Kent Nerburn

Tomorrow I will be having a ZOOM meeting with a book club about Neither Wolf nor Dog, my most loved and most read book.  For those of you who don't know, Neither Wolf nor Dog, tells the story of Dan, a Lakota elder, as we journey across the plains of South Dakota together and he offers his thoughts on American culture, his people, and the values he thinks we all need to learn and share. Neither Wolf nor Dog won the Minnesota Book Award, was the South Dakota book of the year, and has become a favorite of people ranging from the singer, Robert Plant, to the editors of the American Indian College Fund.

 

As the author, I love the book, just as I love all my books.  They are my literary children, and they represent the best of what I can do with the skills that I have been given.  But I often wonder why Neither Wolf nor Dog, among all of the books I have written, has had such staying power and such influence.  Then I go back and read a few pages, as I am doing in preparation for tomorrow's book club, and I am reminded that it is Dan and his insights that give the book such life.

 

Here's Dan speaking on racism. Agree with him or not, he certainly gives you something to think about.

 

White people are afraid of everyone who isn't white.

 

Look at how you define Black people. If a person had one Black ancestor back somewhere, and you can see it, you tell them they are Black. You don't do that with Italians or Irish. But one Black grandma? Bingo, you're Black.

 

But the thing is, you're not really saying they are Black. You're saying they're not white.

 

But at least with Blacks you let them alone once you decided they weren't white. You just threw them in a barrel —black, brown, tan, whatever— and called them Black. But us Indians, you couldn't even leave us alone to be Indians once you decided we weren't white. You start dividing us up, calling us half-breeds, full bloods. Try calling a Black person with some white blood a half-breed. See how that goes over.

 

You've got all sorts of rules that you don't even know. Like, it's okay for white people to adopt Chinese kids, but it's not okay for Chinese people to adopt white kids. If a white man is with a Black woman, then he's liberal. But if a Black man is with a white woman, he must be a pimp. It's the same with Indians. If a white man is with an Indian woman, it might be okay. That's the way they like to do it in the movies. But if an Indian man is with a white woman, there's something wrong with her that she would choose to be with one of 'those people'.

 

I think it has to do with conquering. The white man has to be in control.

 

Unique place, America.

 

 

 

 

Art has a unique power to create social change because it can focus attention on an issue in a way that nothing else can. 

 

The iconic photo of the Napalm Girl by Nick Ut galvanized the consciousness of America against the Viet Nam war, because no caring human being could view it and not say, "This is wrong!  It must stop!"  

 

The photo of ChongLy Scott Thao, the Hmong elder being rousted by ICE, did the same for the invasion of the Twin Cities, as did the heart-rending image of little 5 year old Liam Ramos being kidnapped by Trump's ICE agents.

 

We never know when a song, an image, a phrase, will almost mystically capture the spirit of a moment, and all the anguish, struggle, and confusion suddenly finds its voice.  All we know is that art alone has the power to capture and coalesce that moment. 

 

It is not unreasonable to say that the photos of ChongLy Scott Thao in his blanket and Liam Ramos in his bunny hat marked the moments when indifferent or uninvolved or uncommitted America sat up and said, "This is enough.  This is wrong.  This must stop."  

 

Remember this, all you artists when you think you are not doing enough, and all you non-artists when you think  that art is a frivolity or a luxury and that it has no real place in the down and dirty affairs of the real world.  Art is mysterious and magic, and sometimes mystery and magic are what we need to keep our vision and our dreams alive.

 

 

I told you ICE was leaving, and I told you why. It has taken a little longer than I had expected, they are doing it with more cruel rear-guard action than I had anticipated, and it is not being done en masse. But it is happening. 

 

Now I want to tell you what I think "leaving" actually means, and what it portends. 

 

First off, it's important to understand that while the massed forces of the troops are gone, the policies are not. The Whipple building, where immigrants who are "captured" off the street as well as where ordinary resident immigrants must go to sign in periodically, is still a black box. The government keeps it off limits to ordinary observers. It is a detention center where detainees are denied due process, given inscrutable information written only in incomprehensible English legalese, kept from using their cellphones and made to sleep on the floor with only the notorious detention center tinfoil blankets, if they are given anything at all. 

 

I have a friend who drives legal immigrants to the Whipple building for their periodic reporting, and he has waited as someone he drove there failed to come out for her ride home, only to find that she had been taken out a back door and flown to a detention center in Texas where she is incarcerated for no legitimate reason.  This sort of terrorist detention and deportation is still happening every day, and it has the brown population of the Twin Cities living in fear -- afraid to leave their homes, afraid to go shopping, afraid to go to work, afraid to send their children to school.

 

Just the other day I went to get my hair cut and the shop had its door locked because one of the barbers is Hmong and he fears that ICE might break in and take him.  Likewise, at the little tire store I patronize customers are let in only upon visual recognition because most of the workers are Mexican, though the sad truth it that few of the workers dare come in at all because the shop is a target, and few are needed because most of the customers are immigrants and few dare to come out to shop. 

 

Likewise restaurants are shutting their doors because their workers don't dare come to work; ethnic restaurants are even afraid to open.  School attendance is down because parents fear their children will be grabbed from the classroom or while waiting for the bus.  Homes and buildings are not being cleaned. The whole service economy is under siege and in danger of collapsing. 

 

Understand -- this is not an unexpected byproduct of the occupation. This is the new face of ICE:  no longer a hammer, but a shiv.  It has retreated and is operating on the principles of a terrorist enterprise -- make everyone afraid because no one knows where it will strike next.  This is a classic technique of asymmetrical warfare:  if numbers are not on your side, control by fear not by force.  The IRS has operated on this model forever:  compliance is created by the fear of the unknown, not by any certainty of direct confrontation. It is brutal and it works.

 

Overall, ICE is following a textbook model of pacification and control in Minnesota.  It replaced Bovino, its little tin pot general, with Tom Holman, a more corporate-looking leader in a suit who speaks in more measured tones, albeit with a threat always just beneath the surface. It has gaslighted a retreat into a change of policy supposedly based on Minnesota coming to its senses and agreeing to work with the feds on reasonable immigration policies-- essentially declaring victory, normalizing the appearance of things, and operating with cruelty and stealth under the cover of darkness.

 

Simply put, the general populace has been pacified (or, at least, exhausted), the black and brown people are still living in fear, and a model of soft occupation has been put in place.  Minnesota's economy and the emotional well-being of its children have been the casualties, but that was and remains of no concern to the federal government.   

 

But here is the real issue:  in terms of a tactical operation, this was an apparent failure for the feds -- a failure that they are attempting to gaslight out of existence.  But on a strategic level, this was a success.  It was a Dieppe-level operation undertaken to assay the feasibility and process of resistance to a federal government takeover of state and local systems of operation and enforcement.  (The Dieppe landing, for those who don't know, was an invasion of the French coast two years before D-Day where the Canadian troops were essentially sacrificed in order to test the feasibility of an invasion strategy and to assay the power of the Germans to offer resistance to a full Allied invasion in the future.)

 

Minneapolis is the federal equivalent of a Dieppe invasion of an American city --a trial run of federal efforts to wrest control of governmental and legal structures from states and municipalities. Can a federal para-military police force override and control local law enforcement?  Will courts be able to offer resistance to illegal federal action?  How resistant and compliant will the local population be?  What will the long term shape of a pacification take?  How much will this cost and how is it to be pulled off logistically?

 

Minneapolis was the feds test invasion and they got the information they needed.  What they will do with it remains to be seen. I, personally, think it was both a chance to test the limits of the American legal system and a dry run for on the ground control of the 2026 (and probably 2028) elections.  At the very least it was a chance to test some real world techniques of citizen control.

 

The real question is what is behind all of this?  What is the end game?  It's becoming more and more clear that Trump is simply a useful idiot in a larger plan to reshape the entire American governmental structure.  He is the perfect lightning rod because he is such a magnet for attention and will do almost anything to keep people from finding out the truth of his unholy dealings with young girls through his friends, Maxwell and Epstein.  You can just leave it at that or pull on some conspiratorial strings that lead back to the Kremlin and Russian control and rumblings about a Manchurian candidate, or to some unnamed trans-national capitalist cabal with a Bond-villainesque dream of world domination and control.   But I will leave that to the conspiracy folk.  All that matters to me is that there are forces invested in modifying our American form of government, that overriding existing legal controls is part of that modification, and that Minnesota and Minneapolis were and are integral pieces in determining the efficacy of certain tactics and practices dedicated to achieving that end.

 

Minneapolis was a temporary check on the chessboard of governmental modification and control.  Whether it was an initial move toward an ultimate checkmate or just a necessary move in response to a decoy feint by larger forces with a larger agenda remains to be seen. 

 

Stay tuned, stay watchful, and don't bet the farm.  This is the long game and we are only at the beginning. 

Image is everything to Trump, and the image war was tipping against him

 

1.) Alex Pretti, in the video, in his character, in his association with the Robby Rabinovich character in The Pitt in the subconscious of viewers, offered an unassailable image of goodness that Trump knew he could not overcome.

 

2.) Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem were becoming objects of derision and vilification.  Bovino, with his tone deaf choice of an SS-echoing overcoat, was bringing to mind Nazi era repression, not patriotic strength and resolve.   Noem, with her embarrassing cosplay soldier Barbie outfits, was eliciting the same kind of snickers that Trump elicited from European leaders as he thundered about taking over Greenland.  His show of strength on the streets of Minneapolis had devolved into something brutish and cartoonish.  He was not being feared, he was being mocked.  And any further show of strength would only make him look worse.  If Noem and Bovino aren't gone by the time you read this, I expect they will be given the boot shortly.

 

3.) The five year old boy in his bunny cap and the Hmong man in the Crocs and blanket were becoming the indelible images of this occupation.  They were going to be Trump's visual equivalent of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing from the napalm, and he knew he could not overcome them.

 

4.)  The crowds in the streets of Minneapolis did not conform to Trump's expectations of post-George Floyd lawlessness which he expected to exploit, but were steadily winning the hearts and minds of the nation with their raise-the-hair-on-the back-of-your-neck unity and clarity of purpose.  The nation's rooting interest was turning in their favor and Trump's only options were to cut and run, double down, or hope that the demonstrators would lose their enthusiasm which was not happening.  His only viable option was to find a face saving off ramp.

 

Trump saw the economic power structure turning against him

 

It's a sad truism that wars only end when the men in suits turn against them.  In the case of Trump's war on Minneapolis, Wall Street was the embodiment of the men in suits.

 

It was clear that Trump feared and does fear Wall Street because he has consistently backed down when the stock market told him that he had gone too far.  So long as the tee shirt tech bros smothered him with their subservient adulation, and Wall Street always rebounded when he pulled back from the edge, he could play his game of financial brinkmanship.

 

But when the more staid corporate big dogs started to itch and twitch -- the Targets and United Health Cares and 3Ms and Cargills -- he knew that the men he so idolizes and fears, the ones who run the New York where he has tried so desperately to gain respect and meaningful entry, were about to turn on him, and if they abandoned him his most important and most desired power base would be in peril.

 

Trump finally set some stakes in the ground about what it would take to get him to leave

 

Any lawyer knows that you can't negotiate with an idea.  There must be a specific in place, no matter how absurd.

 

Once Trump started talking in specifics about how many people had been detained and deported by ICE (4300, 2000, etc.), rather than just going on about rapists and murders and "many, many" people, it fit his pattern of stating a specific and then using that as a basis for claiming success in any venture.

 

The Greenland "tell" put the pieces together

 

It should have been obvious, but we were all looking in the wrong place.  We were peering under the sheets and seeing "Epstein", and that blinded us to something deeper and more fundamental that should have been obvious if we been thinking more clearly:

 

Trump wants to be seen as a great president, not as a dictator.

 

Bear with me.

 

We on the left, and, increasingly, more of those in the center, are terrified of Trump's megalomaniacal push toward dictatorship, and that is what we see first when we look at his actions.

But Trump does not want to be a dictator, he just wants a dictator's power.  What he wants to be is a great president or, at least, to be seen as one, which, in his mind, are one and the same.  He just thinks he needs a dictator's power to accomplish the things necessary to achieve this goal.

 

What he truly wants is to be up on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and TR.  Or at least to be seen as worthy of being up there. He has said as much.  What he is trying to do by his actions is show himself as their equal, or their better.

 

Look at the tea leaves:

 

His "Donroe Doctrine"?  He'll complete what James Monroe was never able to fully accomplish:  take military control of the entire western hemisphere.

 

Misbehaving nations in that hemisphere?  He'll outdo Teddy Roosevelt and his rough riders by making the waters of Venezuela the new San Juan hill.

 

Redo the White House?  He'll outdo TR, Taft, Hoover, and FDR who built and expanded the West Wing; he'll build a ballroom as big as the White House itself.  And his wife, not to be outdone by Jackie Kennedy, will redo the rose garden into a regal marble plaza.

 

A champion of culture?  He'll redefine culture and put his name above Kennedy's on the national building that stands for culture and carries Kennedy's name.

 

Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations?  FDR and the UN?  He will start an international Board of Peace that will dwarf them all.

 

Middle East Peace?  He will outdo Clinton and Carter, even if it involves working with a sheik who treats his critics like the guy stuffed in the woodchipper in Fargo.

 

You can go on and on, picking your own analogies.

 

But the important thing to remember is that all of these were not simply, as they seemed to be on the surface, diversionary tactics or megalomaniacal overreaches.  They were ham-handed attempts to claim his place as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, president in American history.

 

With Greenland, this goal came into focus.

 

The claiming of Greenland, on the surface, seemed insane--his wildest overreach or his most blatant Epstein diversion. But, in fact, Greenland was his wild grasp at Jeffersonian greatness.  Greenland was to be his Louisiana Purchase.  Though it didn't quite rise to that level, he was able to understand it that way in his own mind.

 

But then came Minneapolis.

 

Perhaps the Minneapolis Invasion was originally intended to be a demonstration of power; perhaps a punishment for uppity Democratic behavior; perhaps a war games practice ground for Stephen Miller's fever dreams of total domination.  Perhaps, it had no psychological significance in Trump's mind whatsoever beyond his desire to hurt people who do not do what he says.

 

But whatever he or his minions originally intended, the Minneapolis occupation did not go as planned. His Project 2025 apparatchiks may have wanted it to be the start of a new Civil War, but Trump didn't.  He wants to be seen as Abraham Lincoln by stopping a Civil War, not Bashar al Assad by starting one.  Minneapolis, whatever it was intended to be, was going sideways for him.

 

Remember, more than once he has crowed, very specifically, that people tell him if he ran against Washington or Lincoln, or even against a ticket of the two of them, he would win.  Absurd? Yes. But you can look it up. So while we were obsessed with seeing him as our own home-grown Hitler, he was obsessed with being seen as America's Greatest President.  With every image of his thugs roughing up an old man in pajamas or snatching a two year old from her mother, with every image of soccer moms and grandmas marching with thousands in the streets, his narrative of being the Great President who solved our very real border crisis -- the one that has bedeviled presidents for decades -- was dissolving into the image of an authoritarian dictator who hated and oppressed ordinary Americans. He was becoming the anti-Abraham Lincoln.  He was not ending a Civil War, he was on the verge of starting one.  His fantasy image of himself as the fifth head on Mount Rushmore was dissolving before his very eyes.

 

Faced with the choice of doubling down and risking the bad optics of more killings and toddler kidnappings and freezing grandpas in bathrobes -- optics that would make him seem like a Hitler, not like a hero -- or withdrawing in a fog of lies and gaslighting, it was obvious which one he had to choose.

 

He needed to get out.

 

The playbook for his retreat had already set in a number of previous situations.  Lop off a few heads (keep your resumes updated, Kristi and Kash and Bovino), claim that it was underlings who went too far, blow a few fake kisses towards those people who just days before he was vilifying as communists and terrorists, and pivot to a new narrative.

 

In this case the new narrative was obvious.  He would become the voice of reason, stern but fair. The Great Conciliator.  Walz had come to his senses. Without Trump's intervention, the nation would have descended into Civil War.  Without his calm and measured hand, the dark forces that were manipulating the Left would have succeeded in tearing the country apart.  His withdrawal of ICE agents in the face of the continuing assault of immigrant rapists and murderers was necessary to save the union that was about to be rent in two.

 

There it is.  The New Lincoln, not ending a Civil War, but stopping one before it starts!  It's craven, it's stupid, it's ridiculous.  But it's pure Trump. And it allows him to continue his dark acts and Epstein diversions in other places and in other ways.  (Cuba, anyone?)

 

There will be threats and skirmishes on the way out.  He has to look strong.  He has to have his hand on top in every handshake.  But he is backing up.

 

Underneath, nothing has changed.  But for the moment, the good guys have won.

 

But Trump is a moveable beast.  As Arnold Schwarzenegger said in The Terminator, "I'll be back."

With the new year I have decided to redo my website.  There will be glitches, to be sure.  I am bumping over the cyber-landscape in a conestoga wagon while most are flying above it in supersonic transports.  But I will persevere.  I hope you will, as well, granting me the gift of patience while I blunder toward viability.  

 

My whole idea is to communicate better with you once this new website is in place. Facebook has become a junkpile, I have no skills at Instagram or X or Snapchat or any of the other systems currently used by cyber-savvy folks.  In general, I have neither the interest nor the capability of mastering online reality, and have no intention of trying to do so.  So this will be my go-to location for any of you trying to find out about what is going on with me and my books.  

 

As always, I will try to keep my relationship with you personal rather than presentational.  I am, for better or for worse, a "cult" author.  One commentator once compared me to Leonard Cohen, saying my following was small, but devoted and intelligent.  I'll take that any day. 

 

But, enough explanations.  Go forth, examine the website, and reach out if you are so inclined.  The conestoga moves forward, bump by bump.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Alexandria, Minnesota 

 

Bookstores occupy a unique place in small communities. There is generally a fiercely visionary aspect to their presence and, usually, a fragility. After all, they are selling a product that is discretionary in areas of the country where folks generally don't have a lot of discretionary income. Hardware stores they need; bookstores, not so much.

 

Too often the economic realities of the town and the book business force these stores to descend into being shops of greeting cards and gift items, with the books becoming secondary. No praise, no blame. It's just the way it is.

 

But when a store survives with its vision intact and establishes itself as a community anchor, it shines in a very special fashion. Even people who never step inside its doors point to it with pride.

 

"See, we are more than Walmarts and Dollar Generals and barstools and denver omelettes. We are part of the larger world. We value ideas and adventures of the mind."

 

Cherry Street is one of those community anchors. Maybe I'm blinded by my history with this store: it, like Beagle and Wolf, was one of the stores that embraced me and promoted me early in my career. Kathleen Pohlig, the founder, made me feel like I was important, not just the next author up in a string of author appearances. A dinner out, good fellowship, and a warm welcome in the store. It made me feel like Sally Field in her famous exclamation: "You like me! You people really like me!" And the feeling was mutual.

 

This tour's night together at Cherry Street just cemented that love. All you folks out there in big city America, all you folks who think that rural America is just bullet-headed Trumpists, need to go to a reading at a store like Cherry Street. Smart people, engaged people, stronger in their belief in a worldly vision than many of their urban compatriots, because the reactionary forces with which they have to contend are ominpresent and immediate in their everyday lives.

 

A rainy night just enhanced the evening's intimacy. I left with a warm feeling in my heart, not just for Cherry Street, but for this whole nine day journey through the Minnesota north country that I love so much.

 

Now, it's a little R and R before going back on the road in the southern part of the state. Sadly, I have to say adieu to my blogging about the tour. Obligations are piling up and I can't keep pace with the demands. Every mother has at one time told her kids, "If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all." My personal variation on that admonition is, "If you can't do something right, don't do anything at all." I can't do the blogging right, so here comes my radio silence.

 

Keep reading, keep passing on the word about Lone Dog Road, and pet every dog you can.

Every author has one of those places where it all began.

What is now Beagle and Wolf books in Park Rapids, Minnesota, is that place for me.

 

Beagle and Wolf was originally two stores — Beagle Books in the small town of Park Rapids and Sister Wolf books in the even smaller town of Dorset, Minnesota. Both are destination spots in the resort area on the western edge of the lakes and pines country of northwest Minnesota.

 

Park Rapids is a sweet little lakes and woods town of 4000 that serves as an escape valve for North Dakotans who get tired of their parched reality and scoot over to Park Rapids to race around on jet skis and otherwise live the lake life that their home geography has denied them.

 

Dorset, population 22, pulled off the promotional gimmick of having a three-year-old mayor, who succeeded his six-year-old brother in the job, creating a political dynasty that for all I know continues to this day. That's a story unto itself, and worthy of the knowing, but now is not the time to tell it.

 

Lots of vacationers and cabin owners visit Dorset for an evening meal at one of the four restaurants that exist on its single main street and are its claim to fame as the self described "restaurant capital of Minnesota". Where the people come from who staff and operate these restaurants is anybody's guess — probably Park Rapids.

Bemidji, Minnesota

"My god!  You look just like someone I used to know, except a lot older."

"Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you!"

 

And so went the good-natured ribbing among those of us at the Lone Dog Road reading at Four Pines bookstore in my old home town of Bemidji.

What a warm evening! Dear old friends, folks I recognized but didn't know, folks I knew only slightly, but with whom I shared a common history on these too familiar streets.  This was not the Red Lake taproot.  This was the Bemidji intertwining of branches.

 

Four Pines bookstore felt courageous.  I know this town in the lakes and pines country 100 miles from the nearest freeway and 100 miles from the Canadian border.  I lived here for25 years.  I know how it has fought against meaningful social change and clung tightly to a culture of nostalgia. But things are changing. The young people are forcing it. They are saying, "We want more.  We want the bigger world."  And they are getting it.

 

Micro-breweries, Thai restaurants and ramen shops.  Home grown businesses started by young, courageous entrepreneurs who want to embrace change, not resist it.

Four Pines Bookstore is one of these.  It has a brightness, an earnestness, a hopefulness.  Other bookstores have come and gone in this town — a crazy, topsy turvy bookstore of used books on jumbled shelves in an old Victorian house, a weirdly insular tiny Christian bookstore, an off-brand chain whose heart never really seemed in the enterprise, and now, Four Pines.  It has the modern, welcoming openness that puts it right in the mainstream of colorful, brightly lit independent bookstores around the country.  You can feel it enhancing the texture and dimension of the community by its presence.

 

The reading went well.  I am figuring out how to present this sprawling, hard-to-categorize novel.  But, even more, there was discussion about the interwoven nature of the Native and non-Native communities here.  The pain, the rupture, the commonalities and differences, are all being brought out into the open.  I like to think that my work has played a part in this.  After all, here in this forgotten corner of northwest Minnesota is where my eyes were opened, where I first put pen to paper, and where the land grabbed me with a force that has never let go. And I have tried to give it voice through my work.

 

I'm fond of saying that we each have to live in a way that pays the rent for our time on earth.  Between the wonderful engagement in Red Lake and the warm evening in Bemidji, I get a good feeling that maybe my rent is partially paid.

 

My reward for these days was a touch with people who have touched my heart, the lapping of lake waters and the nighttime cry of the loons outside our window, and a pontoon ride along this northern most part of the Mississippi with my wife at my side and a dog on my lap.

 

If there was nothing more, I could die happy.

 

But I don't get to die, happily or otherwise.  Bemidji is in the rearview mirror and we're off to Park Rapids and Beagle and Wolf books, who have been among my strongest supporters for 35 years.

Another precious homecoming. I could get used to this.