Readers and writers: Immersion, writing from the heart help non-Native novelist access the culture

Kent Nerburn cradles in his palm a small turtle carved from clay quarried at Pipestone a place in southwestern Minnesota sacred to American Indian people This little guy plays an essential role in Lone Dog Road the story of two Lakota boys on the run in Nerburn s first novel after writing nonfiction books To the Lakota the sacred is in everything It comes with their way of understanding the world he says The turtle represents patience a vision of longevity Patience and longevity are qualities of the wise and witty old great-grandfather in Lone Dog Road which continues Nerburn s efforts to honor Native people striving to bridge the gap between Natives and the dominant white way of life His majority of popular books make up the trilogy that won two Minnesota Book Awards Neither Wolf Nor Dog made into a film The Wolf at Twilight and The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo My novel is a relative to Neither Wolf Nor Dog but more expansive in its voices Nerburn says It s the capstone to the trilogy The characters are different but the themes and heartbeat and inner and outer landscapes are much the same I put everything I know into this book Courtesy of New World Library As he talks about writing and his early career as a sculptor Nerburn settles into a chair in the University Grove home he shares with his wife Louise Mengelkoch a retired Bemidji State University journalism professor He had just returned from North Dakota where he was cultural liaison for staff of Smiles Organization International who were doing dental work at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation Nerburn writes about Lakota and Ojibwe people but he proposes no Native blood His writing comes from traveling the pow wow highway with Indian elders participating in a sweat lodge teaching Indian youngsters immersing himself in the people s lives as a respectful outsider I am a guest in their world he says of his Indian friends I loved introducing non-Natives to Natives who see spirituality as fundamental to human experience That spirituality is deep in Lone Dog Road set in the summer of on the high plains of South Dakota Part coming-of-age story part fast-paced road adventure the novel s main characters are brothers Levi Reuben Long Dog When a man comes to the reservation to forcibly take Reuben to the leadership school where Indian children are stripped of their civilization the boys strong fierce mother tells them to run Before they leave their beloved great-grandfather s ceremonial pipe is broken and given a dignified burial because it cannot be used again The boys journey several miles to Pipestone to get clay they use to fashion a new pipe for Grandpa that has a small turtle on its shaft An image of the turtle is also on the first pages of the book s sections As the brothers progress they are helped by Natives and non-Natives including a wandering white man caught in the American cowboy myth who s missing his dead dog a cheerful Black entertainer who joins his beautiful voice to Reuben s a Lakota woman and her white ex-seminarian husband grieving the death of their child a mixed-blood man who has lost his lifestyle On the reservation lives an elderly Dakota woman in a wheelchair who advises the boys knows the old strategies and maybe has a little magic in her My books tend to speak from the heart I try to touch people Nerburn says With this one I wrote the book I demanded to write a book about good people each struggling Every character embodies someone I knew or admired I love my characters If I love them the reader can love them too Nerburn s writing has been praised by Louise Erdrich Pulitzer Prize-winner and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians Anton Treuer professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University and the late Ojibwe civic leader Roger Jourdain William Kent Krueger white author of the Cork O Connor mystery series featuring a protagonist who is Irish and Ojibwe is an admirer of Nerburn s writing He will be onstage with Nerburn when Lone Dog Road is launched Thursday at the University Club of St Paul Kent opened the door for numerous of us writing about a practices not his own Krueger says I so appreciated his nonfiction which captured so well from a white guy s perspective the beauty of the Dakota lifestyle And in Lone Dog Road he does a spectacular job of writing in multiple voices It s no surprise Nerburn s novel is permeated with spirituality He s proud of being described as a guerrilla theologian who exposed emotions in wood before he turned to writing A Minnesota kid becomes a sculptor I ve dependably tried to be a watcher It s what I do in my books Nerburn says looking back on growing up in a tiny cracker-box bungalow outside of Minneapolis Author Kent Nerburn talks about his career in his St Paul home on Wednesday May John Autey Pioneer Press His attention to what was happening around him was learned when his father director of tragedy relief for the Red Cross Midwest region would sometimes get him out of bed in the middle of the night to race to an exigency that might be a four-alarm fire on the North Side or a drowning Seeing disasters and crises in other people s lives made my life pale in comparison he says about staying on the sidelines while the Red Cross band offered backing services Later in life these experiences gave him the ability to stand aside and let others talk a valuable attribute for a writer After graduating from the University of Minnesota Nerburn attended graduate school at Stanford University in California He was interested in studying religion but was not happy about the way it was taught at Stanford So he traveled to Marburg Germany to learn the language Visiting beautiful churches and museums in the old city Nerburn was mesmerized by the woodworking of farmers and peasants The carvings had been so filled with heart so honest in their spiritual learning I who was in graduate school for the survey of religion had exposed in them a spiritual presence I experienced nowhere else Nerburn writes in his book Dancing With the Gods made up of essays on life in the arts Securing a job at an antique-restoration shop Nerburn cut into a piece of maple for the first time I dug into that wood with no understanding of what I was doing I only knew that something was alive and waiting to be distributed from inside the block of wood on the bench before me Returning to Minnesota Nerburn studied with the late Kostas Papadakis world-renowned artistic woodcarver In he graduated with a doctorate in religion and art from Graduate Theological Union and the University of California Berkeley Nerburn s larger-than-life wood sculptures are in a monastery in British Columbia and the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Japan His only work in bronze is the figure of St Francis commissioned by the Hennepin County Humane Society for their headquarters in Golden Valley To the reservation and beyond Nerburn met his future wife when they worked on The Northsider an award-winning Minneapolis region newspaper After their marriage in Louise got a job at a newspaper in Bemidji and Kent went with her Living in a house on a lake the couple raised their son Nicholas and Mengelkoch s children Stephanie Alexandra and Creighton Penn During those years Nerburn also founded and directed Project Preserve an oral history project on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation He and his students published oral histories To Walk the Red Road and We Choose to Remember After co-writing Native American Wisdom with Mengelkoch Nerburn s first solo book was Letters to My Son A Father s Wisdom on Manhood Life and Love That was followed by others inspired by his Indian friends including The Wisdom of the Native Americans Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Pierce Voices in the Stones and the Wolf Dog trilogy After Louise retired in the couple relocated to Oregon hungry for different experiences I envisioned us sitting in our robes watching daytime TV Nerburn says with a laugh But I could never find my footing there or my heart The boy in the chair Last year Nerburn and his wife moved back to Minnesota to be near family but they were still living in Oregon when the pandemic hit and Kent recalled a picture he d seen years ago of a little Indian boy sitting in a rocking chair He didn t know the child s name or where the old photo came from He only knew the boy haunted him and was one of the inspirations for Lone Dog Road Ultimately the boy could no longer be denied Nerburn recalled in a social media post His face noted what I had been trying to say in words for almost three decades He was innocence stolen promise denied confusion and defiance in the face of a world he did not make and could not understand Lone Dog Road took a three-year journey to publication and Nerburn is clear-eyed about why publishers were wary of this book Old white guy No history as a novelist A -plus-page book No social media presence other than a faithful but small following on Facebook Writing in voices of people whose experience it s assumed I cannot possibly understand Ending up in the rejection pile of any publisher that keeps an eye on the bottom line And that s all of them Happily Nerburn s best friend from Hopkins High School Marc Allen loved the novel and published it through his New World Library Allen who has published the majority of Nerburn s books recalls that young Kent first sculpted a life-sized Indian head at the Allen family s cabin in Deerwood I perpetually knew Kent could write because of the way he talked Allen recalled in a conversation from his home near San Francisco We d be walking along when we were and he d say something so fresh and beautiful During the years Allen published Nerburn s books he watched his friend s nonfiction gradually take more fictional form So he wasn t surprised when he got the manuscript for Lone Dog Road To make money in publishing these days you need a good backlist and an occasional bestseller to keep going Kent has both Allen announced And he has a great soul Summing it up The afternoon grows more cloudy as Nerburn poses for a picture with one of his sculptures in his side yard When he s urged about writing he says he followed the counsel of an Indian elder Reliably teach by stories because stories lodge deep in the heart If you go Nerburn will launch Lone Dog Road with a free undertaking at p m Thursday at the University Club Summit Ave St Paul presented by SubText Bookstore He will be at Comma Bookshop Upton Ave N Mpls at p m June and at Stillwater Society Library on June Related Articles new books to send restless readers on a summer road trip Literary calendar for week of May Weird Sad and Silent Readers and writers Selections for Mental Soundness Awareness Month Kids author Mo Willems and The Pigeon stare down the future in a new book Like it or not the Like button has changed the world