Joe Wilkins

Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan, as his father met a violent end more than a decade earlier. 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 failed to save his mother's life. Into this situation comes seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the illegitimate son of Wendell's cousin, who is incarcerated after falling prey to addiction. Traumatized, Rowdy is mute and damaged. Caring for him will be a test of Wendell's will and resolve, and yet he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That love will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder results in a manhunt, and Wendell finds himself on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, hoping both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his father. This dark and haunting debut novel is an unforgettable tale of sacrificial love, with two characters who win the reader's heart from the first page to the last.

Fall Back Down When I Die

A Novel

Entire Sky

Erin Malone

Richard Fifield

Rick Barot

Kathryn Smith

David Naimon

Catherine Johnson

Kate Lebo

Nicola Griffith

Elissa Washuta

Beth Piatote

Leyna Krow

Tiffany Midge

Alexis M. Smith

Shawn Vestal

Johanna Stoberock

Kate Peterson

Katrina Roberts

Kathryn Nuernberger

Lucia Perillo

Tess Gallagher

Margot Kahn

Taneum Bambrick

David Allan Cates

Erin Pringle

Nance Van Winckel

Linda Cooper

Ruth Joffre

J. Newell

Anca L. Szilágyi

Rena Priest

Tara Roberts

Leah Sottile

Dayna Patterson

Gary Copeland Lilley

CMarie Fuhrman

Dujie Tahat

Elissa Ball

Alexander Ortega

Ellen Welcker

Mita Mahato

Jennifer Marsh

Emma Noyes

Tamara Love

Katharine Whitcomb

Dawn Pichón Barron

Shantell Jackson

Laura Read

Rachel Mehl

Derek Annis

Christopher Maccini

Seanse Ducken

Tim Greenup

Henrietta Goodman

Inga Laurent

In this rich, shadowy, glittering anthology edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller , a multitude of Northwest writers share their singular stories, essays, and poems that center what Shields calls "the literature of despair." These pages confront what is difficult in life with extraordinary precision and grace: In Beth Piatote's story "Secondary Infection," a Yakama auntie narrates the undoing of a lonely woman; in the essay "There Is No Story Until It Happens to You," Richard Fifield writes about a devastating car crash in the remote Montana northlands of his youth; in his series of poems, "During the Pandemic," Rick Barot reflects on fear, isolation, and hope as quarantine descends; in her visual poem, "The Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit: An Auto-Elegy," artist Mita Mahato mourns the decline of a fragile species and the terrors of human impact on the environment. In works that span themes from colonialism to environmentalism, from divorce to disease, from toxic masculinity to a loss of faith, the writers here unflinchingly address what makes us vulnerable, what makes us complex, what cleaves us and what connects us. As Zeller writes in the book's introduction, this ambitious anthology pushes us to "learn, memorize, and recite the songs sung by these regional voices, mapping us into a communal root system of evergreen selves."

Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest

Evergreen

Thieve is a pointed, political book, though the politics here are local, particular, physically felt. The central sequence of poems--subtitled "Poem against the Crumbling of the Republic"--was written in direct response to the poet's own transition from rural poverty to coastal liberal comfort, as well as the presidential election of 2016, which brought to the national consciousness grave division in American society between urban and rural people. Thieve is a poetic attempt, as someone who knows/has known both worlds, to speak across that chasm. Thieve also interrogates chasms and barriers between the human and the natural, the present and the past, the parent and the child, between what we earn and what by grace is given.

Thieve

A book that interrogates the idea of America--especially our westering, both historical and contemporary.

Notes from the Journey Westward

For readers of My Absolute Darling and Fourth of July Creek, a "riveting and timely" Montana story about the unbreakable bond between a young man and the abandoned boy put in his care (Jess Walter), as old grievances of land and blood are visited upon them. Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan. 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 failed to save his mother's life. An unexpected deliverance arrives in the form of seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the mute and traumatized son of Wendell's incarcerated cousin. When Rowdy is put under his care, what begins as an ordeal for Wendell turns into a powerful bond, as he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That bond will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder ignites a desperate chase. Caught on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, Wendell is determined both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his own father. A gripping story set in a fractured and misunderstood community, Fall Back Down When I Die is a haunting and unforgettable tale of sacrificial love. Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrestles his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward "the bean-rusted fields and gutted factories of the Midwest," toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck. A panoply of voices are at play--the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say--and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very "place / hope lives, in the breaking." Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. "When we were birds," Wilkins begins, "we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped-- / it's true, we flew."

Poems

When We Were Birds

Sean Prentiss

Offering guidance on writing poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, Environmental and Nature Writing is a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing about the environment in a wide range of genres. With discussion questions and writing prompts throughout, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writers' Guide and Anthology covers such topics as: · The history of writing about the environment · Image, description and metaphor · Environmental journalism, poetry, and fiction · Researching, revising and publishing · Styles of nature writing, from discovery to memoir to polemic The book also includes an anthology, offering inspiring examples of nature writing in all of the genres covered by the book, including work by: John Daniel, Camille T. Dungy, David Gessner, Jennifer Lunden, Erik Reece, David Treuer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Alyson Hagy, Bonnie Nadzam, Lydia Peelle, Benjamin Percy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Nikky Finney, Juan Felipe Herrera, Major Jackson, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, G.E. Patterson, Natasha Trethewey, and many more.

A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Environmental and Nature Writing

Though creative nonfiction has been around since Montaigne, St. Augustine, and Seneca, we’ve only just begun to ask how this genre works, why it functions the way it does, and where its borders reside. But for each question we ask, another five or ten questions roil to the surface. And each of these questions, it seems, requires a more convoluted series of answers. What’s more, the questions students of creative nonfiction are drawn to during class discussions, the ones they argue the longest and loudest, are the same ideas debated by their professors in the hallways and at the corner bar. In this collection, sixteen essential contemporary creative nonfiction writers reflect on whatever far, dark edge of the genre they find themselves most drawn to. The result is this fascinating anthology that wonders at the historical and contemporary borderlands between fiction and nonfiction; the illusion of time on the page; the mythology of memory; poetry, process, and the use of received forms; the impact of technology on our writerly lives; immersive research and the power of witness; a chronology and collage; and what we write and why we write. Contributors: Nancer Ballard, H. Lee Barnes, Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, Joy Castro, Robin Hemley, Judith Kitchen, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Dinty W. Moore, Sean Prentiss, Lia Purpura, Erik Reece, Jonathan Rovner, Bob Shacochis, and Joe Wilkins.

An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction

The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre

Le jeune Wendell n’est qu’un simple employé de ranch sur les terres qui appartenaient autrefois à sa famille. L’arrivée soudaine du petit Rowdy, fils de sa cousine incarcérée, illumine son modeste quotidien tourmenté par la disparition déjà lointaine de son père, devenu une légende pour les milices séparatistes du Montana. Un lien puissant se noue entre Wendell et le garçon de sept ans mutique et traumatisé. Wendell est prêt à tout pour épargner à Rowdy la violence qui se transmet de génération en génération, et qui ne tarde pas à embraser une fois de plus le coeur des Bull Mountains.

Ces Montagnes à jamais

"A practical guide to the art and craft of nature writing, covering non-fiction, fiction, poetry and polemical writing"--

Nella terra dei lupi

Depicts the author's life in the harsh world of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, raised by his young, widowed mother and elderly grandfather amidst the violence, confusion and rural poverty rampant in the area. 10,000 first printing.

Growing Up in the Big Dry

The Mountain and the Fathers

Joe Wilkins

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