lists, from “New York” magazine to “Publishers Weekly” (in fact, “Publishers Weekly” named it the Most Underrated Book of 2013). He tells us about how the book took more than 20 years and five thousand pages to write.

Further episodes of OPB's State of Wonder

Further podcasts by Oregon Public Broadcasting

Website of Oregon Public Broadcasting