The Tilt

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 (I’m doing another Hugo House class in a couple of weeks, if you’re interested), 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.

Working on copyedits for Every Sky at Home now, and still gathering good words from the amazing likes of Erica Berry, Michael Kleber-Diggs, and Shann Ray. If you want to write and pitch a review, let me know and I’ll get you an ARC!

Joe Wilkins’s essays are gemstones cut with utter precision, revelatory and gleaming, as fierce with inquiry as they are tender in execution. Reading this book means pausing at the end of an essay to look out the window and remember to breathe. With intimate vignettes and extraordinary observation, these essays illuminate not just the American landscape from Montana to Mississippi to Iowa to Oregon, but what it means to steer a body―electric with love and awe, grief and uncertainty―through a world of deep connection with other beings. ―Erica Berry, author of Wolfish

The best guides see life and landscape with attentiveness and awe. They take it all in: the miraculous and the seemingly mundane, the eternal and the ephemeral, what’s difficult and what difficulty can allow. They see beauty when it’s right there, and they know how to hunt for it. Every Sky at Home is keenly observed and richly rendered. It results from a curious mind and a heart wide open to wonder. Joe Wilkins is exactly the guide to take you on what is, throughout, a spectacular journey. ―Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things

How one approaches the history, present, and future of America, and within America the American West, is not only a cultural touchstone with great ramifications, but a kind of plea to the depth of our collective humanity. Joe Wilkins’s book reveals how important a wholistic sense of one another―and one another’s ecology―is, and why it’s so necessary in our frail but vital attempts to help to heal the heart of the world. In this gorgeous book of essays on the wilderness of the American West and the wilderness of the human heart, Wilkins gives us everything we need.”―Shann Ray, author of American Masculine and Where Blackbirds Fly

The Oregon Book Awards ceremony is less than a week away and Pastoral, 1994 is a finalist! Check out a few poems from the book at Terrain.org and this rich conversation with Corrie Williamson and Lauren Korn at The Write Question.

A few weeks back, in early March, an older man—thin, bent at shoulders—hitched to a stop by our front gardens and studied the spring flowers a moment, then looked up at me. I’d seen him before. I think of him as one of the walkers, one of the maybe six or eight folks I regularly see walking as in the mornings I scribble and sip coffee on the front porch.

“The daffodils are here,” the old man said, his voice gravelly, serious, strong, “to tell us to keep going!”

He turned, then, and kept walking.

Keep writing. Stay in touch.