An Interview with Joe Wilkins

Joe Wilkins is an extraordinary writer of the American West. Writing fiction, memoir, and poetry, his work examines what the West is, what it isn’t, and what it could be. In honor of his newest novel, The Entire Sky, Wilkins talked with associate editor, Kira Compton about genre, teaching, and the Big Dry.

KC: One of the things I really admire about you is that you’re something of a Renaissance writer. How does working in so many different spaces and genres affect your writing?

JW: On the whole, it’s been a great help. I didn’t know being a writer was a thing people did. I thought all the books had been written. I came from a little tiny rural high school and it just wasn't part of the conversation. I got a degree in engineering, and in my senior year, there was enough room to take a creative writing class. Everything changed after that.  

A lot of really amazing working-class blue collar rural poets first spoke to me. Philip Levine and Richard Hugo and Gary Soto and James Wright, and finding their poems was finding these people treating these places and situations that I knew in this sacred and important way. They thought this was worthy of literature, worthy of recording, of paying attention to.

That hooked me right away. So, I started as a poet, but I'd always been a reader. And what I read, of course, were novels. I just loved going to the B. Dalton in Rimrock Mall and getting the latest fantasy series, which slowly graduated to other things.

Even early on, a lot of my poems had a narrative. I was pushing toward larger things. I wanted to continue that in grad school, and I was lucky enough to go to a place where they encouraged cross-genre work. I studied poetry, but I was always working on stories and essays.

It allows me to pay attention to these other parts of the way I’m seeing the world, and the way the world is resonating with the self. For me, poetry is about image, about the lyric moment and about the language… the way things strike us in the moment. I get to just wallow and turn around in the language and not necessarily figure something out, but pay attention to it.

Essay and memoir for me is much more about exploring questions and experience and trying to make sense of what it might mean, even if you can’t get to exactly what it means.

And fiction is the place where you get to have the most fun. You get to be a little rambunctious and rollick with these characters. What I love about fiction is that you fall into this dream—even as a writer—where you’re reading a good novel and you’re just so with these characters in their world. And whatever it is—the membrane, the wall—narrows and suddenly collapses. It disappears. Fiction reminds us that we are one another, that we can’t not be, even across all kinds of difference. We have so much in common and so much that we might share.

I love that feeling. I love that moment. I love that as a reader and as a writer.

On the flip side of all this, I do think sometimes I get a little scattered.  

KC: Has the publication process been different? You publish pretty frequently in every genre.

JW: Yeah, I would say I publish in poetry the most frequently. That feels like sort of home base for me in a lot of ways. I’m always writing poems. Sending them out, getting rejections, getting a few acceptances. But I’m always writing them.

I’m often working on at least one or two fiction projects. Sometimes a story, sometimes something bigger. Right now, I’m a little stuck on what the next bigger thing is. I don’t know, I’m waiting for something.

KC: That tipping point?

JW: Yeah, yeah, for momentum to take over and keep pushing.

KC: So, both your poetry and your fiction is imbued with a very strong sense of place. Not even really just the West, which feels more like an idea to me, but that the literal, physical ground the character is walking on is shaping them in such an essential way. Especially in The Entire Sky. I was hoping you could speak more on what environment means in your creative work.

JW: Absolutely. I grew up in eastern Montana. We had two and a half stations on the television and could sometimes get a few of the FM radio stations from Billings. Instead, we had what was close at hand, and what was close for me, living six miles out of town on a sheep ranch, was the landscape itself.  Nearly everyone I knew was in the same situation. We took our living from the landscape. That's where all the dramas of our lives happened. They happened right there on those back roads and along the river and out in the fields. And so the land itself was just a huge part of how I was raised. It raised me as much as my mom, as much as my grandfather.

I think we as a species—even though we’ve built a culture that would like to ignore place and landscape—we as a species need it. We need to be in our places with other people. It’s a deep, deep need of ours.

We all do some damage by our lives. We hope to mitigate that damage by living as well as we can in a particular place. That feels important. I need something from the landscapes. It gives me something.

Whenever I’m writing characters, I'm thinking about what kind of force the landscape forces on their lives and the story.

Luis Urrea says that we’re not writing setting when we’re writing about place, we’re writing the biography of our grandmother or grandfather. We’re writing about this character who's as active and important as anything else in the story. I really believe that and feel that in my own life.

KC: You don't live in Montana right now, right?

JW: No, I live in Western Oregon.

KC: Has living away from Montana changed the way you write about it?

JW: It was when I moved to the American South that I first started writing about my experience growing up in Montana. Distance allows you to sort of fly back and get a higher view of the place. You see it in relationship to other places.

You feel like you can sort of fly back and get a higher view of the place, you know, suddenly you see it in relationship to other places and you're like, oh, wait a minute, I can sort of get above it and look down a little.

KC: Totally. It’s not your day to day anymore

JW: Yeah, it’s not all just right there. I do think sometimes that distance can matter for writing about a place, and it’s important to see your place as a place among others. You start to notice the particularities and curiosities and loveliness of that particular place.

And of course, growing up in poverty, having a father die young... there was a lot to dig into, first as a poet, then as a memoirist. I’ve slowly started to move on to other stories, other things I’ve found in eastern Montana.

I miss it deeply, but I also know what sort of person I am. The writer, the college professor… I had to leave. There wasn’t a place for me in a lot of ways. I grew up in the Big Dry, and now my children are growing up in this place that’s sort of the Big Wet, you know, all ferns and slugs and rain, rain, rain. Which is wonderful. This is their place of origin, and I’m getting to know it with them and through them.

But I do deeply miss that home landscape of Eastern Montana, and I go back as I can.

KC: Something that struck me while reading The Entire Sky is a sense of the past. Part of it was the literal framing, but it was deeper than that. The past yoked on the characters a bit. In a past interview, you said that writing about the past was an act of reclamation. Is something similar happening in The Entire Sky? Or are you going about memory in a totally different way?

JW: I do find myself, like, just as a human person, oriented towards the past. I'm always thinking about what has happened, or I'm remembering what has happened. We’ve just started the year 2025 and that hinge is often a place where people look both backward and forward. My wife and I were just talking about this—she’s much more oriented in the present, the right now. And I look backwards. It’s nice that we’re both doing these things that are important, right? Being here now, but also remembering so that we can inform the now and the later.

So yes, I’m oriented toward the past. I think it has great lessons for us to understand who we were then and who we might be now. The slow progress we are hopefully making, especially in the case of The Entire Sky.

You know, we're telling a lot of stories. I mean, we just elected someone to the presidency whose slogan was Make America Great Again and this easy, whitewash nostalgia, this idea that what was is somehow better than what is. And it’s deeply dangerous, that kind of nostalgia that puts a rose glow on everything. A lot of characters in the book are reckoning with what came before, but also reckoning with the fact that when a culture says what was is important and great, they know from their personal lives that it was just life.

There were good things about it, and there were things to value, but there were also terrible things. We can strive toward a better one, even as we mourn or try to bring forward lessons from the past.

Looking back matters. We should recognize what is of value in tradition, or what our contemporary culture doesn’t pay attention to. But we need to also recognize the truth of the past, which, well, for a long stretch of this country’s history, it didn’t make enough room for folks.

KC: You mentioned teaching is one of the reasons you left Montana. How does teaching affect your writing?

JW: My mom was a kindergarten teacher for thirty years in a little rural town. I saw how hard she worked, and I remember saying to myself I will never be a teacher. I discovered I didn’t want to be an engineer either, but I didn’t know what else to do. So, I used my engineering degree to teach high school math for a couple of years, and I fell in love with teaching.

It’s the hardest job I’ve ever done, and that includes all the harvest work and sheep work and everything else I’ve done on a ranch. Teaching is harder. Especially in the public schools.

After I went to grad school and got a few publications, I was able to transition into higher ed, which I really love. Being with young folks who are able to take their own stories and language and words very seriously… it’s a gift. It’s powerful to see them latch on and understand their own world as mattering in a literary, storied way.

So, teaching really does matter to me. I would say any economic work you're going to do in the world, there’s nothing perfect. If I could wave a magic wand and change a few things about my job, sure, I would. But when you’re thinking about what you will do in the world to earn your keep—I tell my students this—it has to be just a little better than good enough. Not a bunch better, right? There’s nothing out there that’s perfect. Nothing hits everything. But a bit better than good enough? And it brings meaning to you, it keeps you safe with a roof over your head? Maybe a little bit of joy? That’s all you can ask for.

KC: That segues nicely into the last question I ask everyone. Do you have any advice for writers early in their careers?  

JW: I don't have anything original!

KC: That's okay. Everyone says that and it always ends up being pretty unique.

JW: Okay, well. I would say you have to read a lot and you have to write a lot and you have to be persistent at both those things. Read past your point of understanding. Dive into the words. You have to be surrounded and swimming in them.

And then you have to write a lot. You have to stick with it. You have to write some things that are not going to be very good, some things that fail. Hopefully, you'll slowly work your way to a place where it feels like it’s working.

There's so much rejection out there in the world of the arts. You have to love the writing process enough to be able to deal with that rejection, because it will come. It'll happen. And you have to just keep sending it out.

The last thing I'd say is to find some folks. Write notes to authors you admire, or hang on to those great folks from your MFA program. The mentors, the peers. Wherever you end up, try to find the local writing series.

Community really matters. Writing can be a little bit lonely, but it doesn’t have to be.  

Purchase The Entire Sky here, or anywhere books are sold.