Reflection

Spring in Minnesota — a Mother’s Day reflection

May has come to Minnesota, and, surprisingly, it has taken me by surprise.

The symphonic grandeur of spring in the Pacific Northwest had caused me to completely forget the quiet crescendo of spring here in the Midwest.

There, spring was celebratory and explosive — all bright colors, flowers bursting forth in rich profusion, pink cherry blossoms blanketing the streets like the chapel train of a wedding gown.

Here, spring is less celebration and more resurrection — a Lazarus season, with the world quietly blinking its eyes as it peers forth from the slumbering, moribund earth.  The bone grey fingers of the trees slowly cover with green buds, the animals come out tentatively, the brown grasses start to show whispers of green, and the silent sky day by day fills with a growing chorus of birdsong.  It does not burst upon you; it builds slowly, just as night turns slowly into day.

Perhaps most surprising is the way the trees here gradually fill out and become a protective canopy over our lives. In the Pacific Northwest — and, in its own way in northern Minnesota where we used to live — the pines stand self-contained and solitary, pointing skyward with an almost palpable indifference to the human.  Even where they join together to form tunnels and pathways, their focus is upward, and any human or animal activity that takes place beneath them does so on its own terms, with no feeling that the trees care for them or have any concern for the lives taking place beneath their branches.

But here the elms and maples and oaks and all the others spread their branches almost maternally over the streets and boulevards.  They seem to look down on you rather than asking you to look upward.  They make you feel cared for and protected.

I’ve always loved trees in an unreflective way.  I had favorite trees as a child, special trees as meeting places, trees I loved to climb and branches where I loved to sit.  I knew nothing of their various species or place in the ecological order.  They were just my companions, sometimes recognized, sometimes taken for granted — and, like so much else in life, never truly appreciated until, for some reason, they were gone.

As I got older, I wrote about them, I sculpted them, I got to know them in ways both intimate and abstract.  But always I felt their presence in my life.  Now we are back here where I was born and raised and I am feeling their presence strongly once again.

There is no doubt that I miss our Oregon home.  The abundance and profusion of the Pacific Northwest makes you feel like you are living in a garden.   But here, where the landscape is subtler and the vegetation more nuanced, the trees rustling in the breeze and the dawn chorus of birdsong outside the window make their own special music.  It may not be symphonic, but it builds and crescendoes in a song of gratitude that has you waking with a smile on your face and thinking, “Damn, it’s good to be alive!”

And who could ever ask for more than that?

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Is there really such a book as LONE DOG ROAD, or has Nerburn become a liar in his dotage?

Fair question.  All I can tell you is that if I am a liar, I am not a liar of my own making.  Poor, bedraggled, and, I think, wonderful, LONE DOG ROAD has had the worst birth of any book I’ve ever written.  But I prefer to cast it in the terms of Leonardo Da Vinci, if I remember my source correctly:”The longevity of any work of art is directly proportional to the time of its gestation.”

If that’s the case, move over Shakespeare, the Bible, and all the great books of the Western World.  LONE DOG ROAD, from inception to the present moment has already been gestating for four and a half years.

So what’s going on?  Why does this book, praised by the likes of William Kent Krueger, Leif Enger, Dan O’Brien, and Robert Plant, refuse to step into the daylight?  The answer is in the old saw that all writers should take to heart:  “Writing is an art; publishing is a business.”

The earnest young publisher, Polished Stone Publishing, with whom I had placed the book because of both their faith in it and my faith in them, has simply been unable to pull it off.  It was a bridge too far for a fledgling operation — too expensive to produce, too hard to slot into the marketplace, too labor intensive to shape and create in a timely fashion.  So, with sadness on both sides, I had to retrieve it from them before both they and it sank below the horizon, never to be seen again.

However, there is a silver lining.  Without getting too “inside baseball” about the whole process, the distributor who is responsible for getting the book into bookstores and who has been a faithful friend and supporter of my books over the years, remains both committed to and excited about LONE DOG ROAD.  The bookstores are waiting for it; you readers are waiting for it.  What has appeared to be a number of false starts and promises, is proving to be just a long runway onto what we both believe will be a successful launch of a long-awaited book.

The kicker has been to find a publisher who will take it on and put it out in a timely fashion.  Think of books on a publisher’s list as cars on a train.  They get put in line and produced in the sequence in which they are acquired.  It takes a rare book with tremendous celebrity status or currency –“The Truth about Donald Trump’s Hair”, “P. Diddy’s Dog Tells All” — to break into that sequence.  LONE DOG ROAD does not rise to that level of significance.  Put in line with a major publisher, it would remain at least a year and a half out from publication.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I don’t want to give out specifics just yet.  I’ve already been “The boy who cries, ‘Book’!” too many times about this beleaguered literary child.  Just know that, if all falls into place, and I think it will, there will be an announcement very soon that will put to rest all the uncertainty about when LONE DOG ROAD will finally see the light of day.  And all of you who have pre-ordered, inquired, pleaded and complained, and all of you bookstores that have had to backpedal, refund, and apologize, will finally have some solid information about when this literary kin to NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG, THE WOLF AT TWILIGHT, and THE GIRL WHO SANG TO THE BUFFALO, will actually be in your hands.

I have not told you much about LONE DOG ROAD because of the fragile way it was coming into being.  Once I have a solid commitment and can trust the information I am giving you, I will tell you more, provide you with excerpts, and generally open the doors on a book that has been shut away for far too long.

Just know that you are not alone in being frustrated about the uncertainty and delays.  Fingers crossed, that uncertainty is about to come to an end.  And soon enough, in the reasonable future, you will have LONE DOG ROAD in your hands.

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