Near and Necessary

The snow started falling late last Friday, and kept falling as we slept.

The snow started falling late last Friday, and kept falling as we slept, an icy, wind-driven snow, and we woke the next morning to a world remade, a white winter brightness we seldom get in the rainy, gray Pacific Northwest.

My son's weekend basketball games were canceled, and looking at the forecast, we were pretty sure school would be canceled early the next week as well. Walter and Edie celebrated by tromping all over the neighborhood to go sledding with friends and play board games and watch movies. Liz and I took long walks—even snuck onto the lonely, frozen golf course!—and made big batches of butter chicken and ropa vieja. We tossed sunflower seeds to the twittering, hopping juncos (a group of juncos is known as a blizzard, appropriately) and switched out the hummingbird feeders every hour, so the nectar wouldn't freeze. On Monday we helped serve breakfast to homeless folks at a local church. On Tuesday, we made all the kids—we tend at most any hour to have a houseful of middle schoolers—sit down to a dinner of shrimp-and-sausage gumbo, even had them hold hands and say our homemade grace:

Thank you for this food,

thank you for this day,

thank you for friends and family,

hip-hip-hooray!

We had to navigate screen-time, of course, and bedtimes and breakfast dishes and laundry and chores. And with school and work canceled Tuesday, then Wednesday, we all went—maybe me most of all—a little stir crazy. But now with the snow and ice melting away beneath a hard rain, I'm already missing it, missing the way those days we turned toward one another and our place on the earth.

So, with this note I'm wishing you all just that: a turning toward what is near and most necessary. And, too, remember it's okay to grieve the good, cold days going away, even as we welcome the opening up that comes as everything thaws and rustles and readies for spring.

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The Entire Sky

The galleys of The Entire Sky have arrived! A thousand thanks to everyone who's helped in this long, long journey. But especially Liz—my first, best, and loveliest reader.

Pre-orders (which really matter, so, you know, if you're thinking about it, do!) are live at my favorite local bookstore, Third Street Books, and at yours.

And look for news of the summer book tour coming soon!

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Poetry News

Super excited as well to announce that my fifth book of poems, Pastoral, 1994, is slated for an early 2025 publication date with River River Books. This news is made all the sweeter by the fact that my book will be published alongside Corrie Williamson's latest collection, Your Mother's Bear Gun. Corrie is a friend and fellow alum of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Her poems are deft, wild, and wonderful.

Here’s a bit from the press:

We are beyond delighted to announce the two books we’ve selected from our Summer 2023 open reading period:

·       Pastoral, 1994 by Joe Wilkins

·       Your Mother’s Bear Gun by Corrie Williamson

These two remarkable books — chosen from among more than 300 manuscripts we received in June and July — will be published in early 2025. They could not be a better pairing. Though we did not set out to choose collections that spoke to and with each other so clearly, these two share deep roots in the landscapes of the American West.

Pastoral, 1994 calls softly into the lyric quietness, labor, and landscape of the rural West and its communities, bringing readers close to the earth, to the ditches, to the “flowery stink of alfalfa / hot breath of wheat.”

Your Mother’s Bear Gun takes on questions of violence and self-preservation, seeking the sometimes-difficult balance between loving the land and living on it; these poems sing to the “flat and fertile” prairies of middle America.

Here are few recently published poems that will appear in Pastoral, 1994:

• “Dirt Song” and “Cohagen Travelogue” at About Place

• “Husbandry” and “Tamping Bar” at Ilanot Review

• “Elegy with Adding Machine and Milk” at The Sun

• “Evening Elegy,” “I Am the One Who Finds the Slender Bones Left Behind,” and “Foreclosure” at Terrain.org

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Upcoming Classes

Super jazzed to be continuing to teach for Hugo House.

My next Zoom course, Our First Gods: Writing Our Parents, runs Saturday, March 2 from 1:10-4:10 PM PT—and still has some open seats! This class is a favorite of mine; so much good writing always comes from it. Here’s the write-up:

Too often unapproachable, unassailable—our parents are our first gods. How have we known them? How might we know them? And are we ready, if we are to know them, for our parents to fall from their thrones and become not gods (or devils) but the human beings they are? In this generative workshop participants will think, discuss, and write about a parental figure in the hopes that all will leave with the beginnings of a personal essay.

This spring, my next Zoom class for Hugo House, What We Really Mean to Say: Utilizing Poetic Techniques in Prose, is slated for April 20 from 1:10-4:10 PM PT. Look for it. Let’s keep writing!

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Recommendations

And a few recommendations:

• I thought I’d read nearly everything Mary Clearman Blew has written, but I somehow missed her memoir Balsamroot, which chronicles her elderly aunt's slide into dementia and her own reckoning with her family's complicated legacy of story and emotional withholding; it's wise, fierce, and so, so lovely.

• When it comes to tunes, I've been digging Nathaniel Rateliff and Plains lately.

• And Reservation Dogs just might be the best television show ever. If you don’t agree, well, sorry. You’re probably wrong.

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Maps

Last thing. I promise. I’ve been making maps, and even if they’re not especially good, I kind of love them. Here are the two that chart the landscapes and families of both Fall Back Down When I Die and The Entire Sky.

Hip-hip-hooray for all our many journeys, maps, and stories!