Every Sky at Home

Joe Wilkins is the author of The Entire Sky, Fall Back Down When I Die, The Mountain and the Fathers, and When We Were Birds. His work has earned widespread acclaim and numerous awards and honors, including the Oregon Book Award and the Montana Book Award.

"It's the musicality of Joe Wilkins's prose that first takes your breath. Words chosen as instrument, every line a chord. His melodies transporting you into the very heart of what it means to be human. But what alters you forever is his honesty—the rarity of it. Kindness without sentimentality. Selfishness paired with gentleness. Loyalty, pity, compassion, anger, disappointment, timidity, celebration—because they are aspects of us all. His people, whether you meet them in his memoirs, novels, or poetry, remain with you, become as lasting and foundational and as cherished as family. Joe Wilkins owns one of the most affecting and necessary voices in American letters."—Mark Spragg, author of Where Rivers Change Direction and An Unfinished Life"Joe Wilkins's essays are gemstones cut with utter precision, revelatory and gleaming, as fierce with inquiry as they are tender in execution. Reading this book means pausing at the end of an essay to look out the window and remember to breathe. With intimate vignettes and extraordinary observation, these essays illuminate not just the American landscape from Montana to Mississippi to Iowa to Oregon, but what it means to steer a body—electric with love and awe, grief and uncertainty—through a world of deep connection with other beings."—Erica Berry, author of Wolfish"To remember the 'real things'—the landscapes that shape us, the loves and losses that make us who we are—read Joe Wilkins. To see the American West as it is, read Joe Wilkins."—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction"The best guides see life and landscape with attentiveness and awe. They take it all in: the miraculous and the seemingly mundane, the eternal and the ephemeral, what's difficult and what difficulty can allow. They see beauty when it's right there, and they know how to hunt for it. Every Sky at Home is keenly observed and richly rendered. It results from a curious mind and a heart wide open to wonder. Joe Wilkins is exactly the guide to take you on what is, throughout, a spectacular journey."—Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things"How one approaches the history, present, and future of America, and within America the American West, is not only a cultural touchstone with great ramifications, but a kind of plea to the depth of our collective humanity. Joe Wilkins's book reveals how important a wholistic sense of one another—and one another's ecology—is, and why it's so necessary in our frail but vital attempts to help to heal the heart of the world. In this gorgeous book of essays on the wilderness of the American West and the wilderness of the human heart, Wilkins gives us everything we need."—Shann Ray, author of American Masculine and Where Blackbirds Fly

• List of IllustrationsPrologue: Into the MountainsOriginsFaithfully a Hidden LifeNine Kinds of SkyDown on Mountain PocketEnding in VisionsBroken BadlandsOf Blood and BoneOut WestThat Sun-Timed LifeOld FriendYou, All of YouSojournsMississippi StoriesNorthern PikeBruisedBuckeyesThe Land of OzCrossing a Riven Country, Part OneCrossing a Riven Country, Part TwoHomeWhere Paradise LayOregon TrailAs a Boy I Dreamed Often of a TigerWhen We Were Birds: An Essay in One ActJust a Piece of Pecan Pie (and All I Want Is You)A Place of First PermissionOn EdgesThe DancersNew NamesShimmerNot the Cowboy but the ShepherdMaking DogmcDry SeasonEpilogue: A Prayer Against TimeAcknowledgments