As a teenager, Shayne Langford wasn’t sure he’d make it to college. He didn’t think he’d be a writer either, let alone lecture on the subject. But Langford has done all of those things at the university he remembers his dad calling “one of the best in the country.”
Since arriving at UC Davis as a transfer student eight years ago, the university, its Department of English and writing program have become a home to Langford. So much so that he’s stayed on nearly his whole career thus far, going from undergraduate student to a graduate student in the M.F.A. program and becoming a lecturer himself. He teaches creative writing and literature in the Department of English and at the Writing Center (University Writing Program).
This year, all that work — and the novel that was born and revised in that time — is paying off. Langford recently won the Maurice Prize for Fiction, a $10,000 reward open to novels written by UC Davis graduates who are first time novelists, for his unpublished book, American Valley.
“I just owe so much to UC Davis,” Langford said, calling the M.F.A. program the best two years of his life. As an undergraduate, he said, “I had kind of built this surrogate family of professors who were kind of taking care of me. I already went in with that — I knew I had people behind me in a real way for the first time, and that felt really good.”
Winning the Maurice Prize, started by bestselling author and Davis resident John Lescroart, just adds to that legacy.
“I’m really proud of Shayne,” said Lescroart, who recently read the novel. “He’s got a terrific sense of style and shows it off to good measure.”
Every character has a story
American Valley is a place-based novel written to feel like a collection of stories — each chapter is able to stand on its own but still weaves its way through the overall narrative. Langford loves novels like this such as There, There by Tommy Orange.
“I read that during grad school and it totally blew me away,” Langford said. Now he teaches it to his own students every year. “I’m mostly interested in short stories and short story collections and also, novels that feel like story collections — and how careful you have to be to make the resonance shine through."
Langford pulls in parts of his experience growing up in rural areas of the Sierras as well as a stint working as a fly-fishing guide in Colorado to bring life to the people and landscape of American Valley.
“There’s a lot about the natural world and how the emotional landscapes are mirrored pretty directly in the land,” Langford said.
The novel is set in what he considers his hometown of Quincy. It deals with tough and emotional subjects: the cycles of generational poverty and addiction, complex trauma, identity and conceptions of masculinity.
“He resurrects people who might be construed as lowlifes and turns them out as sympathetic and fully human beings,” Lescroart said of Langford’s work. “It’s dark and powerful.”
The truth in fiction
Though American Valley was finished ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, Langford didn’t try to publish it.
“I’ve tweaked it here and there a little bit over the years,” Langford said. “I’ve just been sitting on it, giving it some time and space, waiting for stuff to work out — trying to be patient.”
At age 28, Langford is still young, especially for a first-time author. When he wrote the stories that became the basis for his novel, he couldn’t identify the larger themes that tied them together.
“I had no idea what they were about,” he said. “I was just following my intuition, which is what I tell my students to do — to follow what feels real and honest and true.”
Even in or, perhaps, especially in fiction, there are kernels of truth, he said, that gets at what it means to be human. The question for writers is: how do you get at the kernel?
Origins of the Maurice Prize for Fiction
The Maurice Prize for Fiction started 20 years ago as a way for Lescroart to honor his father, give back to the Davis community and help support budding writers.
As a young writer himself, Lescroart said it was sometimes difficult to keep going, especially when he wasn't making much money or receiving a lot of feedback. It was winning a prize from the San Francisco Foundation in 1978 that gave him the gumption to keep at it.
“When I first started out writing, what kept me going is, I happened to win a prize — a literary prize kind of like this,” Lescroart said, recalling a vow that if he ever made money, he would try to do something similar for other writers. “I feel like I'm actually making a difference in some people’s lives.”
“And there’s such talent out there, to win this prize is kind of a big deal,” he added. “I read the winner every year. I just love it.”
Past winners include Jessica Guerrieri, Megan Cummins, Melinda Moustakis, and Spring Warren, to name a few. Guerrieri, who won last year’s prize, will be speaking locally at The Avid Reader on May 22 just days after her novel, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, is set to release.
Lescroart hopes to continue the prize into the future and, in the coming years, increase the prize amount.
For Langford, winning the Maurice Prize has done exactly what it was meant to do: help keep writers like him motivated.
“In a sense, the recognition just makes writing feel so much more feasible,” Langford said. “You’re not just writing into space and nobody cares, which is how I had been feeling for a while: Am I just crazy? Am I even good at this? I think it just helps you believe in yourself.”
He’s already at work on the next novel.
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