I’ve got a long poem, “Arguing with James Baldwin the Day After the Re-election of Barack Obama,” at a great new journal, Codex. Lots of strong work in this issue. Check it out.
Category: News
High Desert Journal: Witness to the West
Just over ten years ago, back home for a holiday, I told my grandmother, an elderly widow living alone out on the plains of eastern Montana, that I planned to quit my good, exhausting job as a high school teacher and go back to grad school to get my MFA in poetry. My grandmother turned from the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand. She backed me up into the corner of kitchen, was all but whacking me in the chest. “Joe,” she said, spoon shivering in her fist, “thinking you can make a living as a writer is a temptation of the devil!”
Six months later, sitting at a conference table and staring at the small, pitiful poem in front of me, the poem that like all the rest had just been torn to metaphorical pieces in my first graduate workshop, I began to think it wasn’t making a living as a writer, but simply making it as a writer that was the true and fiendish temptation. In fact, if it had just been the writing, I would have left after that first, hard semester. But there was the reading, too. My literary education up to that point had been scattershot at best, but now—especially when it came to the literature of the American West—things were starting to come together. I read Kittredge for the first time that year, as well as B.H. Fairchild, Gretel Ehrlich, Mark Spragg, James Galvin, Dorianne Laux—and I dove into the work of my professors, too: Mary Clearman Blew, Kim Barnes, and Robert Wrigley. This, I remember thinking, is something my grandmother—who had books crammed into every nook and cranny of her house, who, when she gifted me her copy of the Montana anthology The Last Best Place, handed it to me as if the family Bible—would understand.
I discovered High Desert Journal that first year of graduate school as well. Here was a magazine after my own windburnt, high-plains heart: the first two issues featured, among other Western eminences, David James Duncan, Kathleen Dean Moore, Gary Snyder, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Kittredge, John Daniel, Kim Barnes, Robert Wrigley, Tami Haaland, Craig Lesley, and Kim Stafford. That spring, I wrote a story in a class with Mary Clearman Blew, “Far Enough: A Western in Fragments,” and I crossed my fingers and sent it off to High Desert Journal. They picked it up. It was my first prose publication ever, and the vote of confidence I needed to keep at it. I remember holding the issue, staring at the rust-red border, the black-and-white photo of a yucca beneath all the names—and there I was: next to Teresa Jordan and Paulann Petersen and Amy Irvine and Nance Van Winckel. I couldn’t hardly believe it.
For ten years now, High Desert Journal has been doing just this, publishing the luminaries of the West alongside the next generation of writers speaking from and about the American interior. As the nonfiction editor at HDJ, I’m pleased to be continuing this tradition, as well as searching for stories of the new and changing West. I’m hoping to find writing my grandmother would appreciate; writing that backs you up and makes you pay attention, writing that’s willing to say it like it is.
And I’m hoping you’ll join me by subscribing, here on our tenth anniversary, to High Desert Journal. In recent and forthcoming issues, you’ll find essays by Pam Houston and Kate Lebo, David Axelrod and Melissa Mylchreest, Shann Ray and Jon Rovner, Craig Childs and Sean Prentiss, Jill Talbot and Annie Lampman. You’ll find writing that will change the way you see and know the American West. Don’t miss out. Subscribe now.
We Had to Go On Living
I’m thinking of this one as my Midwestern: We Had to Go On Living, a limited-edition chapbook of two essays, “Northern Pike,” which originally appeared in the Harvard Review, and “Bruised,” originally appearing in The Sun, from our years in small-town Iowa. Thanks to Red Bird Chapbooks for their attention to these essays and for the beautifully designed chapbook.
Poem at The Coachella Review
Started working on this poem over thirteen years ago. Been through hundreds of drafts–and here it is. Thanks to everyone at The Coachella Review for believing in it!
A Story in The Sun
My story, “Boys, Ten In All,” is featured in the August issue of The Sun. Pleased to see my work in such a fine venue.
Reading in Portland
I’ll be reading with a whole host of great writers this Saturday in Portland as part of the Oregon Writer’s Collective (info through the link and below). Love to see you there!
On August 2nd the Oregon Writer’s Collective arrives in the NE Portland backyard of poet Elyse Fenton for our second annual Portland reading of poetry, fiction, memoir, and musical genre-bending.
Drinks and mingling begin at 7:30 pm. We’ll have Laurelwood beer available for a suggested $3 donation (to offset costs). Please bring snacks if you’d like as well!
Leo London—the best singer and songwriter you’ve never heard of, whose current project is with the Portland rock and roll band The Domestics—will play a few songs to get our night started. We’ll follow with this star-studded cast, broken by an intermission:
Carl Adamshick’s first book, Curses and Wishes, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Saint Friend, is published with McSweeney’s. He lives here in Portland and is a co-founder of Tavern Books, a non-profit publisher of poetry.
Elyse Fenton is the author of Clamor (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), winner of a number of prizes. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner and The New York Times. In 2013, her manuscript-in-progress for a second book received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She teaches at Portland Community College and has an Icarus complex regarding her tomato plants.
Samiya Bashir’s books—Gospel, Where the Apple Falls, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, and Best Black Women’s Erotica 2—have brought some people joy, according to them. Her poetry has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine, World Literature Today, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and more. Samiya teaches creative writing at Reed College, where she sometimes takes her magic cat, who shares her obsession with trees, blackbirds, and hobo signs, to class. Find out more @ samiya bashir dot com.
Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award, and two collections of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Murnion Dogs. He lives with his family in McMinnville, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.
John Brehm is the author of Sea of Faith, winner of the Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, winner of the Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Mountain Writers Workshop in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Colie Hoffman is a poet, essayist, and recent transplant to Portland, OR from New York. She spends many days of the week working at a travel research firm, where she translates English into different English. Colie has been a writer in residence at Writers Omi in upstate New York and at Sangam House in South India, for which she won the M Literary Residency. Her poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, TYPO, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere.
Molly Reid’s stories have appeared on NPR and in the journals Triquarterly, Redivider, Indiana Review, Pear Noir, The Literary Review, and others. She has received fellowship support from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a novel.
Michael Copperman’s prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Triquarterly Online, The Rumpus, UNSAID and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. He currently is waiting on word from New York about a memoir he fears will never find a home, and finishing a novel-in-stories even less commercially viable than the memoir in question.
James Yu is from Beaverton, where last year he finally saw a beaver.
Thomas Dietzel is the creator of the musical art project, EURHAPSODOI, which performs short excerpts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – in the original Greek and with musical accompaniment – to allow audiences to make the connection between ancient oral formulaic methods of composition and the use of the freestyle technique in hip hop. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that ten minutes of listening to EURHAPSODOI perform will communicate more about the shared aspects of these two cultures than twenty written volumes ever could. EURHAPSODOI has performed at the Portland Art Museum as part of The Body Beautiful Exhibit as well as part of Leo Daedalus’ Portland avant-garde variety show, The Late Now.
A Pushcart Prize for “Say”
Couldn’t be happier to report that my story “Say,” originally published in The Sun (and nominated as well by former Pushcart Prize-winner and at-large editor Jennifer Lunden–thank you!), won a 2015 Pushcart Prize and will appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIX alongside the likes of Karen Russell, Ellen Bryant Voigt, D. A. Powell, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, Russell Banks, Edward Hoagland, Rick Bass, Mary Szybist, and many other amazing writers.
Poem in Adroit
Jazzed to see the title poem from my latest book, Notes from the Journey Westward, reprinted in the summer issue of Adroit–and especially jazzed to see my work alongside a poem from one of my literary heroes, Terrance Hayes!
Poem in River Styx
Pretty amazed to have a poem in the 39th Anniversary issue of River Styx, which also features new work from luminaries like Kim Addonizio, Stephen Dunn, Dorianne Laux, and Robert Wrigley.
Poem in The Minnesota Review
My poem “Caddo River Elegy” is in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. Jazzed to be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ed Skoog, H.L. Hix, Kathryn Levy, and more!
joewilkins.org 