Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana, and make no mistake—those sagebrush-studded prairies and hard badlands raised him just as much as did his mother, as his elderly grandfather, as the memory of his father, who died young, leaving his family mired in poverty. Older now than his own father ever was, Wilkins reckons with this inheritance of landscape and loss and catalogs his travels across the country. From Iowa to Mississippi to the North Country of New York, Wilkins is a perceptive, fierce observer of rural life, and once he and his wife settle in western Oregon to raise their son and daughter, he turns his attention toward the wild places they find themselves drawn to. In this literary reckoning, each essay endeavors to more intimately understand the loves and landscapes that have made, and are making, Wilkins and his family.
