Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family is a finalist for the 2027 Pacific Northwest Book Awards! Sure nice to share this nod with friends Maya Jewell Zeller, Emily Ruskovich, and Willy Vlautin. A very fine PNW reading list.
My tenth birthday was the first I celebrated after my father died.
I’ve been shuffling through old pictures and think I’ve found one from that day. My grandfather sits beside me at the formica kitchen table, his big, working-man’s hands folded in front of him. Behind his glasses, his eyes are kind; his bald head shines. He’s trying to look happy, though he was never one for ceremony, never one for gatherings. He liked the plain facts of the prairie better. And, too, he was heartbroken. His beloved son-in-law, goddamnit, had gone and died.
I’m wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, my dishwater hair a mess. I’m not there yet but getting close to as big as my grandfather (in just a few years I’ll be taller, wider in the shoulders—my grandfather, the one father I had left, beginning to shuffle and stoop.) I’m smiling big, I’m just starting to unwrap a present. I was finishing, that spring, the fourth grade.
My mother isn’t in the picture because she was, I’m sure, taking the picture. Because she was doing what she had to do. Because she was making, despite loss and poverty and drought, a way out of no way. Because she was, even then, building the foundation that would allow her oldest son—at twenty-three, five years of university education in his rearview, an engineering degree in hand, all kinds of economically lucrative possibilities in his front pocket—to claim he wanted to be a poet.
And you know what she told me? God I wish I was half as kind and wise and strong.
“A poet,” she said, “how wonderful!”
Every Sky at Home will be the first book I’ve published since my mother died. It is, I’m realizing, my tenth: two novels, a memoir, five books of poetry, a textbook, and, now, a book of essays. She liked them all—she was always my mom—but she would have loved this one.
I hope you like it too.
It’s not that you write alone, exactly, but there are the many hours spent scribbling in journals and clacking at the keyboard and pouring a third cup of tea and sometimes even just turning circles in your kitchen because you are indeed all alone and wrought up in a story. And as much as I love that solitary time to reckon and deeply feel, one of the great joys of releasing a book into the wild, I’ve discovered, is the chance to make connections, the gathering that happens—and has happened for millennia—around the sharing of a story.
I met Megan Torgerson in an online class for Hugo House a number of years ago, and Megan emailed me afterward, to follow up on some ideas from class and to mention that she produced a podcast, Reframing Rural, that I might like.
Reader, I’ll tell you right now, I took a listen and liked it a whole heaping bunch.
The fate of rural America matters to everyone, no matter where you live. —Reframing Rural founder, Megan Torgerson
So I was thrilled to get the chance to be a part of this ongoing conversation Megan has built and continues to curate. We talked last summer, about my latest novel The Entire Sky and so much more, and Megan has just released our conversation as a companion piece to this season’s focus on farm succession.
If you would have told me, when I was young and just beginning to understand the delineations and vastnesses between the world I was from and the worlds I saw in books and on television—if you would have told me that some forty years on I’d get the chance to sit down with another eastern Montana kid and take it all seriously, our primal places and the places we’ve been since, well, I might not have believed you. But it’s true.
Late again, but here’s the link to my latest over at Notes from the Journey Westward:
It’s been months since I’ve had a chance to catch up here. And, Lord, what months they’ve been. Loads of adventure, sadness, and grace. You can read through it all over at my Substack.
A couple of other notes:
As always, I’m out there teaching and reading. Come say hello!
Been a bit lax on keeping this space updated. Apologies. You can find a link to my latest newsletter below, as well as some fun upcoming events.
I’ve gotten a bit behind posting news here. The big news, of course, is my latest book of poetry, Pastoral, 1994, which is the first book I’ve done that’s a straight run—no sections or breaks—and though you’ll find here elegies, aubades, and songs, the sonnet or the ghost of the sonnet haunts most of these poems, which explore rural spaces, rural culture, and rural identity; the late years of the farm crisis in eastern Montana; and wonder, wildness, grief, loss, ecological devastation, and masculinity.
You can find out more about the book, and catch up on other news, via my two latest newsletters (clink on the images for links!)
This Saturday is going to be all kinds of amazing. Check out the full schedule, and here’s an interview with me about the festival over at Oregon ArtsWatch. I’ll be reading and speaking with the amazing Renee Watson (my daughter is so excited to meet her!) at 5 PM at the Portland Art Museum.
Stories of intergenerational kinship, families original and found, of loss and healing from Renée Watson (skin & bones) and Joe Wilkins (The Entire Sky), with moderator Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math and Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion).
From a lovely run through the mountains of western Montana to a graduate school reunion in Idaho and just lately closing the Sisters Saloon down with John Larison and Willy Vlautin, the last month and change have been all kinds of wonderful. And I’m not hanging up my spurs just yet! Love to see you in the coming weeks in Corvallis, Canton, Brooklyn, McMinnville, Bend, Salem, or Portland.
The Entire Sky Book Tour: A Reading with the Spring Creek ProjectSeptember 20 at 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm, Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, Corvallis, OR
The Entire Sky Book Tour: St. Lawrence University Writers SeriesSeptember 24 at 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm, St. Lawrence University, 23 Romoda Dr, Canton, NY 13617
On America: A Reading and Conversation at the Center For Fiction with Essie Chambers, Julia Phillips, and Joe Wilkins, moderated by Nina St. Pierre, September 25 at 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm, The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY
The Entire Sky Book Tour: Readings at the Nick, October 1, 2024 at 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm, Linfield University, Nicholson Library, McMinnville, OR
An Evening with Ellen Waterston and Joe Wilkins, Roundabout Books in Bend, OR,October 17, 2024 at 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
An Evening with Scott Nadelson and Joe Wilkins, The Book Bin, Salem, OR, November 1, 2024 at 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
The Entire Sky Book Tour: Portland Book Festival, Event Times and Places TBA, November 2, 2024
Been on the road with The Entire Sky and am just catching up here. So good to be sharing stories with you all. Here’s to the next song on the radio and the next stop!
