Reflection

“A quest, a pursuit, a spiritual mystery, a road book.  A penetrating study of the hidden corners of the human heart.”

These are some of the descriptions that advance readers have used when responding to Lone Dog Road.  And I like to think that they are all accurate.

Lone Dog Road was a project that came into focus only when the pandemic began.  I had been wanting to write a grand, sprawling novel that brought together all the things I love:  the mystery and majesty of the Dakotas, the spiritual forces in the land, the hearts and hopes of people struggling to live honorable lives in difficult circumstances, the lessons of Native America, and the intimations of otherness that live just outside the edges of our everyday consciousness.

But the time hadn’t been right.

Suddenly it was.

We were a fractured nation—fractured and frozen in place.  Politics had made us adversaries; a plague had made us insular.  We were on a common journey, but we were all traveling alone.

In Lone Dog Road I could speak to this aloneness and to its healing, and do so through the people and places I had come to believe in and love.

It was a risky course.   We were in a time that demanded, even celebrated, our differences, and the idea that a writer — especially a white male writer — could enter into the hearts and minds of people of different races or cultures or personal histories was to touch the third rail of American identity politics.

But I didn’t care.  Empathy and using the creative imagination to enter into the lives of others is what I do best.  And I was in no mood to justify or issue apologies.  It was time to tell the story.

So off I went. Down Lone Dog Road.

Two young Lakota boys on the run, one 11 and one six; their great grandfather who adhered to the traditional ways; their angry and wounded mother; a white wanderer grieving over his dead dog and trying to find his place in the world; a cruel mixed blood who worked for the government grabbing children for the boarding schools; a Lakota woman and her white ex-seminarian husband who shared a dark and tragic secret; a wheelchair-bound Dakotah woman tasked with caretaking the pipestone artifacts bequeathed to her by her grandfather; a Black itinerant gospel singer; and an old dog who lived for porkchops and only wanted to make people happy. And at the heart, two unseen forces — a broken Channupa, or sacred pipe, and the haunting memory of a dead child.

These were my fellow travelers, my companions.  And I grew to know and love them all.

It has been a struggle to get them to you.  I had touched the third rail and publishers ran scared.  But now, at long last, the drama of getting the book published is over, and the journey of the people and the land of Lone Dog Road can begin.  I hope you will enjoy my fellow travelers as much as I did, and that you will enjoy reading this heartfelt child of the pandemic as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I will write new updates at least once a week.  Sign up if you haven’t, at kentnerburn.com.  That way you can meet the characters, hear the story, be part of the journey.  I look forward to having you as a fellow traveler as we make our way together down Lone Dog Road.