Lone Dog Road Archives | Page 2 of 4

Lone Dog Road: the image that inspired the book (Ep5)

12 Comments / knerburn / January 24, 2025

Every book begins with a seed of an idea.

I went on with my life, writing books, giving talks, doing what I could to be an ally to the Native people and help them tell their stories. Neither Wolf nor Dog, The Wolf at Twilight, and The Girl who Sang to the Buffalo came and went. Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce filled up four years of my life. Voices in the Stones became a quiet passion.

And, still, the image of the boy remained.

Finally, after 25 years, he could no longer be denied. His face said what I had been trying to say in words for almost three decades. He was innocence stolen, promise denied, confusion and defiance in the face of a world he did not make and could not understand. He was both victim and conqueror, the conscience and the survivor. He was guilt and he was hope.

If there was redemption to be had for what we as a nation had done and become, it was he who embodied the need for that redemption and the means by which it might be achieved.

And so, when the pandemic sent me into isolation, I knew I had a chance to address the image that had been haunting me for over three decades.. I also knew I could not do it as a single character; his reality was too complicated. Instead, he became the life blood that flowed through the two little fellows who live at the center of Lone Dog Road, eleven-year-old Levi and six-year-old Reuben.

So, as you read Lone Dog Road, remember this little boy in the rocking chair. I do not know his name, or even where he came from. I only know that from the first moment I saw him he issued a challenge to me that I could never forget.

Just know that as you journey with Levi and Reuben — two young boys crossing the Dakotas, sleeping in strange beds and hiding in corn fields — they are not traveling alone. They are carrying the ghost of that young boy who haunted me from the moment I pulled his photograph from a dusty file in some historical society archive in 1989.

It was he who set me on this literary journey and he to whom I owe this entire book.

Thank you, my young anonymous friend. I have done the best I can. Know that I never forgot you.

Pre-order at your favorite bookseller visit to:

Lone Dog Road: the image that inspired the book (Ep5) Read More »

Lone Dog Road: A Story of People (Ep4)

9 Comments / knerburn / January 13, 2025

Pre-order at your favorite bookseller visit to:

Readers love stories.

And I love to tell stories. But stories are made by people, and when I tell a story it is the people in the story that matter to me.

In Lone Dog Road, I offer you the stories of good people — honest people, struggling people, fascinating people — told slowly, deeply, and from the heart. Two little Lakota boys, one six and one eleven, on the run from a government agent; a white man adrift in life and grieving over his deceased dog; two Indian women — one Lakota and one Dakota — one in a wheelchair and one carrying an almost unbearable emotional burden, who have been friends since childhood; the Lakota woman’s white husband, who was studying to be a priest but lost his faith when he found himself overwhelmed by a larger undeniable truth; the boys’ Lakota mother whose heart has been hardened by life and the reality of Native experience; her grandfather who sees the world through different eyes and has a different understanding of the forces that control our lives, a Black traveling gospel singer who has made his life traveling through the often inhospitable small towns of the South Dakota prairies, and an old yellow dog.

They tell their stories in their own voices, bringing us along as all of their lives slowly and inexorably intertwine. And slowly, inexorably, a larger truth is revealed.

There are those who would say I don’t have a right to tell stories about people of backgrounds different from my own, and certainly not in their own voices. But those people are wrong. There are things that are common to the human heart, and though our lives may be shaped by experiences as different from each other as the earth from the stars, those common experiences — love and yearning and hope and suffering — transcend our differences and make us one with each other in ways that no barriers of culture or personal experience can deny.

I hope you will trust me to tell the stories of these good people. If you give yourself over to them and allow them to speak to you in their own heartfelt and authentic voices, I believe Lone Dog Road will reward you with a reading experience that is about far more than what it seems on the surface. Yes, it is a story about two small boys on a desperate journey and the people that they meet along the way. But beneath this surface is a story of redemption and revelation and a world far deeper, far more spiritual, and far more complex than we realize.

In its simplest terms, Lone Dog Road is a spiritual mystery in the guise of a road book; a literary adagio that reveals its meaning slowly and in layers. It doesn’t gallop out of the gate with a breathless plot. But if you give yourself over to it and allow its story to unfold and its layers to reveal themselves, your patience will be rewarded. You will find yourself in the presence of a book that touches all the themes that have been so important to me in my writing: the power of the land, the presence of the spiritual, and glimpses of the unprotected human heart.

Lone Dog Road: A Story of People (Ep4) Read More »