Difficult Magic: Writing Our Way Home
The word home conjures all kinds of associations, faces, joys and hurts and confusions, distant and near places. Home is, surely, one of the most powerful, most magical words we might utter. And, like all magic, home can be difficult to contend with, let alone contain and wield and ever truly, fully explain. In this generative workshop, intended for writers of fiction and nonfiction, we’ll do lots of reading about home, and we’ll think together and share ideas and our own creative work as we try our hand at casting various spells of home.
Joe Wilkins’s debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, was praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the High Plains Book Award and has subsequently been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German editions. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His latest novel, The Entire Sky, is now out from Little, Brown. Wilkins was born and raised in eastern Montana and now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.