Kent Nerburn

A invitation to a rare experience

Join me on a journey to the windswept, haunting Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic 

 

Explorer X Webpage: Faroes 2026

 

Info Session Details

Date: Wednesday / May 13

Time: 5–6pm PT / 7–8pm CT

 

Location: Zoom (Online)

 

Link to the Info Session Registration

 

You, my readers, know that the spirit of place has long been a deep and abiding obsession of mine.

 

From Letters to My Son, where I spoke of being mesmerized by the vast distances of the arctic, to Voices in the Stones, where I wrote of sensing the ghosts of the Nez Perce as lay in the shelter pits at the Bears Paw battlefield, to the "Dan trilogy" where I sought to evoke the spiritual presence of the haunting landscapes of the Dakotas, I have sought to communicate the power that the land has over our spirits.

 

Recently, my friends at Explorer X (www.explorer-x.com) who share my love of the deep forces of nature, offered me a chance to help shape a journey to a place that has called to my spirit since I first learned of it -- the Faroe Islands -- an archipelago of unsurpassingly rugged outcroppings that rise like jagged teeth from the jaws of the North Atlantic in the lonely seas between Scotland, Norway, and Iceland.
 

Why the Faroes?  What has so intrigued me about them? 

 

The Irish, harking back to their Celtic roots (which the Faroese share), speak of "thin places"-- places on earth where the distance between the eternal and everyday is so thin that the two seem almost to touch, like the fingers of God and man in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

 

The Faroes are such a place.

 

Like Monument Valley, like the hills of Big Sur, they are a place on earth where the great forces, indifferent to our presence, engage in eternal conversation.  We who visit can only stand in silence and bear humble witness to their presence.

 

But there are people on the Faroes who do more than just bear witness -- the Faroese. They have made this eternal landscape their home for centuries.  The lifestyle they have created and the culture they have evolved reflect the elemental nature of this sacred meeting of the sky, land, and sea.

 

Explorer X knows the Faroes and loves them.  When they heard that I shared that love, we put our minds together to shape a once-in-a-lifetime journey to this unique and magnificent land. 

It will be multi-dimensional in the way that only Explorer X can do. We will meet the Faroese people, share their homes, learn of their art, sit at their tables, experience their culture, and encounter their way of life.  But it will also be a deeply personal journey, allowing each of us time and space to take in the enormity of this land that is simply too great for the human mind to absorb.

 

If you choose to sit alone and journal, there will be time for that.  If you choose to go off somewhere to sketch or paint, there will be time for that.  If you choose merely to stand on a promontory and take in the conversation of the light and the landscape and the restless rolling of the northern sea, there will be time for that, as well. 

 

This is our journey -- like-minded folks who care about the deeper dimensions of the human experience traveling together.  But it will be each of our personal journeys as well. At heart, this will be a journey about transformation, and none of us knows what the shape of our personal transformation will be until we experience it.

 

I hope you will join Michael and me for an informational webinar about this rare opportunity   to experience the Faroes, one of earth's sacred "thin places" and one of the world's mightiest meetings of land, sea, and sky.

 

I hope you will.

 

I would love to meet some of you face to face after these long years of friendship developed over your kind support and appreciation of my writings.  To have that meeting take place on the majestic Faroe Islands would be a gift I would always cherish.

 

The Detailed Itinerary for the Faroes Trip

Info Session Details

Date: Wednesday / May 13

Time: 5–6pm PT / 7–8pm CT

Location: Zoom (Online)

Link to the Info Session Registration

My apologies for the confused notification about Lone Dog Road and the Reading the West fiction award.  I am managing my own website now and I'm afraid it should have the cyber equivalent of that bumper sticker, "Student Driver.  Please be Patient."  plastered as a warning across the top.  But I persevere, lurching down the cyber highway trying to look like I know what I'm doing, making course corrections as needed.  This is one of them.

 

Quite unbeknownst to me, Reading the West, a site sponsored by the Mountains and Plains booksellers, short listed Lone Dog Road as a finalist for the fiction book of the year. 

 

I am, as most of you know, something of an odd duck as an author.  Perhaps I should say I'm neither wolf nor dog.  But frame it as you will, my work lives in the margins between literary categories and is, as an author friend of mine said, "Well loved, but not well known."  It has been variously described as a search for an authentic American spirituality and as a worthy bridge between Native and non-Native cultures.  I use many genres to try to illuminate and teach about the lessons our dominant culture has to learn both from and about the Native experience.  

 

Lone Dog Road is my latest work and it is the most complex literary endeavor I have ever undertaken.  

 

I have never been one for self promotion. I find it unseemly and I don't do it well. I almost threw up the first time someone talked to me about promoting  my "brand".  I see my task as quietly and unobtrusively serving the common good. But someone with a more measured view told me, "If you see your work as teaching and illuminating, you need to think of promoting and publicizing your work as acts of sharing, not acts of self promotion."  Lesson taken.

 

And so, instead of recoiling from publicizing and promoting Lone Dog Road I am embracing the opportunity afforded me by the Reading the West nomination as a chance to share, in a new and more complex way, the insights and stories that I have gained from my unique almost forty year involvement with the people and ways of Native America. 

 

So, if you are somenone who has valued and has faith in my work, I am asking you to help me in that task.  I need you to go to the Reading the West voting page (https://readingthewest.com/36th-annual-shortlist-titles/#fiction) and cast your vote for Lone Dog Road as the fiction book of the year.

 

My publisher is not one of the big dogs with an unlimited promotional budget, so my works have always had to make their way by word-of-mouth, and that's the way I like it.  It has kept me close to you, my readers, and has made of us a community of friends. We even collaborated on the title and the cover for Lone Dog Road, and your participation has made it the compelling book that it is.

 

Now we have a chance to expand our community and work together to help this "elder book" of mine do its work in shaping minds and hearts.  Please go to the site and vote for Lone Dog Road.  I think it is a worthy choice and I'd love to have its message reach new readers.  A selection as the book of the year would help make that happen.

 

Hey gang, I'd like your help. Lone Dog Road just made the short list for the fiction book of the year on Reading the West and I need your vote.

 

I've been out speaking about the book -- 7000 miles on America's highways and backroads -- and folks love it, which pleases me greatly. Its a radical book, because I took the risk of having no narrator, just good people speaking intimately to you, the reader, from their own point of view.

Many authors do this, but few allow their characters to speak so deeply and honestly from the heart. They don't tell the story, they are the story, and what they reveal becomes their part of the journey of little Levi and Reuben, ages 11 and 6, on the run across the Dakotas to get a piece of pipestone to make a new Chanunpa for their great grandfather. It's a good story, well told. I call it a spiritual road mystery and it is a near kin to Neither Wolf nor Dog, The Wolf at Twilight, and The Girl who Sang to the Buffalo.

So, please go to https://readingthewest.shelf-awareness.com/readingthewest... and vote for LDR. I really think this is an important book that reaches across spiritual and cultural boundaries. It was and is for me an affair of the heart.