Been a real joy to join, and be so embraced by, the writing community here at Linfield, in McMinnville, and across Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. And I’m really delighted to be part of the 5th Annual Terroir Creative Writing Festival this year. I’ll be teaching a craft class, Notes Toward Evocative Prose: What We Really Mean to Say, and doing a poetry reading with Maggie Chula, Paulann Petersen, and my wonderful colleague Lex Runciman.
I’m headed to Seattle soon, where I’m jazzed to check out lots of readings and panels, buy lots of books, and sign a few books and talk about landscape myself. Here’s the official schedule:
| Thursday, February 27, 2014 |
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1:00 pm to 2:00 pm |
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| Spot: 502 | Author Signing: Wilkins, Joe Organization Name: Fugue Literary Journal / Idaho MFA |
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm |
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| Spot: 1201 | Author Signing: Wilkins, Joe Organization Name: Michigan State University Press |
| Friday, February 28, 2014 |
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11:00 am to 12:00 pm |
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| Spot: Q21 | Author Signing: Wilkins, Joe Organization Name: Terrain Publishing |
| Saturday, March 1, 2014 |
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12:00 pm to 1:15 pm |
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| Willow Room, Sheraton Seattle, 2nd Floor | S169. Pacific Northwest Authors Speak About Their Landscape . (Kim Barnes, Bharti Kirchner, Joe Wilkins, William Dietrich, Claire Davis) How important is geography when pursuing literary work, be it poetry, fiction, or nonfiction? Accomplished Pacific Northwest authors who are known to derive inspiration from their scenic land will answer that question. This diverse group will read short selections to illustrate how the setting, combined with imagination, memory, and personal interpretation, plays a large role in their stories. To be followed by a moderated discussion detailing tips and techniques that can make the landscape come alive on your pages.
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The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction doesn’t hit stores for a month–but you can get a sneak peak at one of the essays inside today over Terrain.org, where Erik Reece’s “The Act of Writing: Speak and Bear Witness,” a powerhouse craft essay about mountain top mining removal, gonzo poet/journalist techniques, and the moral necessity of getting it right in creative nonfiction, is now live!
Couldn’t be happier to have two poems featured today at Terrain.org, one of the finest environmental magazines out there. Big thanks to Simmons Buntin, Derek Sheffield, and the rest of the Terrain crew!
I recently spoke with Stephen W. Long, author of the novel There’s a Somewhere, about writing, teaching, and the power of literature; you can listen in here.
Really pleased (read: damned ecstatic) to announce The Mountain and the Fathers has won the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award in Nonfiction. The New Writers Award brings winning writers to GLCA campuses for readings and class visits and has previously recognized the likes of Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Kim Addonizio, Andrew Hudgins, Elizabeth Rosner, Ander Monson, Mary Szybist, and Alan Heathcock, among many others.
Here’s the citation from the judges, which has me blushing and feeling really good about things:
The 2014 winner for creative non-fiction is Joe Wilkins, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry, published by Counterpoint Press. Our judges note:
The Big Dry of eastern Montana makes for a subject of rich complexity. Joe Wilkins evokes place like Willa Cather. That is, place begins as a kind of raw, wide-open poetry. But Wilkins tells a different story. This is about the author’s search for a model of fatherhood, to fill spaces left empty by the death of his father. Wilkins strikes with staggering, melancholy, progressively self-reflective prose that, in part, inhabits the sparseness of the part of Montana where he was born and grew up. Yet his prose also pushes against what might be considered the standard fare of writing fixed in the American West. He addresses memory and the inability to remember in lyrical prose that is, at times, achingly beautiful yet never pretentious or sentimental and never cold. With exquisite control at both the structural and sentence level, he displays both a surety and openness to question, particularly with regard to class and masculinity without theorizing or naming them as such.
I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Charles Finn and the editorial team at High Desert Journal as Nonfiction Editor. HDJ is a semi-annual journal of literary and visual art from and about the American West and in past issues has published a veritable who’s who of contemporary western writers, including William Kittredge, Kim Barnes, Rick Bass, Craig Childs, Amy Irvine, John Daniel, Charles Goodrich, David James Duncan, Kim Stafford, Melissa Mylchreest, Brandon R. Schrand, Maya Jewell Zeller, Mary Sojourner, Russell Rowland, and Robert Wrigley, among many, many others.
Though I’m mostly just excited to get reading, I’m especially interested in narrative and lyric essays that challenge our usual notions (whether historical, political, geographic, or what have you) of the West, as well as work that addresses poverty, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. So if you’ve got something that might fit, send it my way!
High Country News has just posted the full text of my essay “Reconciling Family Narrative with Textbook History in Montana’s Big Horn Valley.” Though I really enjoyed researching and writing this one, it means even more to me now, as my grandmother recently passed away. She read an earlier draft, but I would have loved for her to see the piece in print. I miss her.
A few years ago my friend Sean Prentiss approached me about putting together an anthology focused on craft issues in creative nonfiction. As writers of essays and memoirs ourselves, as professors of creative nonfiction, and as former students of nonfiction greats Mary Clearman Blew and Kim Barnes, we knew all sorts of fascinating conversations were being had about the genre–yet there were very few texts that collected and forwarded these ideas. So, we got to work: we contacted writers we admired, we edited and offered advice, we set the essays next to one another, and now The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction is on its way into the world! Here’s a bit more from the publisher’s website:
Though creative nonfiction has been around since Montaigne, St. Augustine, and Seneca, we’ve only just begun to ask how this genre works, why it functions the way it does, and where its borders reside. But for each question we ask, another five or ten questions roil to the surface. And each of these questions, it seems, requires a more convoluted series of answers. What’s more, the questions students of creative nonfiction are drawn to during class discussions, the ones they argue the longest and loudest, are the same ideas debated by their professors in the hallways and at the corner bar. In this collection, sixteen essential contemporary creative nonfiction writers reflect on whatever far, dark edge of the genre they find themselves most drawn to. The result is this fascinating anthology that wonders at the historical and contemporary borderlands between fiction and nonfiction; the illusion of time on the page; the mythology of memory; poetry, process, and the use of received forms; the impact of technology on our writerly lives; immersive research and the power of witness; achronology and collage; and what we write and why we write. Contributors: Nancer Ballard, H. Lee Barnes, Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, Joy Castro, Robin Hemley, Judith Kitchen, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Dinty W. Moore, Sean Prentiss, Lia Purpura, Erik Reece, Jonathan Rovner, Bob Shacochis, and Joe Wilkins.
My poem “The Fragments of the World Seek Each Other” is up at About Place, the literary journal of the Black Earth Institute. This issue, The Future of Water, was guest-edited by the amazing Debra Marquart; I’m excited to dig in and read!
joewilkins.org 