University Times

After 30 sleepless hours spent doing rewrites on her second novel, Katherine Vaz was too dazed to appreciate what was being said when the call came informing her that she had won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Award.

As the University Press's Ed Ochester congratulated her on the award for her short story collection, "Fado & Other Stories," all Vaz could think was that she had just mailed one book and now she was going to have another published: "How did that happen?" Despite her exhaustion, the associate professor of English at the University of California at Davis couldn't get to sleep after Ochester's call. She has since come out of her daze to say she is very pleased by the award.

"This is a very happy one for me," Vaz says. "I am very grateful to the judges and the University of Pittsburgh Press. I've already been working with them closely [on editing of the book] and they are extremely good, very on top of what is going on." Besides the recognition, what makes Vaz so happy about the Drue Heinz Prize is that she won it for a series of stories involving her Portuguese heritage. She may be the only writer in the country dealing with the Portuguese-American experience. A native of California, Vaz has been widely embraced by the Portuguese-American community. She has been the subject of a major newspaper story in Lisbon and is constantly being approached by people of Portuguese ancestry who want to thank her for bringing their story to light.

"That's the nice part of it," she says. "The Portuguese community has been so happy for me." "Fado & Other Stories" was selected for the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize over 280 other manuscripts submitted by published writers. The prize includes a $10,000 cash award and publication of her book by the University Press in November.

George Garrett, author of "Poison Pen" and "The Succession," was the final judge for this year's contest. He said of Vaz's work: "I was swept up and swept along by the stories in this collection. The author has wit and humor, as well as a strong sense of urgency that keeps the reader turning pages." Garrett added that the stories have a "magic touch" and that the author is "daring, takes risks and succeeds. The collection is held together by the fact that all of the stories deal with the memories, and magic, of Portuguese history. All these things add up to a winner." Screening judge April Bernard, author of "Blackbird Bye Bye," said: "An intermittently explosive, persistent lyricism buoys up these stories of family, sex, flowers, money, history, loss and identity that take place in the Portuguese communities of the mainland United States, Hawaii, the Azores and Madeira.

"Many of them are written within the 'magical realist' mode," Bernard continued, "albeit of a more ferocious, second-generation ironic sort, but they never drift wholly away from the actual." "Fado," the title story in Vaz's winning collection, literally means "fate" in Portuguese. The word, however, also describes a sort of blues singing practiced most often by Portuguese women.

"There are different styles of fado, but basically it is a song of fate, song of the heart," Vaz explains. "It is very much associated with life in Lisbon. It is the kind of singing that is supposed to capture the soul and the heart, and is about one's fate. Most Portuguese people in the United States have fado records in their house." The story "Fado" originally was published to acclaim in 1989 by Triquarterly magazine. It centers around the California valleys and a character name Rosa who learns about herself and love.

"I would say it is about all of the things that have to do with Portuguese feelings about fate and longing," Vaz says. "I tried to put down all of the things that occurred to me at the moment I was writing it that had to do with those things." "Fado" also was the story in which Vaz finally found her voice as a writer and the first story in which she decided to write about her experiences growing up in the Portuguese-American community.

Another favorite of Vaz's in the 12-story collection is "How to Grow Orchids Without Grounds." It deals with a veteran of the Portuguese incursion into Angola in the 1970s, what Vaz calls Portugal's Vietnam. The veteran has been traumatized by his experiences in that affair and as a result has decided to plant orchids in other people's homes. "He kind of gives the world a corsage," says Vaz, and then adds of the story, "It came in a wonderful way to me. It was one of those stories you like because it comes full-blown into one's head, and I love orchids." In addition to "Fado & Other Stories," Vaz is the author of the critically acclaimed novel "Saudade," the first contemporary novel about Portuguese-Americans to be published by a major New York publishing house. Barnes & Noble included "Saudade" in its Great New Writers Series. Another novel, "Mariana," will be released in six languages later this year.

Vaz's short stories have appeared in over a dozen literary magazines, including Triquar-terly, Gettysburg Review, Nimrod, The American Voice, Other Voices, The Sun, Kalliope, Black Ice and Webster Review.

Non-fiction work by Vaz, who was a recipient of a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Her piece "Songs of the Soul, Songs of the Night" about fado dancing in Lisbon, Portugal, ran in The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler magazine in 1994.

–Mike Sajna