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.
Category: News
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
Conversation with Brandon Schrand
Last spring I had the good fortune to carry on a dialogue with writer Brandon Schrand about form, language, and experimentation in the writing of memoir. The Mountain and the Fathers eschews chronology for fragmentation and thematic connection, and Brandon’s newest, Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior, is a freewheeling, fun, affecting memoir penned in the found form of a works cited. You can check out our conversation in this month’s issue of Brevity.
The Mountain and the Fathers – Author Signing at AWP
On Thursday, March 7, I’ll be at the Counterpoint Press table at the AWP Bookfair in the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA signing copies of my memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers. Stop by if you like!
Also, there’ll be lots of other wonderful Counterpoint titles at the table to peruse as well, including David McGlynn’s memoir A Door in the Ocean; BK Loren’s novel Theft and collection of essays Animal, Mineral, Radical; Susan Sherman’s novel The Little Russian; and Dana Johnson’s novel Elsewhere, California. Great books all!
AWP in Boston
I’ll be headed to the 2013 AWP Conference and Bookfair in Boston here in a few days for four days of book signings, readings, listening to panel presentations, catching up with friends, and wandering in and out of various pubs. If you’re in town, and you’re interested, here’s my event schedule:
Thursday, March 7, 2-3 pm, Bookfair, White Pine Press Table
Author Signing, Notes From the Journey Westward, Joe WilkinsThursday, March 7, 7 pm, Emerald Necklace Conservancy, 125 The Fenway
Wild Lives / Raucous Pens: Readings from Ecotone, Hawk & Handsaw, and
Terrain.org
Hosted by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy and located at the
Conservancy’s historic Shattuck Visitor’s Center on the Fenway, just a
15-minute walk from the Hynes Convention Center. Emceed by Kathryn
Miles and Simmons Buntin and featuring literary readings by David
Gessner, Sheryl St. Germain, Derek Sheffield, Cynthia Huntington, Joe
Wilkins, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Hannah Kreitzer, and Bill Roorbach. Beer
and wine will be served in this cozy (you might say, intimate) cottage
setting.Friday, March 8 3-4:15, Room 208, Level 2
F238. New Writing from Orion. (Jennifer Sahn, Pam Houston, Chris
Dombrowski, Joe Wilkins, Tania James) The Orion editors believe that
people are a part of nature and that the environment is everything
that is—which translates into a broad mandate for a literary magazine,
allowing Orion to publish the best writing at the intersection of
ecology and culture. Join us as four recent contributors read and
discuss their essays and short stories from Orion.Saturday, March 9, 4:30-5:45 pm, Room 309, Level 3
S260. Counterpoint Press Reading. (Dan Smetanka, David McGlynn, Dana
Johnson, Susan Sherman, and Joe Wilkins) A reading by prose writers
who have had books published in 2012 by Counterpoint Press. Two
memoirists and two novelists read work spanning a range of landscapes,
time periods, and subjects. The editor who acquired the books
moderates and discusses what drew him to each title, while the authors
themselves read and reflect on their experience of working with one of
the nation’s largest and most respected independent literary
publishers.
The Book Stand
Notes from the Journey Westward, my second full-length collection of poems, is featured in the latest edition of The Book Stand at Newpages!
Reading with David Gessner, Kathryn Miles, and Many Others
This week you can check out David Gessner’s recently imagined sit-down with the Washington Post over at the always-entertaining Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. And I’m very excited to be reading with Dave, one of my environmental writing heroes, as well as Kathryn Miles, Simmons Buntin, Cheryl St. Germain, Derek Sheffield, Cynthia Huntington, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, and Bill Roorbach on March 7th at Shattuck Visitor’s Center on the Fenway in Boston, MA!
2012 Montana Book Award Honor Book
Very excited to hear that The Mountain and the Father has been named a 2012 Montana Book Award Honor Book! Lots of great writers–Deidre McNamer, David Quammen, and Timothy Egan, among others–have won or been honored by the Montana Book Award in the past, and this year is no different, with two of my recent favorites, Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post and David Abrams’s Fobbit, winning the prize and being named an honor book, respectively.
Shout-out in the Missoulian
Just ran across this nice shout-out for The Mountain and the Fathers in the Missoulian. Nice to be named alongside greats like McMurtry, Doig, and Ford, and I’m particularly pleased to be keeping company with David Abrams and his wonderful debut novel, Fobbit.
joewilkins.org 