Ten
On birthdays and books.
My tenth birthday was the first I celebrated after my father died.
I’ve been shuffling through old pictures and think I’ve found one from that day. My grandfather sits beside me at the formica kitchen table, his big, working-man’s hands folded in front of him. Behind his glasses, his eyes are kind; his bald head shines. He’s trying to look happy, though he was never one for ceremony, never one for gatherings. He liked the plain facts of the prairie better. And, too, he was heartbroken. His beloved son-in-law, goddamnit, had gone and died.
I’m wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, my dishwater hair a mess. I’m not there yet but getting close to as big as my grandfather (in just a few years I’ll be taller, wider in the shoulders—my grandfather, the one father I had left, beginning to shuffle and stoop.) I’m smiling big, I’m just starting to unwrap a present. I was finishing, that spring, the fourth grade.
My mother isn’t in the picture because she was, I’m sure, taking the picture. Because she was doing what she had to do. Because she was making, despite loss and poverty and drought, a way out of no way. Because she was, even then, building the foundation that would allow her oldest son—at twenty-three, five years of university education in his rearview, an engineering degree in hand, all kinds of economically lucrative possibilities in his front pocket—to claim he wanted to be a poet.
And you know what she told me? God I wish I was half as kind and wise and strong.
“A poet,” she said, “how wonderful!”
Every Sky at Home will be the first book I’ve published since my mother died. It is, I’m realizing, my tenth: two novels, a memoir, five books of poetry, a textbook, and, now, a book of essays. She liked them all—she was always my mom—but she would have loved this one.
I hope you like it too.
On the Road
The realest, most intensely important stuff of this life, as the late, great Brian Doyle used to say, is the sharing of stories. I’ll be on the road with Every Sky at Home this fall. Come take a listen, buy a book, say hello—and maybe tell me a story!
Paulina Springs Books, Sisters, OR, September 2, 6:30 pm
Powell’s Books, in conversation with Leah Sottile, September 9, 7:00 pm
Dallas, OR Public Library, September 24, 6:30 pm
A Virtual Reading with Terrain.org, featuring Joe Wilkins, Steve Edwards, and Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, September 29, 5:00 pm - link forthcoming!
Joe Wilkins and Georgia Cloepfil at Linfield University, October 13, 5:30 pm
Joe Wilkins and Taylor Brorby at Elk River Books, October 15, 6:00 pm
River Arts & Books, Roscoe, MT, October 17, 5:00 pm
Bend Central Library, Bend, OR, December 2, 6:00 pm
Joe Wilkins and Suzanne Matson, Mountain Writers, Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, Portland, OR, December 16, 7:30 PM
Reading with the Spring Creek Project, Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, Corvallis, OR, January 21, 5:30 pm
New Work in the World
Literature is inefficient; it is particular, untimely, and un-targeted. And all this is part of its superpower; it is, as Ezra pound tells us, “news that stays news.”
The earliest essays in Every Sky at Home hail from many years gone by, from my time in graduate school, under the tutelage of the incomparable Kim Barnes. The latest essays in the book are from just a few years back, from the pandemic and my own children’s coming into adolescence.
And even the pieces below, the newest I’ve got, have been in the works for years. I’m sure excited to see them out in the world and in such lovely venues, doing, hopefully, the work of being news that stays news.
“The Empty Room Inside Each of Us,” a story at The Sun
“Failed Index,” a poem at Southern Humanities Review
See you out on the trails!
A beautiful book, Joe. You capture those wide Montana spaces, the stifling Mississippi Delta, the small town nuance of Iowa, and along the way smudge the lines between poetry and prose. But always, always it is the people and their complex relationship to place that transform these essays into gems. Thank you. Again.
Excited about your book of essays! I hope to make a reading this fall.