Lone Dog Tour

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.