Kent Nerburn

 

David Crumm is a very unique interviewer.  Most interviewers try to be objective.  They ask questions to get you to reveal yourself and the story they want told.  They ask, you answer, and then they try to put it together. Not David.  With him interviewing is a contact sport -- or, perhaps I should say, a complicated intellectual dance.  He gets right in there with you and the two of you muck about in the subject, sharing ideas and thoughts and common experiences until something surprising emerges, and it always does.  Here we take a run at Lone Dog Road and the whole intellectual landscape that surrounds it.  Enjoy.

 

Here is the "Read the Spirit" interview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE COMMENTARY THAT DREW THE MOST FIRE, BOTH FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY

 

For years I did political blogs along with posts about my work.  There is no doubt that I could have had a very different career had I chosen to pursue that path.  But I didn't like the person it made me become, so I withdrew from the political fray, at least as far as writing went.  But, before I withdrew, I wrote one piece that made the world go crazy.  It was like the flip side of the cab ride story: a rage against life's darkness rather than a claim on life's goodness and light.  I titled it, simply, "I hate guns."  It was the second most read editorial of the year in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and was picked up by any number of other outlets around the country.  It also elicited the most animated response of anything I ever wrote.  Sadly, I have had to trot it out and republish it many times since its initial publication in 2015.  What the hell is wrong with us?

 

(Originally published in 2015, but republished many times since, and sadly relevant almost every day here in America)

 

I HATE GUNS

Okay. I have nothing to lose, so I'm going to go all the way out to the edge on this gun issue.

 

In 2005 I watched as my friends at Red Lake were traumatized, killed, and besieged by reporters, then forgotten after a confused and alienated kid drove a car into the front of the school where I had worked, before pulling out an arsenal of guns and killing 7 people.

 

I am, as I write this, on a plane back to my home in Portland, 180 miles north of the mass murder site in the town of Roseburg, where I used to buy car parts when I lived in the Oregon woods many years ago, and where I have stopped and let my dog play in the dog park as we drove south through the magical Oregon country side.

 

I shop at the Clackamas mall where one more confused white kid brought out a gun and killed three people for no reason that any of us can fathom, or should have to fathom.

 

And all the politicians, no matter how pained and grieved, are dancing around the issue of guns with vague platitudes about the need for mental health services, background checks, the necessity of enlisting the support of responsible gun owners, and on and on.

 

But, let's cut to the chase: it's guns, pure and simple. Guns.

 

So, let's go to it.

 

What is it about guns that so obsesses Americans? Yes, I know all about the second amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. I know all about the perceived slippery slope into governmental control of our lives. I know about beard boys in Idaho wearing camouflage and facepaint and crawling through the woods to hold out against an upcoming takeover by a fascist and totalitarian government, and about frightened fathers and mothers keeping guns in their houses in cities and suburbs to protect against intruders. I know about all of this.

 

But forget all of that. Tell me about guns.

 

There are otherwise perfectly normal human beings in northern Minnesota where I lived who can barely feed their families but have 25 rifles, pistols, and semi-automatic weapons in their closets.

 

Why? You don't have 25 refrigerators, or 25 pipe wrenches, or 25 anything other than perhaps baseball caps and pairs of shoes, and those things are questionable enough in themselves. So, what is it about a gun? Is it some feeling of power? Is there some crypto-sexual thrill in holding it? Shooting it? Stroking it?

 

I know I'm being a bit demeaning, but, damn it, I simply can't understand. And, frankly, I don't want to. I am sick of hearing arguments for these cruel and lethal objects. They scare me, they disgust me, and it makes me ashamed that such an adolescent and selfish obsession can be one of the few sacrosanct things in our country.

 

What drives it? Why are we like this?

 

Sometimes I think it is part of this culture of fear that comes with our out-of-control capitalist society where every advertisement is based on fear and perceived deficiency, and a gun is just the physical embodiment of a sense of control.

 

Sometimes I think it has a subterranean racism at its heart, where fear of the terrifying black man at your door drives white people to want to have the fantasy of a protective weapon at hand.

 

Sometimes I think it is the residual frontier ethic. But the Canadians have every bit as strong a frontier ethic, and they don't share this cultural mental illness.

 

And, yes, that's what it is — a cultural mental illness, fomented and fanned by an armament industry that needs, or, at least, wants, every man, woman, and child to be packing a weapon in the name of freedom or security or whatever abstraction they can sell us.

 

But, my God, children are dying, and they are dying from guns. No amount of counseling or monitoring or background checks is going to stop this. People will get guns like teenagers get beer, and no amount of laws will stop it.

 

Consider the sheriff in Roseburg. He stated quite forthrightly that he would not enforce any  federal gun laws, nor would he allow his deputies to do so. And now he is looking in the faces of the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives of the dead. How can he sleep at night? Is he at least a little conflicted?

 

Sadly, probably not. To him, it wasn't a gun that killed all those people. It was a person. And the fact that it was a gun in the hand of that person, just as it was a gun in the hand of the killer at Red Lake and the killers at Columbine and the killer at the Aurora movie theater and the killer in every other mass murder in America doesn't register with him or people like him. It is a mind-boggling disconnect that simply beggars the imagination.

 

So, what will stop it? One and only one thing: getting rid of guns on our streets. And this is no easy task. It cannot be done by fiat, it cannot be done in one legislative swoop. It can only be done by changing hearts and minds, and that takes time.

 

There needs to be incremental change – make it illegal to own handguns and semi-automatics for starters, then begin confiscating them as they come in contact with the legal system. Stop the manufacture, or, at least, the sale of them. Then get beneath this and start to educate our children to the reality that compassion will eventually trump fear, and there is nothing magical or mystical about a piece of metal (or, sadly, plastic) that can kill at a distance. In fact, it is simply sick to look at them as problem solvers.

 

So, go ahead, unfriend me, refuse to buy my books, write me enraged emails filled with the tired old tropes.

 

But, for the love of Jesus and Mary and Buddha and things that go bump in the night, take a look in the mirror and ask why this piece of metal that is essentially a killing machine is so damn important to you.

 

Red Lake. Clackamas Mall. Columbine. Sandy Hook.  Roseburg. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

 

And you will be shocked and you will be surprised and you will say, "This was such a nice quiet community. Things like this aren't supposed to happen here."

 

Well, sorry. They aren't supposed to happen in your particular "here," but they will. And if you prevaricate and trot out tired old bromides and talk about abstractions while another child gets its face blown off by a gun, the blood is on your hands.

 

Guns are an American sickness, and it is a sickness that must be cured.

 

 

 

 

Before my time in Native America turned my life in a different direction, I was committed to creating life-size sculptures in wood. It's a long story, and in a different life it would have been the whole story. But just when you think you're the pitcher, life serves you up an unexpected curve ball and you find out that you are really the batter. Enter writing, exit sculpting. I still think of myself as a sculptor, but now I sculpt in words, not in trees, and I still have a sculptor's sensibilities in my use of language and imagery. But the physical act of shaping forms in wood is long over. However, I do have one remaining piece that embodies much of what I tried to do as a sculptor. Here is an image and an explanation of it It probably says more about who I am than anything I have ever written.

 

ELEGY

A sculpture in Wood

weathered black walnut

 

 "We are not apart from nature, we are a part of nature."

 

 I have often said that my work as a writer has been an ongoing search for an authentic American spirituality, a place where the rich humanity of the Judeo-Christian tradition met with the profound earth-bound humility of Native American belief.

 

Thirty years ago, as a sculptor, I committed to making one final image that would embody that spirituality. 

 

 It was to be an echo of a crucifixion, an homage to the heartfelt Medieval crucifixes of northern Europe enlivened and defined by the haunting power of nature.

 

The only way I could do this authentically was to allow the forces of nature to have their hand in the sculptural process.

 

And so this piece, called "Elegy" — slightly smaller than life size and carved from a living piece of black walnut — has now been given life by forty years of weathering by the forces of nature. 

 

It has lain in the hot summer sun, stood against the harsh forces of winter snows and winds.  It spent a year submerged among the shifting sands and lapping waters of a deep northern Minnesota lake, and seasons touched by the gentle breezes and changing light of autumns and springs.

 

It has taken its final form at the hand of nature in a way that could never have been done by human touch, and I now wish it to find a final resting place in a meditative or reflective  setting where it can speak to anyone who sits in its presence.

 

This is a labor of love and finality for me.  "Elegy" is my final sculpture.  It says everything that, as a sculptor, I have needed to say.

 

I have not actively sought a home for "Elegy".  I have preferred to let nature work her magic, knowing that the piece would find a home when the time was right.  Now that the sculpture has reached the state where the natural and the human are in perfect balance, I believe that time has come. 

 

If you know of a setting that would be enhanced by the meditative presence of "Elegy", please get in touch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you have an hour of time to spare?  This 2013 Common Ground segment from Minnesota Public Television is long but worth your time. I was only a month removed from a heart bypass and was more lucid than I had a right to be.  Plus, Lucie gets a lot of air time, as does our life in Bemidji.  You will learn a lot.  

 

Click on this to view the video:

 

https://lptv.org/local-show/sculpting-in-wood-and-words-the-art-of-kent-nerburn/

 

 

 

Mary Ann Grossman, the book reviewer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, is a cultural treasure for all Minnesota authors.  She was kind enough to write a piece about Lone Dog Road and my return to my home state.  As always, I am thankful for her gracious words and presence. Well worth a read.

 

Read this article.

 

 

I have done many interviews over the years with many insightful and perceptive reviewers. Picking several to share with you is like choosing the guest list for a wedding: some very good and worthy pieces get left out. Nonetheless, choices must be made. So I've just reached into the grab bag of my memory and pulled up several that came to mind. This one by Joe Grindon has always stuck with me.

 

Read "The Great Mystery"