My family and I are just unearthing ourselves from Covid. It’s the first time we’ve had it, amazingly. While we were blessed with mild symptoms, I have some elevated risk factors at the moment, and my anxiety and projection about how the illness would unfold for us has reminded me of the early days of the pandemic, when there were many more unknowns, and the stories we were telling about what would and could happen—to us and between us—hadn’t yet calcified.
And then they did, of course—they calcified. In some ways, I think we’re still stuck where our stories hardened off. But I also think that some of our culture’s governing stories (about productivity, for example, or the value of care work, or what we actually need in order to be well) were fundamentally disrupted by the pandemic, in ways whose full ramifications remain to be seen.
One guiding theme of this podcast is an inquiry into what feels possible, or not, for our moment and futures, based on the kinds of stories we tell. And this is one reason I knew, early on, that I wanted to speak to Joe Wilkins.
Joe grew up “father-haunted” in the “Big Dry” of Eastern Montana. He’s a father himself, a writer, a gardener, and a very adept unpacker of two interlinked sets of stories that are often on my mind: mythologies of the American West, and stories about men and masculinity. His memoir The Mountain and the Fathers, two novels, and four books of poems invite inhabitations and expansions of these saturated themes, while committing deeply to the agency and guidance of the land, which he calls “our root and measure.”
Joe is on tour right now with his latest novel, The Entire Sky, which I recommend for its love of place, commitment to characters who are trying to do the right thing, and high-stakes affirmation of second chances. We sat down for this interview in person in my hometown of La Grande, Oregon, on the morning after his tour stop there. As our conversation roamed the fraught personal and political territories of the West, and the consequences of our layered histories here—for men and boys, for the land, for those of us who feel a little different, for all of us—Joe kept circling back to something he knows for sure: we need stories, and we can cultivate the discernment to know when the stories we’ve gotten comfortable with are no longer serving. We need to find the old stories, the new stories, the different stories, the more stories about who we are, and who we can be together.
This episode includes some practical advice on how to slow down and let those stories find us. Also: protecting second chances, parenting for the real world in a virtual time, and letting the land lead. And it opens with a great poem from Joe’s Oregon Book Award-winning collection When We Were Birds.
I hope you enjoy this rich conversation. For more, check out Joe’s musings here on Substack and/or get ye to the bookstore or your local library and read one or more of his books (they’re all good). Maybe you can even catch a tour date; Joe’s still out and about with The Entire Sky—reading, listening, and lifting pints with old and new friends.
Gratitudes for this episode include: to Joe, for modeling self-inquisitive masculinity and affirming his many teachers; to both of my parents for care-from-a-distance during our family’s week of Covid; to my husband Cole for seven years of ever-evolving partnership (today’s our anniversary, hey); and to all of you, for listening.
Be well, folks.
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