Lone Dog Tour Archives | Kent Nerburn

Day 8: Beagle and Wolf books, Park Rapids

2 Comments / knerburn / June 11, 2025

Every author has one of those places where it all began.

What is now Beagle and Wolf books in Park Rapids, Minnesota, is that place for me.

Beagle and Wolf was originally two stores — Beagle Books in the small town of Park Rapids and Sister Wolf books in the even smaller town of Dorset, Minnesota. Both are destination spots in the resort area on the western edge of the lakes and pines country of northwest Minnesota.

Park Rapids is a sweet little lakes and woods town of 4000 that serves as an escape valve for North Dakotans who get tired of their parched reality and scoot over to Park Rapids to race around on jet skis and otherwise live the lake life that their home geography has denied them.

Dorset, population 22, pulled off the promotional gimmick of having a three-year-old mayor, who succeeded his six-year-old brother in the job, creating a political dynasty that for all I know continues to this day. That’s a story unto itself, and worthy of the knowing, but now is not the time to tell it.

Lots of vacationers and cabin owners visit Dorset for an evening meal at one of the four restaurants that exist on its single main street and are its claim to fame as the self described “restaurant capital of Minnesota”. Where the people come from who staff and operate these restaurants is anybody’s guess — probably Park Rapids.

Dorset also once had a wonderful destination bookstore, Sister Wolf books. It was northern Minnesota’s bookstore gem in the woods, and it is dear to my heart.

When I first started writing, I was like a mole coming out into the sunlight. I was wary, unsure, and completely unschooled in the ways of book promotion. Sister Wolf welcomed me and helped me get my footing as an author. It was there that I first stepped into the world of public readings and presentations.

Eventually Sister Wolf moved to Park Rapids, combining its name and its spirit with Beagle Books, becoming today’s Beagle and Wolf where tonight’s reading took place.

In the way that folks used to bronze baby shoes and put them on their mantle, if I could bronze a bookstore and say it was where I began my career, it would be Beagle and Wolf. I consider it my home bookstore in northern Minnesota.

As to tonight’s reading, it harked back to those early days at Sister Wolf: a small and intimate group in a small and intimate store — good folks, caring folks, interested and interesting folks, sharing a warm late spring evening in a bookshop crafted and curated with love.

But tonight’s reading did have a unique significance. Tonight I felt that I finally wrestled this presentation of Lone Dog Road into shape. Introducing a book to the public is a challenge and an art form. You need to find the essence of the book and not disappear too far into any of the weed patches that can easily seduce you as an author. Give folks an honest glimpse, don’t overwhelm them with details, and make time for some shared conversation. After all, they have done you the honor of coming out to hear you talk about your book. Make it worth their while and show them the respect they deserve.

I’m pleased that it was at Beagle and Wolf where I finally got things right.

It seems only appropriate. This is where I took my first steps, this is where I cut my teeth as an author speaking to the public. It is my bronzed baby shoes of a bookstore. And like those baby shoes, it fills me with nostalgia. It may be small and those steps may have been taken long ago, but it seems like just yesterday and somehow it still seems to fit just right.

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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.