This event is SOLD OUT! Please watch our event listings or join our mailing list to be notified for future workshops.

About Layers of Landscape: Harnessing the Power of Place:

Though we live in a world chock full of chain restaurants and department stores, on-screen communications, and cross-country airplane travel, we ignore the power of place at our own psychological and, increasingly, physical peril. Truly, place and landscape are active forces in all our lives. They shape and reshape us; they offer us foundation and refuge; they challenge us to be good citizens of our biotic and built communities. In life and in writing, we ought to be aware of this; we ought to try to understand and harness the power of place. This session offers writers four ways they might begin to do just that.

About Joe Wilkins:

Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. Short-listed for the First Novel Award from the Center For Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award and has now been translated into French, Italian, and Spanish. Wilkins’s memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the GLCA Emerging Writers Award, an honor that has previously recognized early work by Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich.

Wilkins is also the author of four poetry collections, most recently Thieve, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a host of venues, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News, and his work has won the Pushcart Prize, earned multiple notable mentions in the Best American series, and been widely anthologized. Wilkins has received grants from the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and PEN Northwest; as the recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Wilkins and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.

Wilkins now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield University.

This workshop is free. Reservations are required as space is limited to 18 participants.