Courtesy of LC Website
The English department’s annual Visiting Writers Series brought poet and novelist Joe Wilkins to campus on Feb. 24. Wilkins’ work spans across genres, including fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The author presented texts from a range of styles at the reading.
Wilkins was introduced by Professor of English Pauls Toutonghi, who described Wilkins’ upbringing in eastern Montana. Wilkins did not initially set out to be a writer — Toutonghi explained that Wilkins initially completed a degree in engineering at Gonzaga University. However, after taking a creative writing course his senior year, Wilkins was sent upon a new life track. He has since earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. Currently, Wilkins lives in Oregon and directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. Wilkins’ debut novel “Fall Back Down When I Die” was shortlisted for both the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. His most recent novel, “The Entire Sky,” won the 2024 Montana Book Award and the 2025 High Plains Book Award.
The event was attended by students, faculty and community members. Much of the writing Wilkins presented centered around agriculture and the environment in Montana and Wyoming. Prefacing his reading of part of his novel “The Entire Sky,” about a young man who runs away from home to Seattle, Wilkins commented on the difference between the rural upbringing that inspires his stories and his current home in Oregon.
“It was known as The Big Dry, we got about nine inches of rain a year most years, double digits on a good year,” Wilkins said. “Clearly, I live in a different place now, and one of the projects in this novel was to move between those places.”
During Wilkins’ reading of sections of “The Entire Sky,” his use of prose to describe landscapes and environments was striking. Wilkins balances nature and the farm industry in his writing, with settings such as trailer parks and a sheep ranch. He has a talent for writing characters and places that feel real and palpable. The final scene he read from the novel was of an ewe lambing when complications arose. Wilkins created a contrast between a calm farmhand and the panicked main character in the descriptive scene. Moments like this were likely so vivid because they drew from personal experience — the author also discussed his time growing up on a sheep and hay ranch and his surprise in discovering that birthing animals is not a common experience when he attended college.
Wilkins went on to read a nonfiction essay about an incident in his youth when he and a friend were trapped in a grain silo after playing ill-advised games on dangerous farm equipment. The suspense of the scene hung in the air of the room as Wilkins described the crushing feeling of the grain and the futility of calling for help where no one was around to hear.
Wilkins then shared poems from his collection “Pastoral, 1994.” The audience was also lucky to hear some unpublished work by Wilkins, including an alluring poem about a river. Water is a recurring theme in Wilkin’s work, including his short story “The Book of Water.” Wilkins shared that the significance of water has stuck with him throughout life, from his upbringing in dry, drought-ridden regions to the lush forests of Oregon.
During the question-and-answer segment, Wilkins commented on the reception his work has garnered in his childhood homeland.
“People love the novels, not as keen on the nonfiction,” Wilkins said. “I sort of knew that would be the case as well. No one reads the poetry.”
Audience members expressed their relation to Wilkins’ upbringing in the agricultural West as well as his writing about the Seattle music scene. One audience member posed a question on the extent to which Wilkins is knowledgeable about the subjects he writes on, specifically the Seattle music scene, and how much he has to research.
“I had to do a lot of research. I was living in eastern Montana. 93.3 was the one channel that would play things that weren’t 10 to 15 years old,” Wilkins said. “I was late to the scene for sure. … But over the years I have met some folks who were there and listening right away, so that came to me through their experience.”
The author stressed the impact his creative writing class had on him and the importance of artistic spaces.
“I got into this poetry writing class, and suddenly my whole self was valued. All these stories that were following me everywhere, suddenly my professor said, ‘Write about that.’ That was a revelation. I think we need to find those places where we find whoever we are, find meaning, find value, and that we feel like we can bring our whole self or as much of ourselves as we can to that world,” Wilkins said.
Wilkins explained the journey he has been on to become a writer, starting with poetry and branching out into other genres with practice.
“We all want to communicate. We all want to speak to one another,” Wilkins said. “We want to write something down that gathers our thoughts in the best way to give it to somebody. I think that comes naturally to all of us, but the ability to do what the writers who impacted me as a young person did is not natural. It takes hard, hard work.”
The night concluded with the distribution of copies of Wilkins’ work and a chance to speak with the author and have books signed. There will be no more Visiting Writer events this semester, but the event series will return in the fall.
About the Author
