The French edition of Fall Back Down When I Die just hit bookstores, and, wow, it looks pretty good. Kind of amazing to see this Montana story make its way into the world.
French Edition of Fall Back Down When I Die
News
Thieve is here!
My fourth collection of poetry, Thieve, is here! Big thanks to Chris Howell and everyone at Lynx House Press for bringing this one into the world! Here’s a bit more about it:
Joe Wilkins, winner of the Oregon Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, returns with his fourth book of poetry, Thieve, his most ambitious collection yet.
Thieve is a pointed, political book, though the politics here are local, particular, physically felt. The central sequence―all subtitled “Poem against the Crumbling of the Republic”―was written in direct response to the Wilkins’s own transition from rural poverty in eastern Montana to coastal liberal comfort in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, as well as the presidential election of 2016, which brought to the national consciousness the grave division in American society between urban and rural people. Thieve is Wilkins’s poetic attempt, as someone who knows/has known both worlds, to speak across that chasm.
Thieve also interrogates chasms and barriers between the human and the natural, the present and the past, the parent and the child, between what we earn and what by grace is given.
Joe Wilkins’s poems, several of which are aptly subtitled “Poem Against the Crumbling of the Republic,” connect us by fragile threads to a past, a Western past that’s a stand in for our larger American past: the hardscrabble and hardworking, a grace and gratitude for what came before, and for what needs further reckoning, or mercy.
-Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner and Book of No Ledge
2019 Booklist Editor’s Choice
Fall Back Down When I Die is a 2019 Booklist Editor’s Choice for adult fiction, right alongside Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Salman Rushdie. Here’s what Booklist had to say:
In his unforgettable first novel, Wilkins writes of hardscrabble life on the northern Great Plains, creating characters with rich if troubled interior lives who are haunted by absent fathers.
Fall Back Down When I Die is a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Award!
Big news: Fall Back Down When I Die is a finalist for the prestigious First Novel Prize from the Center for fiction. Feeling real good about this! Here’s more from the Center for Fiction:
We are pleased to announce that debut novels by Chia-Chia Lin, Julia Phillips, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Ocean Vuong, Joe Wilkins, Lauren Wilkinson, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow are shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize! The finalists will read from their books and celebrate their achievement with the wider literary community at the First Novel Fête on December 9, 2019, to be held at the Center’s downtown Brooklyn location. The following evening, we will present the award to the winner at the Center’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York City. Judges this year are Maaza Mengiste, Claire Messud, Tommy Orange, Emma Straub, and Monique Truong.
The First Novel Prize, launched in 2006, was created as part of our literary nonprofit’s central mission to promote the art of storytelling and help further the careers of new writers. This annual prize carries a $10,000 cash award. Each of the other shortlisted authors will receive a $1,000 award.
Two Wonderful Conversations
Had the immense good fortune this summer to have two striking conversations–one with Sarah Aronson for MTPR’s The Write Question and one with Ben Bartu for Adroit. Both Sarah and Ben are fabulous poets and sharp interviewers. Such a joy to talk with both of them, and here’s a little snippet of each conversation:
BB: What acts of reclamation are occurring in Fall Back Down When I Die?
JW: There’s a kind of reclamation Verl’s character and a couple other characters in the book are enacting, trying to reclaim something that was never there. And so that, again, is unsustainable. It leads to violence, leads to a way of seeing the world as something that we can abuse, use, and ignore others’ claims on. But we can reclaim some things. We can reclaim stories. A lot of characters in this book are so silent about their stories. And it’s in the act of sharing them that they find their way to being who they can be. Wendell does it by the end, Maddy does it by the end. Gillian is enacting that, as well as Glenn. They’re trying to tell their stories, trying to tell their part in this wider story that they’ve suddenly been wrapped up in. I believe telling our stories can be an act of reclamation. Admitting what we’ve done to one another, especially here in the West, alongside this history of genocide. Admitting that and finding a way we might work together going forward, might move into a future where we might be hopeful again. And so in the book I see these characters enacting all kinds of reclamations. Some characters reclaim a way of being we might call a better kind of masculinity, and that’s something I’m thinking about a lot in my own writing: how we might be men and also own the stories that have come before us. We have to find a way to discard what is old and broken, what leads to broken lives and broken families, and hold on to those things that keep us whole and keep us together.
Sarah Aronson: How has the American Dream failed the West?
Joe Wilkins: I think the American dream is part and parcel of our notion of the American west. The trouble is we thought this was the place it would come to fruition. We thought manifest destiny would spread this patchwork blanket of small farms across the entire nation and it didn’t work. It never worked. It still hasn’t worked, and in a lot of ways, especially the High Plains West, the Mountain West, we’re still paying that price economically, ecologically, and physically for this sort of wrong-headed notion. We need to find a better way to be in this place and I think there are people doing that, and I’m pleased about it, but we need to keep working.
Two New Reviews
Two more great reviews for Fall Back Down When I Die. This time at High Country News and Split Rock Reviews!
“Gorgeous . . . Spellbinding . . . The land itself is almost a living character in the book, rendered both beautiful and ominous in Wilkins’s poetic prose . . . A gripping debut.” —Sarah Gilman, High Country News
“Early in Joe Wilkins’s first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, he writes, “The moon came up whistle thin. A tooth, a claw, the leanest blade.” This language carries through the rest of the novel, and it is symbolic of the stunning, haunting, and complex story that Wilkins weaves.” —Andrew Jones, Split Rock Review
More Reviews!
Been a wonderful spring and early summer of readings, and I’m pleased as can be Fall Back Down When I Die is garnering great reviews across the Northwest!
“There isn’t a wrong note in Wilkins’s novel. He manages to pull off the development of characters simultaneous with a growing sense of unease; the storm is becoming visible on the horizon…Wilkins is evolving into one of our best American writers.”―Chris La Tray, The Missoulian
“Nuanced and textured…Fall Back Down When I Die seeks to point a way forward toward community and compassion, toward understanding.”―Rachel Hergett, Bozeman Daily Chronicle
“Powerful…This is a story of realistic, complex characters whose lives intersect on a big canvas — as big as eastern Montana…Joe Wilkins infuses his novel with a sense of personal attachment to both the history and current realities of life and conflict across the vast landscape.” – Mindy Cameron, Lewiston Tribune
Reviews, reviews, reviews!
I’m a bit behind with these, but am just pleased as can be that Fall Back Down When I Die continues to garner strong reviews. Below, you can find selections from recent reviews at the Wall Street Journal, Orion, and Outside, and, too, you can check out Lithub’s Every Day Is Earth Day list of novels and poetry, which, alongside works by luminaries like John Steinbeck and Ursula K. Le Guin, includes Fall Back Down When I Die!
Wilkins’s propulsive debut, “Fall Back Down When I Die,” takes place in and around the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana during the Obama presidency, when anti-government paranoia escalated into sporadic crescendos of violence. Mr. Wilkins charts that course with skill and concision […] Though he stresses the persistence of kindness and community, the enduring depiction in “Fall Back Down When I Die” is of a small-scale civil war pitting towns, neighbors, childhood friends and family members against one another. Blood ties to the land result in generation-spanning blood debts.
– Sam Sax, the Wall Street Journal
To read Joe Wilkins’s first novel is to spend time in eastern Montana, to feel the sharp wind cutting across the cedar ridges, through the sagebrush and bunchgrass, kicking up dust that gathers into grit at the corner of your eyes. It is to hear the sweet, languid whistles of the meadowlarks in the fields. It is to feel “the gravel and the ruts and the old cracked tires” beneath you and to see, above you, always, the wide sky, its “whole box of colors” and its “extravagant stars,” that pull of the sublime to lift your gaze from the intractable earth. And it is to know how hard-earned the beauty is. Wilkins achieves a rich evocation of place through seasoned language, tough and tender like the steak the characters are always eating. It is a landscape where they chew on their trouble, pick old bones, are gnawed at by their losses.
– Holly Haworth, Orion
Wilkins’s novel feels insightful amid the ongoing debate over public land and legal rights, but it’s also timeless, and it treads the same kind of territory as writers like Kent Haruf and Ivan Doig, digging into quiet stories of people living close to the land.
– Heather Hansman, Outside
Another Strong Review
Fall Back Down When I Die earns another strong review, this time over at the National Review. Thanks to Nick Ripatrazone for this careful, wise read.
What I Wish My Children Could Learn from My Rural Upbringing
A little late with this, but I’ve got an essay up over at Lithub about rural America, community, and cultural division.
joewilkins.org 