Lone Dog Road Archives | Kent Nerburn

On Lone Dog Road and why I’m not writing political posts

12 Comments / knerburn / July 20, 2025

I’m heartened by the reception that Lone Dog Road is receiving. Like all my books, it enters into the world with little fanfare and then either quietly finds its way or quietly disappears. Lone Dog Road appears to be finding its way.

Some folks have asked me why I no longer do political posts, since people enjoyed them and they had a strong following. My answer is that I am doing political posts — folks just don’t see them as such. I have no interest in letting the cruel monster in charge of this country live inside my head any longer. He has been there for far too long. He thrives on the poison of our hate and anger and derives his strength and meaning from it. At some point he will be gone and we will have to pick up the pieces. My political stance at this point is that I need to point a direction by which those pieces can be picked up when the time comes, and it will.

Lone Dog Road is about picking up those pieces. It is a story of redemption and hope, and how the small part each of us plays in life’s drama has importance and meaning, far more than we understand. Yes, it is a road book. Yes, it is the story of two young Lakota boys on the run. But it is also the story of the good people who from their own struggles and isolation, reach out to help, and in doing so, add to the goodness and hope in the world. Each of them has importance; each has meaning.

We each have an important role to play in these dark times. Some of us need to thunder like prophets. Some need to pick up the spears and pitchforks. Some need to keep the home fires burning and teach the children. Some need to plan and reshape and envision a better way.

I once wrote in one of my more homiletic books that it is not our task to judge the worthiness of our path. Our task is to walk our path with worthiness. Lone Dog Road is about people walking their paths and doing what is asked of them by such lights as they have. Do they know the outcome? No. Do they know if they are doing the right thing? No. But they each lean toward the light in the best way they can. And in the end, there may indeed be a meaning far greater than any of them understands.

That is the political stance of Lone Dog Road, and that is the political stance I choose to take as a writer at this time in my and America’s life.

I hope you will read Lone Dog Road with this in mind. It should be a good beach read, a good “summer on the porch” read. But it also should be, as all my books are, a teaching story. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is try to see the world closely and intimately through the eyes of people different from ourselves, and to teach our children that openness to the richness of life is a better route to meaning than closing down around anger and bitterness.

Keep reading Lone Dog Road (or listening on audible) and writing your reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. If this book is important for the understanding of the human heart, and I think it is, we need to keep it alive and pass it from hand to hand as a reminder that even in dark times the pursuit of the light is the only true route of redemption and hope.

I hope your summer is going well. I value and appreciate you all.

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Day 7, Bemidji, Minnesota

“My god! You look just like someone I used to know, except a lot older.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you!”

And so went the good-natured ribbing among those of us at the Lone Dog Road reading at Four Pines bookstore in my old home town of Bemidji.

What a warm evening! Dear old friends, folks I recognized but didn’t know, folks I knew only slightly, but with whom I shared a common history on these too familiar streets. This was not the Red Lake taproot. This was the Bemidji intertwining of branches.

Four Pines bookstore felt courageous. I know this town in the lakes and pines country 100 miles from the nearest freeway and 100 miles from the Canadian border. I lived here for25 years. I know how it has fought against meaningful social change and clung tightly to a culture of nostalgia. But things are changing. The young people are forcing it. They are saying, “We want more. We want the bigger world.” And they are getting it.

Micro-breweries, Thai restaurants and ramen shops. Home grown businesses started by young, courageous entrepreneurs who want to embrace change, not resist it.

Four Pines Bookstore is one of these. It has a brightness, an earnestness, a hopefulness. Other bookstores have come and gone in this town — a crazy, topsy turvy bookstore of used books on jumbled shelves in an old Victorian house, a weirdly insular tiny Christian bookstore, an off-brand chain whose heart never really seemed in the enterprise, and now, Four Pines. It has the modern, welcoming openness that puts it right in the mainstream of colorful, brightly lit independent bookstores around the country. You can feel it enhancing the texture and dimension of the community by its presence.

The reading went well. I am figuring out how to present this sprawling, hard-to-categorize novel. But, even more, there was discussion about the interwoven nature of the Native and non-Native communities here. The pain, the rupture, the commonalities and differences, are all being brought out into the open. I like to think that my work has played a part in this. After all, here in this forgotten corner of northwest Minnesota is where my eyes were opened, where I first put pen to paper, and where the land grabbed me with a force that has never let go. And I have tried to give it voice through my work.

I’m fond of saying that we each have to live in a way that pays the rent for our time on earth. Between the wonderful engagement in Red Lake and the warm evening in Bemidji, I get a good feeling that maybe my rent is partially paid.

My reward for these days was a touch with people who have touched my heart, the lapping of lake waters and the nighttime cry of the loons outside our window, and a pontoon ride along this northern most part of the Mississippi with my wife at my side and a dog on my lap.

If there was nothing more, I could die happy.

But I don’t get to die, happily or otherwise. Bemidji is in the rearview mirror and we’re off to Park Rapids and Beagle and Wolf books, who have been among my strongest supporters for 35 years.

Another precious homecoming. I could get used to this.