40. Good Talk #8: Joe Wilkins

"Pretty weird stuff, ain't it?"

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I get a lot of emails. Maintaining the health of my email inbox sometimes feels like tending to an under-nourished Tamagotchi: if I go too long without checking on the poor thing, the situation will get out of hand.

This is not a newsletter about email, but it is a newsletter that began with one particular email that I found buried in my inbox one day. It was from the Oregon novelist, poet and Linfield University professor Joe Wilkins¹, telling me about his new book. He wanted to send me a copy, and I said, sure, yeah, why not.

What I did not expect is that the novel that would arrive in my mailbox, called Fall Back Down When I Die, would grab me by the scruff of my neck in the way that it did: dropping me into the Big Dry of Montana and conjure up the kind of Western personality, and conflicts, that I’ve encountered more than once in my reporting. Joe’s writing flies at you, and once you start reading his work, it’s hard to put his books down.

With Joe’s permission, I just want to share the very first words of that with you — just to give you a sense of the power this book hits with, narrated through the voice of a character named Verl:

VERL

Day Two

Not out in all this country. Not even with your ATVs and radios and such as that. Not even. What I’m saying. You won’t find me. Not out in all this country. I can run and hide and run and even if it would be only a moment at six hundred yards and you would have to put a bullet in my back these mountains here are mine you fuckers you fuckers and you cowards I am telling you for fuck all and ever these Bull Mountains are mine.

Through much of the work I’ve done over the years, I’ve come to write more and more about the places where the stories I’m looking at occur: the ground, what lies beneath that ground, and who. Because even as things start to look more and more the same in places, the things that happen in those places are often unique to the people and culture of that place. I’ve found such a kinship with the editors at High Country News² over the years, who also believe that explaining the where of a story is just as important as those other W words.

Last summer, just as the camellias were playing their silent symphony of color in the Willamette Valley, I showed up early to the lovely Terroir Festival, where I’d been asked to speak about my work. I am early to absolutely nothing (even Zoom meetings), but I wanted to be there to hear what Joe had to say from the stage about place. And I learned so much from him.

Recently, Joe said he’d be up for being the latest subject of this “Good Talk” series, and it was great to pick his brain about why place matters so much — both to writers and readers — and learned my favorite grandpa-expression that I can use to get out of any conversation I don’t want to be having anymore.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

LEAH SOTTILE: 

I think I wanna start by asking you one of your own questions. 

JOE WILKINS

Oh? 

LS: 

You asked your participants at the Place Writing workshop that I took from you last summer at the Terroir Creative Writing Festival in Newberg what their primal and chosen landscapes were. I'd love to hear more about that from you.

JW: 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, my primal landscape, without a doubt, is Eastern Montana. The bend of the Musselshell River, where, where our sheep and hay farm was. And then out onto the Big Dry where my grandfather had his dry land ranch where we ran cattle and sheep. That country: cactus, sagebrush, yucca, dry, dry, dry in the summer with afternoon thunderstorms, cold and windy in the winter — that’s definitely the primal place. It's a beautiful — starkly beautiful — place. When people think of Montana, they often think of the west side; there’s a lot of that east side over there. 

I think here in western Oregon is my chosen place. A lot of that has to do with my children. We moved here when they were two and three. They’re growing up here, and so this is their primal place: cedar trees and ferns and slugs. In many ways, instead of the Big Dry, it's the Big Wet. This is their place. I'm getting to know it right through them.

LS: 

Tell me a little bit more about why the chosen and primal landscapes became a fixture of the teachings that you do about place writing.

JW:

I think we live in a culture that kind of wants to obliterate place. You can eat at the same restaurants, look at the same stuff along the side of the freeway in any corner of the United States and, and save a few little changes. It is really the same. We wanna make it look all the same: suburbs here look like the suburbs there. That, to me, is a really, really sad thing because I do think that place matters deeply in our lives. Some of us are lucky enough to be born to a place that fits us, that just helps us be the self we need to be. Some of us have to go looking for that a little bit. But I do think place matters as much as community, but of course, community rises out of place. So these are all connected. 

I also think as a culture, we should pay more attention to place. We should pay more attention to its ramifications in our own lives, our effect on the places we live. And as writers too, I think that's the case. I often tell students, especially in poetry writing, that if I don't know where I am in a poem, I’m probably not gonna read very far. I need to know where I am. And sometimes that place of a poem is complicated and strange. Sometimes it shifts on us, and that's okay with me.

LS: 

Was there a writer that you read, or a particular moment you remember in your writing career, when all of a sudden, you thought ‘oh, place is actually something I need to work on,’ or that it started to matter for you? 

JW:

Yes, absolutely. It was as an undergrad at Gonzaga University. It was in a class with Dan Butterworth. In my memory, it's the first day that he read Richard Hugo's “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” to us. At the time I'd been reading a lot, but mostly, mostly fiction, not a lot of contemporary poetry and mostly things that had been handed to me. It was very piecemeal. I was not an English major. I was an Engineering major. But hearing “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” —which is this wonderful poem about the internal state of this guy wandering this small, decrepit town mirroring his own decrepitude and sadness, but also there's these hints of maybe something still standing, something still working inside of it — I just thought, ‘wait a minute, you can do this?’ 

There's a whole stanza in that poem that's all questions. And I remember realizing you didn't have to have answers. So that poem sort of rocked me. I just thought, ‘oh, wait a minute. This is not what I thought poetry was or writing was, but this is way cooler than I thought it was. 

And then from Hugo, I found James Wright and Gary Soto, Louise Erdrich³ — who it feels like places are if not the prime force, one of the prime forces always at work in their poems and their stories. That was the moment that suddenly I realized I could write about something like I experienced it and that would be okay.

LS:

I had a very similar experience in a class at Gonzaga, in a journalism class. I read Joan Didion — her essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I talk about this piece endlessly because it's very fraught, but she writes about this very specific place in California and how it attracted people with a version of the American Dream that they wanted to impress upon that land. I knew I wanted to be a journalist before that, but I read that and I was like, 'wait, this is journalism?’ I wanna do this.

JW:

<laughs>. Yeah. Right. She's so smart too. I mean, Hugo goes on so much about his own internal struggle, but she's so smart about culture and the social ways that the group of people are in a place. 

LS:

Yeah. But also I think it makes her so controversial too. Like sometimes I read that essay and I'm like, ‘it's brilliant.’ And then I'm sometimes like, ‘God, she's so mean.’ 

JW:

Sure.

LS:

In your poetry collection Thieve, I was really struck by how centered it is in the West. It feels like something you dug out of the ground here. You're writing about people that I feel like I know. Talk a bit about the inspiration for that book and what fires that collection was forged in.

JW:

We moved here to Oregon after living in Iowa. So we were back in the West and the Bundys took over Malheur and Trump was elected. Suddenly I felt myself just really funneling back into that primal landscape, that primal place. 

Much of Thieve was pushed by being contacted by an old friend from high school I hadn't heard from in 20 years. He sent me an email and it was clear from the email that he was maybe struggling a little bit. He didn't come out and say exactly what it was. And so I sent an email back, trying to reconnect. And then he sent a somewhat longer one. So I sent a more open-hearted longer one. And then that's the last I heard. And I remember at the time, like, just waiting for the next email because I wanted to continue this conversation. And it didn't come. And so a lot of the poems, especially the, you know, the “Poems against the Crumbling of the Republic” are built around wanting to continue that conversation. Speak to that old friend. Try to say something that would matter to the both of us. 

“The Lost Boys” poems are part of that too. They come out of this thinking about, ‘okay, I wonder where, so-and-so is now? I wonder what he's doing now?” My first book of poems is very much from this child's perspective looking out at this world, where now I'm looking back at it with the knowledge and struggles of an adult. Thieve is kind of coming out of that, being in the West, but not being exactly in the West that I knew and trying to negotiate those two spaces. 

LS: 

Recently I was listening to a poet who I really enjoy, named Coleman Stevenson, reading her work aloud and explaining her views on poems. And she was sort of saying ‘I really don't care what people take away from my poetry — if they experience a sensation or a feeling that I didn't intend, that's okay. Because it's just about an experience.’ Are you wanting your readers of poetry to take away a specific message?

JW: 

Fundamentally, I do think poems are an experience. We're not just communicating information, we’re communicating this full body, heart, soul, bones and muscles experience. Or attempting to. It also has to do with the mind, of course. It also has to do with ideas. It has to do with questions. So that experience is important that you feel like you've gone through something, moved through something — physically moved through something.

But I do attempt to make that experience particular. I know people will bring all sorts of stuff to the work, and they will grab onto things that matter to them in different ways. But I also wanna be particular enough, and focused enough, and clear. I strive to be as clear as possible when I'm writing poems. It's not that I have a particular message. 

LS:

I wanna talk to you about the West. It’s something we talk about so much in the stories I’ve done for High Country News⁴. I’m always going on about the way the West is reduced to stereotypes. And I'm curious if that's something we can talk about a little bit, seeing that you have lived in two extremely different parts of the West, culturally and geographically. Talk to me a bit about that. When you hear the term “the West,” what does it mean to you?

JW:

First off, I totally agree. It's very often reduced and that always troubles me. I teach a class called Rural America in Literature, Film, and Song. It's trying to get rid of what I see as the two primary stereotypes of rural America. The first is the yeoman farmer. This well of moral goodness, this patriarch caretaker: gentle, but tough! The small town that the yeoman farmer calls his own — that’s also gendered right? The town is healthy and good, and there's churches and schools and people care for one another and that kind of thing. There’s that stereotype on one side and then on the other, the white trash or redneck. That kind of joke that you see really too often on Saturday Night Live and other places. There might be some kernels of stuff we can mine from either mythology, but they're both incorrect, right?

There's so much more underneath there. There's so much more diversity, so many more histories and stories in the West. They're endlessly interesting and I'm always learning, and finding something new out about a particular people's history or a particular place that you just wouldn't guess, or you wouldn't know, because those two stereotypes blind us or make us reduce things too often. 

When I published the novel Fall Back Down When I Die, there were good reviews. But then you look at Goodreads reviews — 

LS:

 <laughs> Joe! Why are you looking at Goodreads reviews? Do not look at Goodreads reviews!

JW:

The fun part was every once in a while there'd be one that would say something like, ‘I'm so sick of stories about celebrating men and guns. Put this down after 30 pages.’ And then the next one would be something like, ‘what does a guy from Portland, Oregon know about the West? This was crap.’ I sort of love that there were those two strong reactions, and that neither side was happy 

LS: 

I mean, that's how you know you're doing it right. 

JW: 

I guess. 

LS: 

I got a lot of the same feedback about Bundyville. Why are you doing this? Why are you talking about these people? Don't talk about them. I just think that not talking about a thing doesn't get us anywhere. 

JW:

There were some comedic things about the takeover at Malheur. But the wider culture treated it all as a joke. I just remember experiencing it from afar and thinking, ‘this is many things, but it is not a joke.’ This is very real. That's what I so appreciated about Bundyville, is that you took it seriously.

LS:

I wanna hear more about your processing of that takeover. Initially I think talking about that situation is the reason we first got in touch. 

JW: 

We'd been here a couple years in Oregon. We moved here with children that were two and three, and you're so focused, you’re so looking inward in those early years. And it felt like we had just started to look up, and that's what I saw. That was one of the first things I was like, ‘whoa, whoa, what's going on?’ I had that weird, discordant feeling — like the way people are speaking about this isn't making sense to me. And then I had to think about ‘why is that? Why is what I'm hearing not not working for me?’ And it came back to because people aren't taking it seriously. Then that gets back to the idea that they're not taking these places seriously either and what goes on in them. So I wanted to take it seriously. I would see pictures of Ammon Bundy and I would think, ‘I could've went to high school with that guy. I wanted to take him seriously and think about what was happening there. Bundyville helped me do that immensely, as well as writing Thieve. 

LS: 

When did you write Fall Back Down When I Die? 

JW: 

It was published in 2019, and that was very much a response as well. That kind of came in two sections. So the first: there’s a beautiful short story by Eudora Welty, beautiful and horrifying, um, called “Where Is The Voice Coming From?” It's written in the voice of the murderer of Medgar Evers, the Civil Rights leader. I had long been fascinated with the story. I remember, looking back west from Iowa, seeing the tussles over over delisting of wolves and thinking like, well, you know, one of the things Welty is doing so well is owning her own primal place — her own part of Mississippi — and writing and taking seriously this person who's horrifying, even as she disagrees. She’s making this huge, empathetic leap. So I thought, okay, maybe, maybe I'll try something like that. 

So I wrote a short story that was just from Verl’s point of view — attempting to write from the space that I fully, fundamentally disagreed with, but also trying to take it seriously. Trying to think of this person as a human being with their own impetuses and beliefs and convictions. That short story was published in Orion. A friend emailed me after he read it, and he was like, 'I love the story, but where's the rest?’ And I said, ‘what do you mean, where's the rest?’ And he said, ‘what this guy has done is going to have ramifications in this community.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. Yeah, it will.’ 

So from there, I started working on this novel that was trying to imagine what happens next. Verl has done these things. He’s done these awful things that will shatter a community. I began that process just before, but then was watching the Malheur takeover as I was thinking this through and thinking about, ‘okay, what's this going to do to those communities?’ The community in Harney County, as well as many Western communities who are watching this, wondering and thinking is this ‘what's going to happen here? Or we should do something like this here.’ 

LS:

So I grew up in suburban Portland. At that point, I was very familiar with what anti-government meant, but not in the same vocabulary that the Bundys used. Like I grew up when forest protests were happening. The first protest I went to when I was 16 was at the US Forest Service building, but it had everything to do with clear cutting. Also I was a teenager. I had probably no idea what it had to do with. But having said that, I understood this sort of lefty, hippie, Eugene version of anti-government ideas were out there. So at first, Malheur was an education for me. Do you remember growing up with that strain of anti-government thought in Eastern Montana?

JW:

Without a doubt. My mom had left that small community and gone to college, and brought back with her very different politics from the place she grew up when she came back. I admire my mom very much and tend to agree with her politically. And that marked us very different in that community. I remember a lot of back-of-the-bus, on-the-way-to-basketball-games arguments with friends about things like access to guns, and wolves. That was very much part of just what we talked about. It was all the way from people who I knew who I couldn't take very seriously, who were vehemently racist and hate-filled, to people like my grandfather, who I admired very much. Because of the way he voted and because of the fact that he was a landowner and a rancher, I'd sort through their mail on the kitchen table and he would get mail from all these groups. He wasn’t a part of them, but they were aware of him, um, and aware of us. 

I remember once distinctly reading something that was pretty — I was just like, whoa. And I looked up at my grandpa and he said, ‘pretty weird stuff, ain't it?’

LS: 

<laughs> That’s the best grandpa response ever. 

JW: 

He took it and put it in the burn bin. 

LS:

I'm gonna use that line from now on. 

JW:

It was very much a part of the conversations we had, and argued about, what people talked about. It was always there to a certain extent.

LS:

Do you feel it here in Oregon in a different way or a similar way?

JW:

Yeah, we live here in McMinnville, which is kind of a purple-ish community politically. Especially over the last eight years, I've become much more acquainted with the — as you say — sort of the Eugene type anti-government rhetoric. I remember in 2014, 2015, there were a lot of marches that were sort of organized on the left for anti-vaccine campaigns. I spend a lot of time down in southern Oregon on the Rogue River. And so of course, I feel sort of like I’m moving between two different Oregons as well.

LS: 

You mentioned earlier that you teach this class about rural America, which sounds like a class I would love to take. I imagine you're pecking away at a lot of stereotypes there, right? Talk to me about what some of those are and how your students react.

JW: 

One of the first days we watched a Super Bowl commercial Ram Trucks did — a commercial that's just Paul Harvey saying, ‘on the seventh day, God created a farmer. He needed someone that did this, and needed someone that did that.’ It's just really well done. You feel yourself welling up with emotion.

And then the screen goes blank and it just says, ‘for the farmer in all of us.’

LS: 

<laughs> Oh God.

JW: 

I show this to a lot of kids coming from suburban spaces and urban spaces. And I'm like, ‘you feel it, right?’ So we talk about that founding myth, the yeoman farmer and Thomas Jefferson's idea that we’re not gonna repeat the mistakes of Europe. We were not gonna become this ill urban culture, we were gonna become this place of 40 acres for every family, and crafting your own future — you literally crafted it out of your own land. That's still with us, even if that clearly didn't work. It is still very much part of how we think about ourselves and how we think about one another. 

And then of course, the other myth is the idea that rural places are jokes. We shouldn't pay attention to them that what's going on there is not serious. That the real stuff happens elsewhere. What's insidious is I remember thinking that growing up in a rural place, like I'd imbibed that very mythology that things happened elsewhere. We watch movies. We watched the first season of Reservation Dogs this year. 

LS: 

I love that show. 

JW: 

We read some books, listened to some music. 

LS: 

What do you kind of worry about for the Verls of the world?

JW:

I think much of what I worry about has come to pass or continues to occur, and that is that people with real convictions, with real care for their places in their communities, have been fed a lot of lies about what it means to live there, what it means to live elsewhere, and too often what they resort to is violence. Sometimes that violence is directed inward towards themselves in the form of self-medicating. Montana [has one of] the highest suicide rates in the nation. Sometimes that violence turns outward. With something like Malheur was a huge explosion of that, where that violence moves outward. I worry about that for them. I worry as well that, again, that they won't be taken seriously. … Part of Verl is trying to take him seriously. Think about him in a different way.

LS:

I guess the last thing I wanna talk to you about is this sort of masculinity that is heavy in all of your work. 

JW:

I'm interested in the ways that, again, our mythologies keep failing us and leading young men into all sorts of things that then ruin them and the people around them. 

I think part of it comes from growing up in a place that was decidedly male. My dad died when I was young, so I was raised by my mom, so I had this strong female influence. But outside of my house it was all men and territory. I was observing that and trying to think about that. I was bookish. And I worked on ranches all summer, but I wouldn't say I was like, great at it. It was always kind of like, I can do this, but wow, it just doesn't fit me in the way that it felt like it fits so many others. So I always had a sense of difference. I was always trying to think about is there a way to be a young man and be different and be okay?

Too often the answer for that was ‘no’ where I was growing up. So much of my work is trying to think, trying to make new spaces, trying to think about it differently. Wendell in Fall Back Down When I Die is someone who finally finds a way to be a little bit different kind of male in that space. It's taking care of someone that allows him to do that. 

LS: 

What specific mythology do you feel like you have undone?

JW: 

Oh, boy. I don't know if I've undone anything. I'm trying to undo this idea of the yeoman farmer, this bottomless well, this person beyond reproach. I'm also trying to undo ideas of violence and masculinity.

The ultimate way to exert yourself as a male. And often that violence is, if we watch the old westerns, it’s violent, but it fixes things. It makes things work after the violence is over. And I don't think that's true. I think violence just begets violence. And so I'm trying to undo that and separate violence from being a human being and a masculine solution to things.

LS:

I love in Thieve how there was a poem about the kid who threw the firecracker at Eagle Creek and practically burned down the Columbia Gorge. Even that in itself felt like this masculine imposition on the landscape. Like, I'll even burn it down and sit there and watch the flames.

You know, I was there in court when that kid was sentenced, and I have never seen a child look so afraid of his parents. He was in this very sharp suit, flanked by his two parents, and he was reduced to a boy at that moment. 

What have you figured out from all this writing you've been doing? Have you come to any conclusions?

JW: 

Maybe a little bit is that I never know as much as I think I do. I start writing and I learn in the process. I run up against the limits of my own knowledge. I run up against further questions I didn't know were out there. That's always a helpful thing to remind yourself — that you may know some things, but there's so much more out there to learn. 

The other is to just try to remind myself of two things always: to pay attention. You have to keep paying attention to the world around you. It’s going to teach you things. And then approach people and offer just a little bit of grace, no matter how you might disagree or where you're standing in relation to them. That doesn't mean you have to agree or roll over, but understand that they’re carrying their own worlds with them. And those worlds might be pretty tough.

1. It is only later, after trading emails with Joe, that I learned he attended Gonzaga University at the same time that I did, but we didn’t meet until much later. This only makes sense because Joe was an Engineering major, and you had to be very devoted to your studies to succeed; I was a journalism major, and I can promise you that I missed many a class and not one party and somehow still graduated.

2. The story I wrote this year about the Our Lady of the Rockies statue in Butte, Montana is proof of this mutual understanding: a place that is just as much about the place as the people, and that truly could never have run in any other publication.

3. I am a Louise Erdrich super fan over here, and if you haven’t read any of her books, might I suggest starting with The Round House?

4. Joe, too, has written for HCN from time to time. Here’s an essay from 2012.