A Valentine to this Adopted Home of Mine: Five Questions With William Kent Kreuger, Author of The River We Remember

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You talk about how writing was your childhood dream. As you grew up and became a writer, how did your idea of the profession grow and evolve?

I have always been a writer. I can never remember a time I wasn’t at work on a story, even as a child. But being an author is different. Publishing changes what a writer does in many ways. The focus is still on the creative work, the actual writing process and its result, but another huge consideration comes into play, and that’s the promotion of the published work. While it’s probably every writer’s dream to be published, once that happens, the reality kicks in — the realization that you have to find a way to make readers aware of your work. And that takes a lot of time, effort and creativity of a different sort than imagining a story. Websites, social media, personal appearances all play an important role in this. Then it becomes a question of balance, judiciously choosing the time and energy you devote to your writing as opposed to the time and energy you devote to promoting the work. That can be a tricky line to walk.

Your books are all set in Northern Minnesota — what is it about this setting that draws you and your stories?

I’m not native to Minnesota. I didn’t move here until I was thirty years old so that my wife could attend the University of Minnesota law school. I grew up in a nomadic family. Before graduating from high school, I’d lived in ten different houses in eight different municipalities in six different states. I never had anywhere that I truly thought of or called home. But honest to God, the moment I set foot in Minnesota, I knew I’d found home. I fell in love with the land and the people here. Northern Minnesota with its great Northwoods was different from any place I’d ever been, and from the first, I felt it call deeply to my creative instincts. So that’s where I decided to set my Cork O’Connor series.

I spent much of my adolescence in the Midwest, however, and that’s a landscape that calls to me as well. When I write a standalone novel such as The River We Remember, I set the story in southern Minnesota, which has an agrarian beauty very different from Up North, as we say. A different piece of my heart is involved in writing these tales. But whether I set a novel among the pines of the Northwoods or the corn and soybean fields of southern Minnesota, the work is always, in a way, a valentine to this adopted home of mine. 

When you write a standalone book like The River We Remember, do you have a different approach/writing process than when you’re writing a book in the Cork O’Connor series?

A mystery is an intellectual construct. It’s a puzzle you create very consciously with your brain. When I write a mystery in my Cork O’Connor series, I’m working hard to make sure all the pieces fit together flawlessly. Generally speaking, I try to think that story through as completely as possible before I begin to put words to paper. At the end of that thinking process, I know how the story begins, how it ends, who did what to whom and why, and the themes that I want to weave into the storyline.

My standalones come from a different place. They come from my heart. And so, I follow a different process, one that will, I hope, allow the reader to feel as if I’m telling them a story that’s deeply personal to me, not simply an intellectual construct. Entering the writing of a novel like The River We Remember, I try to know a few important elements, then I let the story reveal itself as I’m writing. Characters come to me in a gradual way. Events occur organically. Connections arise naturally. I find myself tapping significantly into my own experience and my own beliefs. I often populate these novels with people from my past, and I set them in places that are deep in my memories. The creative process for these novels tends to be filled with moments of astonishing revelation, moments that feel like magic and that make me grateful to be a storyteller.

As a cultural anthropology major in college, how have you seen your studies translate into what you write and how you write?

I believe that my educational background has made it easier and more attractive for me to learn about the Anishinaabe people, whose culture is so significant to my Cork O’Connor series. I came to my early research with an appreciation of what other cultures might teach me about myself, my own culture, and about the human experience in general. When I sit down to write a story involving the Anishinaabeg of northern Minnesota or the Dakota of southern Minnesota, I’m painfully aware that I’m a white guy trespassing on a culture not my own, and I work hard to get it right. I have lots of friends in the Native community here in Minnesota whose generous sharing of their insights, their perceptions, their experience and their suggestions have been so instrumental in guiding my work.

The River We Remember largely focuses on lasting wounds war leaves on those who fight them. Could you talk more about what inspired you to explore this through story?

When he was eighteen years old, on his graduation from high school, my father enlisted in the military and marched off to Europe to fight in World War Two. He was just a kid. He came back several years later, a man wounded in body and in spirit. My father suffered from PTSD, although at that time they called it battle fatigue or shell shock. When, as a child, I pestered him for stories about the war, he refused to talk about it. He was very like the fathers of my friends, who’d also fought in WWII or Korea. They’d gone away to war as kids, some of them not even shaving yet, and they came back changed men, wounded by the horrors they’d witnessed and the horrors they’d been a part of. All my life, I’ve wondered how any of these men managed to heal from that kind of emotional and spiritual wounding.

I touched briefly on this issue in an earlier novel, Ordinary Grace. With The River We Remember, I wanted to go deeper. I also wanted to explore the effects of war on those left behind — wives, mothers, fathers, sisters — who prayed desperately for the safety of their beloved husbands and sons and brothers, and who, in the end, may have lost them on the battlefield. How did they any of these people manage to heal those deep wounds?

I chose to couch the story in what I believed would be a compelling mystery. In its way, this novel is a melding of my two approaches to writing. I wanted it to come from my heart, and I also wanted it to be a flawless puzzle. My hope is that those who choose to read the novel will find that I’ve succeeded.