Author focuses his sights on rural America

Joe Wilkins never thought that writing could be a career when he was growing up. He was an avid reader because he grew up in a rural town with not much to do.

“I read all the time, it was how I passed the time in my small town in Montana, it was my way to have company around” said Wilkins.

Now a highly regarded author living in the Pacific Northwest, he will be featured at the Sisters Festival of Books, October 18-20.

Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains, out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. His debut novel, “Fall Back Down When I Die,” speaks to the community, struggle, violence, and care Wilkins knew growing up in the rural West.

As stated by his website: “Brought to life with rich and vivid brushstrokes, Wilkins’s characters will win you over from the moment you meet them. Wendell, a young ranch hand, is living in a state of chronic despair. He’s recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan. His father met a violent end more than a decade earlier. The list of Wendell’s woes goes on—his bank account holds less than a hundred dollars, and he owes back-taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that couldn’t save his mother’s life. In short, the American Dream has failed him.”

Wilkins knew that in order to get out of his early circumstances, he had to pursue a “practical job.” So, he attended college at Gonzaga University and majored in computer engineering.

“I wasn’t super passionate about engineering, but I got my degree and had an internship for a summer in Seattle and it was a cool experience to live in the big city,” he said.

He then went back to college for a year and landed in a creative writing class. That is what sparked his interest in fiction-writing, and writing in general. Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth-grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley.

Aside from being a novelist today, Wilkins teaches writing and runs the creative writing department at Linfield College. Wilkins is currently on sabbatical for a year, teaching in upstate New York. His family moved there for the year for his teaching fellowship at St. Lawrence University.

“I teach a course on rural American literature. I think rural America is really where the crux of the American Dream is, and those places are constantly overlooked and so it is another way for people to look at it,” he said.

Throughout his life, Wilkins was struggling with a way to understand the world because he grew up in such a small town and lived a poverty-ridden life.

“Engineering offered me a mathematical and practical way to understand the world, but I was still after that story — how to make sense of the world using language,” Wilkins said.

“We see glimpses of stories in everyday life that could have more to them. Everything we see invites a story, and that is what I like about fiction, is you can expand on that story,” he said.

Wilkins’ “Fall Back Down When I Die” is a fictional story, taking place in the town in which he grew up. It reflects characters that were similar to those he grew up with, including a ranch hand who is similar to himself working on a ranch trying to make ends meet and an overworked school teacher, similar to his own mother. There is also a character who has committed an act of violence and is on the run.

“That character is forced to reckon with what he has done and what will come to be after his actions, that is a huge part of how the story moves,” Wilkins said.

The writing of this novel helped Wilkins to understand the place that he grew up and the characters that existed around him his whole life.

“I think reading and writing enlarges us and forces us to reckon with the fact of our actions and treat our surrounding world more carefully,” he said.

Wilkins and his family travel to Sisters quite often to go camping, and enjoy coming over this way.

“One personal connection with Sisters area and the novel, is one of the trips camping up at the Metolius when I was looking over the final pages for the novel,” he said.

Sisters Festival of Books is a three-day celebration of the literary culture of Central Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The festival features more than 40 local, regional, and national authors and takes place across multiple venues in Sisters. For information and tickets visit https://www.sistersfob.com.