BONUS
The Tilt of the World with Author Joe Wilkins
In this companion episode to our Succession season, Megan sits down with author Joe Wilkins to explore the pressures facing rural communities and how fiction can help us understand them more deeply.
Joe’s award-winning novel The Entire Sky follows a ranch family in eastern Montana navigating grief, generational change, and the uncertain future of their land. Through these fictional characters, the novel offers a different way to think about succession and what happens when transition is delayed or avoided.
Like Megan, Joe also grew up in rural Montana and has since chosen a home elsewhere, but his work is still rooted in the eastern Montana landscape – his “primal place” – where he witnessed how land shapes people and families over time. Together, Megan and Joe also discuss the “tilt,” or forces pressing down on agricultural communities today, rural suicide, and the push-and-pull between leaving and returning home.
Photo courtesy of Joe Wilkins.
Guests
Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins was born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching junior high math in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho.
He is the author of four poetry collections, a memoir, and two novels, including The Entire Sky, which tells the intertwining stories of a young runaway who bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Cobain, a grieving sheep rancher, and a woman in the middle of her life not knowing which way to go. Long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, The Entire Sky won the 2024 Montana Book Award and the 2025 High Plains Book Award.
Joe lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield University.