Shawn Vestal

Shawn Vestal’s debut novel, Daredevils, was published in spring 2016 by Penguin Press. His collection of short stories, Godforsaken Idaho, was published in 2013 and won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which honors a debut book that “represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.” He also published A.K.A. Charles Abbott, a short memoir, as an e-book in October 2013. His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The Southern Review, Cutbank and several other journals. He writes a column for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane. A 2008 graduate of EWU creative writing program with an MFA in fiction, Vestal now teaches in the program.

Shawn had this to say about his time as an MFA candidate:

“I spent three years studying fiction writing in the EWU MFA program, and it really did change my life. I have written short stories since I was a teenager, but it was only after I began working with the faculty and my fellow students at Eastern that I began to publish stories. I worked primarily with Sam Ligon, who was my thesis advisor, but also with Greg Spatz, John Keeble, Chris Howell, Jonathan Johnson and others. All of them helped me to recognize the weaknesses in the work I had been doing, and develop a way of working to improve them – a method that serves me still. The stories I wrote for my thesis made up more than half the stories in my collection, Godforsaken Idaho. In the years since, I have occasionally taught workshops and classes in the program, and it’s been wonderful to connect with young writers and help them find their own way. The process always re-energizes me, reconnects me with the experiences that helped me so much as an artist, and refocuses my attention on the need to work steadily and diligently to battle the distractions of the everyday world.”