I am nothing if not hopeful.  Hope rises in me, eternal.  Every December as the old year draws to a close and a new one stands on my threshold, I think, This is the year.

For what?  For becoming the person I would like to be.  And what is that?  A vision so mundane I’m a little ashamed to share it.  But here it is.

For starters, I want to be kinder and gentler.  I would like to be more forgiving.

I would like be less envious of the success of others.  When a friend or colleague hits a home run with a book, I would love to be able to celebrate that accomplishment without thinking that somehow their success is my failure.

I would like to be more generous.  My wife is a giving person, and I rely on her as a gauge for generosity.  At some point, when we discuss our charitable giving, I’d like the first number out of my mouth to match her best expectation.

I would like to remember the name of every individual who has told me in person that he or she enjoys my work.  This is especially true of those who’ve said this to me many times, but whom I continue to regard with utter cluelessness each time we meet.

I would like to write one thing that is true.  I don’t mean non-fiction.  I mean one thing that captures life truly, simply, and without artifice.

I would like to love more deeply, less selfishly, and with a broader stretch of my heart.

I would like to lose fifteen pounds.

I would like to become the writer I believe myself capable of being.

What is a resolution but a dream of what might be?  In my experience, dreams can come true, but only if you work on them.  Wish me luck.  And I’ll do the same for you.

My father was a high school English teacher, and he attempted to give his children a great appreciation for literature with a capital L.  It worked with my brothers and sister, but for some reason, in my case, it didn’t take.  Me, I was in love with comic books, especially the superhero kind from Marvel and DC.  I loved the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Green Lantern, and the Flash.

All that changed in the summer of my twelfth year.  The instrument of that change was a librarian in a small Ohio town.

I was a Boy Scout then, and in that summer, I decided I wanted to earn the Reading Merit Badge.  One of the requirements for the badge was a period of volunteer labor at my local library.  So I made the arrangements.  On the day I went in to fulfill my obligation, I was put to work date stamping returned books.  This was long before computers, and I used a rubber stamp and an ink pad.  For a while, I sat at the checkout desk, pounding dates in place on slips glued to the inside covers—ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.

After an hour or so, the librarian drifted over and asked the question I was afraid she would ask and therefore knew absolutely she would.  “Kent,” she said, “what do you like to read?”

I thought about lying, but was pretty much into that whole a scout is trustworthy thing, so I told her the truth: I really liked comic books.

She didn’t bat an eye.  She said, “Have you ever read The Count of Monte Cristo?”

I left the library with that Dumas classic under my arm.  And I came back a few days later for The Three Musketeers. After that, it was The Man in the Iron Mask. When I’d gone through everything Dumas had written, I asked the librarian’s advice, and she directed me to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson.

If you read my work, you’ll see that most of my stories contain a solid element of adventure, something that can be traced back to the influence of those great stories I fell in love with under the guidance of a librarian whose name I have forgotten but whose kind wisdom I have always treasured.

God bless librarians everywhere.

I’ve been doing a lot of book talks to promote my latest novel, Northwest Angle. Pretty much, I do this with every when it’s first published.  Book tours can be grueling, but I have a confession to make.  I love to hear myself talk.

I don’t mean I just love to flap my gums.  I love to talk about my writing.  And the opportunity to do this is one of the greatest pleasures that has come from being a published author.

I’m supposed to be an introvert.  At least that’s how I score on a Myers-Briggs assessment.  I can see that.  I crave the alone time in which I conceive of and execute the stories that I write.  And after a book event, I have to crawl into a cave somewhere and regenerate.  But when I’m onstage talking about my books, about my writing process, about the creative impulse, I feel like I’m riding some incredible thrill machine, better than the California Screamin’ roller coaster at Disneyland.  And I love the personal connections that come from the questions I get during a presentation and the answers—as honest as I can make them—that result.

I don’t know what this says about me.  Probably something dismally narcissistic.  But there it is.  I hope that you have a chance to catch my act some day.  Really, I’m pretty entertaining.  And enlightening.  But mostly I’m just having a good time.

My day begins at 5:45 AM.  I wake up to the radio playing softly, get dressed, leave the house, and go to my office.

Here’s a picture of my office:

The first thing you might notice is that there’s no time clock.  The second is that, yes, it’s a coffee shop.  In this jovial little place, I do all the slaving away to produce the books in my series.  My current office is called the Java Train.  I’ve had other offices.  For more than twenty years, I worked at the St. Clair Broiler.  A lovely office.  My little space there was Booth #4. I also worked for a while at the J&S. Bean Factory.  In a pinch, I’ve worked at Starbucks and Caribou and Dunn Brothers.  I’ve worked just about everywhere…except at home.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have an office at home.  It’s just that I don’t write there.  No, that’s not quite accurate.  The truth is that I can’t write there.  It’s too quiet, for one thing.  No kidding, I’ve had this experience: It’s a beautiful winter day.  The sun is out, the snow is sparkling, the house is quiet, and I have it all to myself.  It would seem the perfect environment for creating a work of art.  But what am I doing?  I’m sitting there in all that stillness thinking, Hmmmm.  Shouldn’t the furnace have come on by now? The point is that when I’m home, I’m thinking about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with writing.  The phone rings; I have to answer it.  Someone knocks at my door; again, with the answering.  I walk through the kitchen, and the dishes in the sink cry out to me to be washed.  But in a coffee shop, even drinking coffee isn’t really the point.  I’m there to write.  It’s how I’ve trained my creative mind to work.  A waitress drops a tray of dishes—big deal; it’s not my concern.  Two hours can pass in the blink of an eye.  Honest to God, it’s like magic.

There’s history to this process.  I got serious about wanting to write a novel when my wife was in law school.  I was the sole support, the guy who kept a roof over our heads and food on the table.  I knew if wanted to write, I had to find a way to work the discipline into every day.  At that time, we lived a block from the St. Clair Broiler, which opened for business at 6:00 AM.  So every day I got up early enough to be at the Broiler when the doors were unlocked.  I wrote for an hour and fifteen minutes.  Then I closed my notebook, paid my bill, and was outside at 7:20, just in time to catch a bus that took directly to the campus of the University of Minnesota, where I was employed.

Maybe I’m a little like Pavlov’s dogs now.  As I approach the coffee shop each morning, my creative mind kicks in automatically.  Everything else fades away.  And for a couple of hours, I’m lost in a place that’s absolutely wonderful.

Really, they’re the Anishinaabeg (plural noun), which means First People, or Original People, or simply The People.  The adjectival form is Anishinaabe.  As in, “She’s Anishianaabe.”  Or “That’s an Anishinaabe trait.”  Some of the Anishinaabeg call themselves Chippewa, as do many whites, but that’s a name that’s fallen into disrepute among many in this particular culture, because the word is an English bastardization of “Ojibwe.”  Ojibwe means “to pucker.”  The most accepted explanation for how they came by this particular name is that it referred to the way in which they made moccasins, a technique that resulted in puckering around the stitches.  However, it’s also been reported that the name was given them because they had a penchant for roasting their enemies over a fire until their skin puckered.

I write a lot about the Anishinaabeg, and for good reason.  In the area in which I’ve set my series, their influence is ubiquitous.  Lakes, rivers, roads, landforms, even many of the towns still carry names first given to them by the Anishinaabe people.  Some of the words we commonly use originated in Anishinaabemowin, the language of The People, or with the Algonquin, from which the Ojibwe language developed, words like: chipmunk, moccasin, moose, toboggan, tomahawk.  The father of waters, the mighty Mississippi, got its name from the Ojibwe who called it Misi-ziibi, the Great River.

I write about the Anishinaabeg for other reasons as well.  I do it because I admire the richness of the culture, its history, and the tenacity of those who identify themselves as Anishinaabe.  Like so many other indigeous people, the Anishinaabeg have been ill-treated in every way imaginable, yet they’ve endured.  And one of the things I admire most about those Shinnobs (a kind of shorthand they use) I know personally is that their sense of humor is undiminished despite all the prejudice they routinely face and all the obstacles they constantly have to overcome.  (American Indians have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic group in the United States; Indians have the highest poverty level of any ethnic group in Minnesota and the highest rate of unemployment as well; Indians report the highest rates of alcoholism of any ethnic group—I could go on, but you get the picture.)

I get a lot comments on the fact that, in my stories, I don’t reinforce the stereotype many people continue to hold regarding the Ojibwe.  One of the things I try point out in my work is that there are, among the Anishinaabeg, doctors, lawyers, judges, plumbers, veterinarians, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and educators, just as there are in every other ethic group.  Here are a few well-known Ojibwe: David Anderson, of Famous Dave’s; Louise Erdrich, award-winning writer; Bill Miller, marvelous musician, poet, and raconteur; Jim Northrup, columnist and storyteller; Winona LaDuke, activist and writer; Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, founders of AIM; Adam Beach, actor; Henry Boucha, Hall of Fame hockey player.  They are simply human beings who see the world in the context of their own cultural awareness, just like everyone else.

If you read my stories, please don’t read them as ethnography.  The Anishinaabeg are far more complex culturally, rich historically, and textured spiritually, than I will ever be able to adequately portray in my writing.  But if I’m able to give you a sense of the admiration I feel for them, then I’ve succeeded.