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.