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.
joewilkins.org 