Pleased to have five poems (with audio) up in this quarter’s issue of Dialogist, a sharp, new online literary magazine featuring poetry and visual art.
Category: News
The paperback has landed!
Copies will be available in bookstores and online in just under a month–just in time for Father’s Day!
Short Story in The Sun
Society of Midlands Authors
My second book of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward, has just been named a finalist for the 2012 Society of Midlands Authors Award for the best book of poetry by a Midwest author. You can read more about the award here.
Get Lit!
Next week I’m headed to what I’ve always thought of as one of the best literary events around, Get Lit! Loads of amazing writers this year–Joyce Carol Oates, Jess Walter, Kim Barnes, David Shields, Major Jackson, Robert Wrigley, Emily Danforth, and so many more–and lots of great panels, readings, and workshops. If you happen to be in Spokane, I’d love to see you! Here’s my schedule of events:
Event: Panel Discussion: Your Truth, My Truth, Their Truths: The Modern Memoir
Date: Friday, April 12
Time: 12 p.m.
Venue: North Idaho College, Molstead Library, Todd Lecture Hall
Description: Memoir is more popular than ever. Contemporary writers are taking risks of
storytelling technique and subject matter that continue to redefine the genre. Joe Wilkins’ memoir,
The Mountain and the Father, is a collection of stories about the men and boys he knew growing
up in the harsh landscape of northern Montana. Anna Vodicka’s essays have appeared in Brevity,
Ninth Letter, The Iowa Review, and other outstanding journals, and she is currently finishing her
first full-length memoir. Moderated by writer and NIC faculty member Jonathan Frey.
Event: Workshop: Crafting Evocative Prose
Date: Saturday, April 13
Time: 9:30-11:30 a.m.
Venue: Red Lion Hotel, Riverside Board Room 1
Description: The poet Richard Hugo claimed “all truth must conform to music,” for in music we
find a fuller, stronger truth. As a prose writer, especially as a creative nonfiction prose writer, I’m
not sure I buy that 100% of the time, but, nonetheless, I think Hugo’s on to something. In attending
to language, we not only say what it is we’re after in more effective, vivid ways, but we very often
find ways to say that which we didn’t even know we could say. We discover what it is we really
mean to say. In this craft lesson we will discuss four techniques for attending to language and
crafting evocative prose. Participants are asked to bring an essay-in-progress, as we will have some
time to apply these techniques in revision and share revised work at the end of the lesson.
Event: A Reading with Jim Lynch and Joe Wilkins
Date: Saturday, April 13
Time: 2 p.m.
Venue: Red Lion Hotel, Audubon/Manito room, lobby level
Description: From urban underbellies to Big Sky dreaming, writers have always sought to capture
the true essence of the Northwest. Olympia writer Jim Lynch dives into Seattle’s sordid past with
his latest novel, Truth Like the Sun. A tenacious newspaper reporter sets out to unmask corrupt local
politics and gets swept up in a story that goes all the way back to the famous (and infamous) 1962
World’s Fair. Joe Wilkins chooses farmland over skyscrapers in his memoir, The Mountain and
the Fathers. Set in the drought-afflicted area of northern Montana known as the Big Dry, his stories
reexamine masculinity and the American mythos of the West, all while set in a land that “chews
up young and old alike.” Both authors take us on a journey through the Northwest with humor and
heart, through familiar landscapes that local readers will particularly appreciate.
Details: Each author will have 15-20 minutes of reading time, followed by a joint Q&A after the
readings. Book signing to follow in the adjoining ballroom.
2013 Orion Book Award – Continuing Coverage
This last summer I spoke with Scott Gast of Orion about the power of storytelling, the physical imprint landscape leaves on us, and The Mountain and the Fathers. Orion has reposted the interview this week at their blog as part of their continuing coverage of the 2013 Orion Book Award.
2013 Orion Book Award
Just heard that The Mountain and the Fathers is a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award! Feeling very, very honored to be among such fine company and to be recognized by such esteemed judges and such a necessary magazine. Here’s the press release:
2013 ORION BOOK AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED
March 27, 2013 – Great Barrington, MA – Each spring, just before Earth Day, an important book is presented with the Orion Book Award in recognition of its success in addressing the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner.
The five finalists for the 2013 Orion Book Award are:
• Apocalyptic Planet, by Craig Childs (Pantheon Books)
• Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)
• Things That Are, by Amy Leach (Milkweed Editions)
• The Old Ways, by Robert Macfarlane (Viking)
• The Mountain and the Fathers, by Joe Wilkins (Counterpoint)
The winner will be announced during the second week of April, and the authors of all five books will receive a cash prize. Previous winning books include The View from Lazy Point, by Carl Safina (2012), The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman (2008), and Insectopedia, by Hugh Raffles (2011).
This year’s selection committee includes National Book Award winner and celebrated essayistUrsula K. Le Guin; best-selling author of The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea; renowned book critic and founder of BookSlut.com, Jessa Crispin; author and Orion contributing editor Erik Reece; and Orion’s associate editor, Hannah Fries.
Books eligible for the 2013 Orion Book Award can be either fiction or nonfiction and are judged on how they deepen our connection to the natural world, whether they present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and the extent to which they achieve excellence in writing. Over two hundred books published last year were considered for the 2013 Award.
Orion is celebrating its thirty-first year of publishing a bimonthly magazine devoted to the need for ecological awareness and a new relationship between people and nature. It has won numerous awards, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2010, and is based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Reflections West
I have a short essay, paired with a wonderful poem by Charles Goodrich, up at Reflections West, a really wonderful Montana Public Radio program. You can take a listen here.
Essay in Montana Quarterly
Very jazzed to have an essay on wild bison and land use in the latest issue of Montana Quarterly, a beautifully designed magazine full of great writing. Here’s a bit from the issue announcement:
Check out the Montana Quarterly’s spring lineup: Tim Cahill, Craig Lancaster and Joe Wilkins, just for starters. Their props include a couple High Plains Book Awards, even an Oscar nomination. And we’re just getting started. Click here to subscribe: http://www.themontanaquarterly.com/subscribe/
Trio of Good Reviews
The Mountain and the Fathers has just garnered reviews in The Briar Cliff Review, The Great Falls Tribune, and Montana Quarterly! The reviews aren’t available online, but here are some quotes:
Page after page and sentence after sentence, this is one of the best-written and most readable books to come across this reader’s desk, worthy of keeping company with such excellent nonfiction such as A River Runs Through It, Blue Highways, and Tom Montag’s Curlew. -Phil Hey, The Briar Cliff Review
Words are [Wilkins’] escape from a dry, treeless, stony world and the entryway into other worlds. They’re the paving stones to self-knowledge. Later he finds respite in stories—true or not, some half-remembered. “It is when we recognize how stories fail us and how stories save us. It is when we have heard them both and tell, in the moment of out greatest need, the story that will save us.” This book is one of those stories. -Carol Ann Clark, The Great Falls Tribune
Wilkins does a wonderful job of telling the world of daily life—the hippie math teacher who’s effective in part because he throws boys against walls until they learn, strawberry ice cream and fishing, snakes and prairie fires and cheap vodka—but he hits a crescendo near the end, when he leaves the toughness behind and lets his mother remember reality, warm and joyous and not elegiac at all, from the first moments of life with her husband to the last, just a few years later: “Dancing, she was saying, every night that week. He came in every night that week and took me dancing…Two-dollar champagne, she said. We drank it out of soda bottles and drove all through the night…Anyway, I loved him. I love him.” -Jamie Harrison, Montana Quarterly
joewilkins.org 