I don’t quite know how many essays I’ve published in Orion over the years, but I’m thankful for every one. Here’s a new, “Broken Badlands,” from the latest issue:
WHEN WE ARE SMALL and close to the earth, there is more landscape than time. It’s only later that we forget. Only later that we begin to play pretend.
Joe Wilkins, from “Broken Badlands,” Orion Autumn 2021
This summer, we drove 3000 miles across the country, from our temporary home in the North Country of New York to our permanent home in Oregon, in the middle of a pandemic and in the midst of tragedy and protest. The good folks at Orion Magazine asked me to narrate our readying for the trip, as well as the trip itself. You can find the resulting essays here: Crossing a Riven Country, Part 1 and Crossing a Riven Country, Part 2.
Here’s a sneak peek from the second essay:
We left in a light rain, the sky gray and shadowed and close.
We waved goodbye to our rambling, white house, to the park and little downtown, to the Grasse River, and not long after—I’m not sure exactly where, maybe north of Syracuse, our first mixed CD still spinning—we entered, suddenly and completely, that other world: the fast, loud, American universe of the interstate, of movement and hurry and the next stop, the next thing. After a year in the quiet of the North Country, after four months of sheltering at home, it was a shock. But perhaps even more shocking was how quickly—we weren’t even out of New York State—I found myself adjusting to it again, the rushed rhythms, diesel stink, and breathlessness.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Along the verge, I named sumac, maple, spruce. Across these months at home, I have grieved the delights of travel and sport, the sustenance and texture of community, yet this time has reminded me, taught me once again, how myriad and lovely are the slow and close at hand, how much we might see when we take the time to look carefully, that the pace of our wider culture, of capitalism, often obliterates what is near and intricate and dear.
I knew this. I grew up way out on the plains of Montana long before cell phones and Wi-Fi, grew up miles from neighbors, the land itself close at hand. But barreling down I-90 just east of the Pennsylvania state line, I had to remind myself.
I think we will have to keep reminding ourselves.
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
I’ve got new essays in recent issues of Orion and Riverteeth. Both grow out of our time down on the Rogue, time which seems to matter more and more as the days recede.
Crazy late with this (I’m just catching up), but I have a short essay in the September/October 2014 issue of Orion. As with every issue of Orion, this one is required reading; I mean, new work by Terry Tempest Williams, Luis Alberto Urrea, Brian Doyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore, as well as reviews, poems, and so much more–if you aren’t subscribed to Orion, well, you’re missing out!
Pleased to see that my essay “Eleven Kinds of Sky,” which was originally published in Orion Magazine and built of snippets from my memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, earned a notable nod in Best American Essays 2013, edited by Robert Atwan and Cheryl Strayed.
My poem “Drought” appears in the latest issue of Orion. Lots of wonderful stuff in this issue (as always–Orion’s plain great!), including a stunning/scary essay on the breast cancer industrial complex by Jennifer Lunden and a dreamy meditation on borders, dying rivers, and ghosts by Luis Alberto Urrea.
As part of Scott Temple’s Wyld-Er-Ness documentary series, Pam Houston and I sat down on a snowy spring day in Boston and talked writing and nature. You can find the newly released video at Orion Magazine’s blog.
Though it isn’t available online, my story “Notes from the Bulls: the Unedited Journals of Verl Newman” is in the latest issue of Orion. Lots of wonderful work in this issue, including essays by Barry Lopez and Ander Monson, poetry by Todd Davis, and a series of stunning paintings by James Lavadour that accompany my story. Truly, there’s just no excuse not to be subscribed to Orion!
Thanks to Scott Gast for the great interview about The Mountains and the Fathers. Here’s a short excerpt:
In the book’s prologue, you write, “In story we learn to live like human beings in the dark houses of our bodies.” I love that line—it’s the kind of sentence I’m tempted to write down, tear from my notebook, and pin on the wall. Can you say a bit about the power of story in your life?
My grandfather was a wonderful teller of tales. After Sunday dinner we’d all sit in the front room and read and talk until late. And no matter the topic at hand, my grandfather had a story for it, a story that deepened or turned or somehow complicated the conversation. There were seldom any morals, seldom any clear arguments or ideas. Yet the stories mattered; they were full of things to think on, to wonder at and hold close. And I did. I carried and still carry my grandfather’s stories.
joewilkins.org 