Stories of Place as an Antidote to Placelessness

Writer Joe Wilkins teaches how stories are rooted

This bonus newsletter is a monthly feature for paid subscribers, the seventh in the series. These extras showcase edited interviews with someone whose work intersects in some way with this newsletter’s focus—place, history, writing. I hope you enjoy this one and those to come.

Introduction

Two decades ago, a Master’s student in creative writing approached me at the end of class. He explained he hoped he could have some leeway on the final paper. As a creative writer, he wanted freedom to write more expansively than a standard term paper. Although I was a new professor and not sure about experimentation, I figured there would be no harm. That student was Joe Wilkins, who produced a richly researched, deeply understood, and beautifully written essay. (A version of that essay eventually appeared in print.)

Hailing from Montana, Joe is a professor at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and the author of many books and essays, including the forthcoming novel, The Entire Sky. His memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, earned the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award in Nonfiction and was the finalist for other awards. His first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, won the 2020 High Plains Book Award. All four of his books of poems have earned awards and recognition.

(NOTE: the following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Adam Sowards

How do you describe yourself and your work?

Joe Wilkins

I'm a writer, and I'm concerned mostly with issues that that feel close to my own life. And partly because of where I was born in Eastern Montana, partly because of circumstances I was born into—we made do with a part time teacher's salary most of the time I was growing up—I'm really concerned with issues of place and class.

I'm concerned with issues of the American West. There are a whole lot of things that I think I felt, inarticulately, as forces in my own life growing up—the mythologies, the genocide that allowed Europeans to be there in the first place—but now I'm trying to understand them more articulately as a writer.

I'm also really concerned with the lives of children and the ways that place and class and gender and all these other forces sometimes see their fullest effects in the lives of children and the lives, especially, of children on the edge or children who are struggling for one reason or another.

I always tell my students that we have this idea that writers are, you know, wise people who go up under the mountain and think great thoughts and then bring those thoughts down to the rest of us.

And to me, that's just seems so silly because I don't have any answers. I'm not an abstract thinker. I'm a narrative thinker. And so when I'm trying to think these things through, it's in the form of story.

It's in the form of stories I've heard, the form of stories I'm trying to tell about myself, about what I see around me, stories I'm inventing that somehow feel true to me—feel true to the place, true to the characters that have popped into my head.

So, it's not that I know anything about these things, it's that I'm trying understand, I'm attempting to know more fully.

Adam

I have two follow ups. First, what's your artistic, creative genealogy, or what conversations do you see yourself contributing to in your writing?