Neither Wolf nor Dog Archives

LONE DOG ROAD — episode two: The Setting

10 Comments / knerburn / August 19, 2024

We Minnesota writers by and large get our literary inspiration from the craggy promontories of Lake Superior and the pine rimmed lakes of our endless northern forests.

And it makes sense. Who is not inspired by the waves crashing on the rocky shoreline of the greatest of the Great Lakes or the haunting call of a loon over placid sunset waters?

But somewhere along the way something unexpected happened to me: I encountered the Dakotas, and that turned my eyes to the west and changed my life forever.

I could not have imagined this. North Dakota had always meant nothing to me but farms and tractors and endless miles of boredom. And South Dakota was four stone heads carved into a mountain, and nothing else. These were not places that fired the imagination. They were places you avoided. Time spent there was a penance.

But when we moved to northwestern Minnesota, just at the margin where the forests give way to the broad expanses of the prairies, the Dakotas began to whisper to me. Instead of being drawn east to the loons and canoe country of our northern lakes and pines, I found myself being pulled magnetically into the vast openness of the plains and prairies to the west.

And what was it in this Dakota landscape that was drawing me?

Consider:

It is in the Dakotas that you first feel America turning its back on the forests and woodlands of the east and reorienting its spirit toward the west. It is in the Dakotas where those settlers, confident in the power of the plow and hard labor, first had to gasp and stare out at an arid landscape and admit that their Biblical belief in tilling the land and making it bear fruit was too small a vision. It is in the Dakotas where the sky first becomes bigger than the land and where dinosaur bones poke out through the earth. And it is in the Dakotas where the spirit of Native American not only resonates, but dominates.

Once I opened myself to these larger forces, there was no turning back.

So when it came time for me to write Lone Dog Road, the novel that had been percolating inside me for so long, it was only natural that I should set it in the land that had so touched my spirit and fired my imagination.

Soon enough you will have Lone Dog Road in your hands. My solid and steady publisher, New World Library, has it scheduled for a March release, and this time that is rock solid.

It is my paean to our Western myth and the hard reality that lives beneath it, and the folks, Native and non-Native, who live, love, and struggle on this land that captures something so fundamental in our American spirit.

In the next few installments I will introduce you to some of these people. I will also give you a look at the cover of the book as it evolves, because I love having you all involved in the process of the book’s creation. After all, it was you by your voting and comments who gave me the title, Lone Dog Road.

And, lastly, I will offer you a way to sign up to be among the first to have Lone Dog Road as your book club selection, which will include a ZOOM visit with me and your group.

This has been a long time in coming, and it is going to be fun.

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Moving back to Minnesota, with a stop in Deadwood at the South Dakota Festival of Books

29 Comments / knerburn / September 23, 2023

It’s a strange feeling to be going back.

House sold, goods packed. Pushing against what feels to be the flow of history, both personal and cultural. No one said, “Go east, young man.” But maybe “Go east, old man” makes sense.

But someone did say, “Look homeward, Angel.” And, in some fundamental way, Louise and I are going home.

It will be hard to leave the spiritual lightness and mobility of the West Coast for the heavier forces of the Midwest. Possibility gets supplanted by watchfulness and survival. Caution dominates over optimism. A greater gravitas descends, along with the inevitable yearning that has always been the lot of a life stuck in the middle. But we know this world. It fits like well-worn clothes — functional and comfortable, but slightly frayed around the edges. It is where we come from.

I lie awake at night. Will it be a homecoming or a retreat? A reversion to the norm?

And then there is that other voice: “You can never go home again.” Old friends are the best friends, but the new friendships were launched from the shoulders of the old and have taken us to unknown places. Will we, as we have become, even exist when we go back to a place where the old friends only knew us as people we no longer are?

And so I sit here in Deadwood, at the South Dakota Book Festival, caught half way. Portland behind me, Minnesota in front of me.

I did not give much thought to this book festival. It was supposed to be a chance to go with Louise and another couple to the wonder of this unknown part of the country and the pleasures of this delightful, intimate, festival that I love with all my heart. But things went awry and I am here by myself, contemplating where I am going and what I am leaving behind. Blessedly, it is a wonderful place from which to do that contemplation.

Deadwood is surely not my country. It is gambling and cigarettes and Harleys and drooping Wild Bill Hickock moustaches. And biscuits and gravy slopped on a plate and served by a waitress who calls me “honey.” No arugula omelettes with eggs from chickens with names. No SUVs. Stores expect you to pay with cash.

But it is also the first taste of great open air and capacity for reflection, things that for whatever reason I never experienced in the west — the grand spaces and expansive landscape nothwithstanding. It has something to do with the lack of possibility and the quality of emptiness. Your thoughts don’t bump up against objects or ideas here unless you choose to let them. You live best when you turn your sights inward.

And I am known here — a literary elder, known, sought out, held in an inordinately high degree of regard. One man drove 6 hours from Minot to meet me, another sought me out to tell me of visiting his friends in France who were raving over their discovery of the wildly popular French edition of Neither Wolf nor Dog.

I was never known in Oregon. As an author, I never existed. It was my own doing. I never raised my head, and I’m not sure why. I just didn’t feel the need.

Now I’m back where I’m beginning to feel the need. And maybe it’s because I’m feeling needed. It has to do with the Indian connection. Native folks coming up to me and thanking me for what I do and asking me to please keep doing it. A “cult author” as another author said to me. Known not regionally or in standard literary circles, but for the way I illuminate and articulate a tiny but important piece of literary earth.

Minnesota, too, knows and values this piece of literary earth. And that is where I am headed.

There is no doubt this is going to be hard. But here, half way, in country I begin to understand and that seems to understand me, I can sense a growing sense of possibility and a distant rumbling of an unexpected hope.

Maybe, just maybe, you can go home again.

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