PCS Twelfth Night

Portland Book Festival: Joe Wilkins, author of ‘The Entire Sky,’ on importance of place and ‘the mythic years’

The Linfield University professor has written poetry, novels, essays, and memoir. "Working with language and story somehow gets me back into the way I need to be," he says.

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Joe Wilkins says his new novel is very much about Eastern Montana, where he grew up, but also “about the ways that we travel between places, and the ways places fit us and don’t fit us.” He will appear with Renée Watson and moderator Mitchell S. Jackson at 5 p.m. Saturday in Portland Art Museum’s Miller Gallery as part of the Portland Book Festival.

Joe Wilkins, poet, novelist, educator, and Oregon Book Award winner, believes in place. Moreso, he believes in the importance of letting ourselves be shaped by place, and learning from the landscapes around us — the landscapes that raise us. From Seattle and Spokane to the dry deserts of Montana, Wilkins’ new novel, The Entire Sky, delves into the world formed by landscape — that of a young boy on the run who takes solace with a grieving rancher named Rene Bouchard. Through careful observation of time, place, and relationship, Wilkins excavates the heart and soul of the West, exploring the meanings of heart and home.

“Place, in general, is something we would do well as writers and human beings to consider more fully,” Wilkins told me over the phone this week. “It’s the root to the ground of our being. It’s where what we consume and what sustains us comes from. So, place matters to me in my own life, and a big part of why it matters is because I grew up on a farm outside of a small town. The landscape itself was what we had. That was where we worked and played, and where we were with one another.”

Wilkins, who is director of Linfield University’s creative writing program, began his career as a poet and expanded to write literary nonfiction and novels. This book, he said, stems from his desire to write a story of being found. Mulling his lost connection with a childhood friend — a long-haired guitar-playing boy from Seattle — Wilkins found himself in the throes of the pandemic, slowly realizing he didn’t want to write another story of loss.

“I thought, ‘There’s too much lostness right now.’ And then the next thought was, ‘Who might find a young man like that on the run?’” Wilkins explained, “I thought of someone a lot like my own grandfather, who the character of Bouchard, the sheep rancher, is modeled on. And while these characters are not my friend or my grandfather, they take their inspiration from them, along with that sense of the great second chance.”

Meandering, Western, and rural, The Entire Sky is also distinctly Oregonian, touched by Wilkins’ connection to the Pacific Northwest and the state he has called home for 11 years. Wilkins, who was raised on a sheep and hay ranch in Eastern Montana, said he was inspired by Seattle’s ’90s grunge scene at an early age, idolizing the music of Nirvana and dreaming of a forest beyond the Bitterroot Range.

“Growing up, I was often looking longingly West, looking both to Western Montana, but also farther… this shining city on a hill, this wet, green place where amazing music was pouring out from. And so it’s a great delight to be able to make my own life here, to raise my children here. This is their place. And in a lot of ways, it’s kind of the opposite of where I grew up, which is called the Big Dry. This is kind of the Big Wet, and it’s wonderful to get to know it with them and know it differently than they will.”

During the Portland Book Festival, Wilkins will be joined by author Renée Watson and moderator Mitchell S. Jackson in Portland Art Museum’s Miller Gallery for a reading and discussion titled “Reconciliation” at 5 p.m. Nov. 2. Tickets are available through the website. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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When did you first know you wanted to be a writer, and how did you begin writing?

Wilkins: It took a while. I grew up in a tiny town in Eastern Montana and went to just the local county high school, and I didn’t realize that people were still writing. I sort of had this idea that everything had been written, and we just read it now. I was a great reader. I loved to read, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know any writers or read a lot of contemporary work. When I went to college, I studied engineering and soon after realized I didn’t really like engineering, but I didn’t know what else to do. As a ranch kid, I just stuck with it. That’s what you did when you had to fix more fence and stick with it.

Eventually, I had just enough room my senior year to take a couple of electives and I took a creative writing class. Very quickly, everything changed for me. I started reading work by people who’d written more recently — people writing about Montana and about small towns and poverty. As soon as I encountered that work and the ways it made me feel and made me think, I was hooked. I didn’t quite know what I was planning to do with that or what that would look like in the world, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it. I knew I wanted to write and to read. There have been a few twists and turns since then; I taught high school for a while, then went back to grad school and transitioned to higher ed, but pretty much since that class, I’ve been writing ever since.

When you began writing, did you start with poetry?

I did. That first class I took was a poetry class. And when you’re a beginning writer, even a sentence can be hard. To try to make something that spans paragraphs feels like so much. So I started as a poet, and the poems tended to be short. Eventually, as I kept writing, I gained more facility and confidence. I started stringing together these short fragments into bigger things, such as stories and essays. Because as a reader, what first grabbed me were the novels of Steinbeck and Willa Cather. And so I knew I wanted to try to reach for longer work. I wanted to try to tell bigger stories. Eventually, I gave it a shot, and I failed a lot, but was able to finally put together stories that I was proud of and build them into these novels.

How different are your processes for writing poetry and novels, and how do you transition between the two, coming from a poetry background? 

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In the beginning, I don’t think there was much of a differentiation. There was just the feeling of wanting to write, wanting to create, and wanting to build something new out of the mess of experience — the bits of memory, the bits of wonder.

As I’ve continued to write, though, they do seem to come from very different places. Poetry, for me, comes from a desire to play with language, to see what the language might do. Literary nonfiction comes from a desire to try to understand something that I don’t quite understand…. It’s a sense of wanting to make sense of something out in the world, or something in my own past.

Fiction works a little differently. Fiction often comes from the desire to want to know something new. You want to see what happens. You want to follow it. I think that is one of the great powers of fiction that keeps drawing me to it as a reader and writer. In fiction, we get to spend intimate time with these “others,” who are sometimes a little like us and sometimes very unlike us. We get a chance to walk around with them and feel with them and see with them. So fiction does some really powerful magic. It sort of reminds us we are one another. In the writing of fiction, I feel this sense of the self going away, and the characters rising up. They become the world in front of me, just for a little bit.

In The Entire Sky, you have specific characters that drive the story. What was your inspiration behind these characters, and what was the catalyst for writing the novel? 

The character of Justin, who we open with, is a young man in the middle of Montana, on the run with his guitar. It’s 1994 and he wears long blonde hair and earrings in both ears. He’s modeled on a friend I met when I was growing up in Montana, a kid who was in town for just a summer.  We ended up working together at the county school as janitor’s assistants, which was kind of a terrible job, but it was wonderful because he was there and he was someone I didn’t know. He was new, and not only that, he was from Seattle. He had holes in his jeans and ratty flannels, and he would bring his guitar to work and play acoustic Nirvana tunes at lunch. He seemed, for me, a connection to this wider world, and in the way of young people, we were almost immediately best friends, and started making plans for him to go to school there. Then he disappeared. He’d been living with some relatives and it wasn’t working well. I don’t know all of the ins and outs, and I’ve tried to find out a little bit more, but I’ve mostly run into dead ends. And so his story, to me, was one of lostness. He was lost to me.

Place also seems to have a large role in the book. He comes from Washington and goes to Montana, where you’re from. Can you talk more about your connection to the place where the book is set and its significance?

I always say that I lived the first half of my life in Eastern Montana, and the second half… It’s getting to the point where I’ve had a little more time outside of Eastern Montana than in. But those childhood years, those first 19 years, matter deeply. Those are the mythic years, and the ways I am in the world are very much influenced by the place I grew up — very much part and parcel of Eastern Montana. That’s the place my imagination begins when I begin to dream and imagine. It starts with the field out front of our house.

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In The Entire Sky, it’s very much about Eastern Montana and it’s about the ways the characters get this second chance at a family in that landscape — a landscape where they’re close to the facts of life; sometimes violent, sometimes brutal, and very often beautiful. But it’s also about the ways that we travel between places, and the ways places fit us and don’t fit us.

What inspires you to keep writing?

Writing is the one way I know how to make sense of and be wholly, fully, and sustainably in the world. It’s just become a part of who I am and how I make sense of things, how I feel OK in my own skin and bones. We all need those things that still us, that help us step into ourselves and the world around us a little more fully. Writing is the one that works for me. Writing is the one that I’ve discovered. Working with language and story somehow gets me back into the way I need to be.

When do you know whether what you’re working on is going to be a poem, novel, or essay?

I know very early what genre it will be in. The tougher question for me is always whether what I’m working on is any good or not, or if it’s worth continuing. I will often spend a lot of time on something, then suddenly realize it’s not right at all. Sometimes there’s some salvage to be done. I can back up and turn another direction. But I have had the experience that what I need to do is write a nearly full novel that doesn’t work. I did that for both of the last books. I had been working on something for a couple of years, amassed a great pile of words, and suddenly realized, “Wait, this, this isn’t working,” before I pivoted to something else.

In your opinion, what makes a great novel, or what makes a great story?

Oh, boy, that’s a tough question. Work that really matters to me is often work that helps me see a world I think I know in different ways. It helps me rethink and re-understand human relationships. I like work that surprises me. I always tell my kids that sad songs are the best songs, and I enjoy work that makes me deeply sad, but also somehow heartened by that sadness and that struggle — as if that struggle has taught me something or allowed me something. I also love work that challenges what I’ve taken for granted, and it does so not by simply being provocative or avant-garde, but by digging into an experience of what goes on between and here on these landscapes we live on.

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What have you enjoyed reading lately?

I just finished John Larison’s The Ancients and thought it was so wonderfully strange, profound, and moving. It was very much about human beings struggling to figure out how to live on these landscapes that are shifting and changing, which is something many of us are struggling with right now. I also finished a great novel by Ash Davidson called Damnation Spring, about logging communities in Northern California, which, since moving to Oregon, is something I’ve been trying to pay attention to … trying to understand the history of small communities and the Cascades and the Coast Range. And though this is set in California, I very much felt like I was learning about my new home place.

What are you most excited about during this year’s upcoming Portland Book Festival?

It looks jam-packed! I’m not excited about having to make all these tough decisions about what to attend, because there’s lots of stuff going on at once. Richard Powers is a great favorite of mine, so I’m very excited for that. I’m also excited that Tessa Hulls is reading from her new graphic memoir.

 Is there anything else you want readers to know ahead of this weekend?

Just that I’m always thankful to readers for picking up a book. It’s a good thing to do. I often tell my kids, “Think about something that will build you up with your time.” Books, even the toughest ones, the saddest ones … can build us up.

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Amy Leona Havin is a poet, essayist, and arts journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She writes about language arts, dance, and film for Oregon ArtsWatch and is a staff writer with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Her work has been published in San Diego Poetry Annual, HereIn Arts Journal, Humana Obscura, The Chronicle, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Archipelago Gallery, and Art/Lab, and was shortlisted for the Bridport International Creative Writing Prize in poetry. Havin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts and is the Artistic Director of Portland-based dance performance company, The Holding Project.

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