William Kent Krueger on Cork O’Connor, the Ojibwe Nation, and Spirit Crossing

William Kent Krueger is the author of the celebrated Cork O’Connor novels. With the series’ newest novel, Spirit Crossing, which comes out on August 20th, the Strand was honored to be able to sit down and talk to him about the series, his writing process, and his life in Northern Minnesota. We hope you find his answers as insightful as we did.

TSM: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing?

WKK: While I’ve always done that very “literary” thing of going by three names, William Kent Kreuger, I always go by Kent. So, when anyone encounters me, I say, “Call me Kent.” I am best known as the author of the New York Times best-selling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in the woods of North Minnesota. My protagonist, Cork O’Connor, is a man of mixed heritage. He is part-Irish American and part-Ojibwe, which is the largest tribal affiliation we have in Northern Minnesota. Because of that mixture in his heritage, and largely because of the setting, a lot of the stories in the series arise from the issues between those two cultures, white and Ojibwe. So, I’ve written about Indian gaming casinos and the effect that they have had on the Ojibwe community and the surrounding white community. I’ve written about the influx of drug and gang cultures on the reservation, about the sexual exploitation of vulnerable Native women and children, and most recently about missing and murdered Indigenous people. There are currently nineteen novels in the series, but number twenty, Spirit Crossing, comes out on August 20.

I have also written several well-received stand-alone novels. In 2013, I published Ordinary Grace, which won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel that year. Three years later, I published This Tender Land, which is a companion novel in many ways, and it spent six months on The New York Times Best Seller list among the top ten. Last fall, I published the third novel in that companion series, a book called The River We Remember, which was also very well received.

TSM: How has writing Cork O’Connor gotten easier or more challenging as the series has gone on? What are the surprises or challenges that come along the way?

WKK: The truth is that every time I sit down to write a Cork O’Connor novel, he’s not the same guy he was in the last novel. He’s aged, had experiences that have changed how he sees the world, how he relates to others. So, it keeps it fresh in that I’m always trying to figure out who he is now, especially considering his life experiences. I think that’s what keeps it fresh for readers. Cork has aged across the course of the now twenty books—almost twenty years in the world of the series, so Cork is about to turn sixty. A lot has happened in his life: His children have grown, he’s lost a wife and gained another, he has a grandson. Following him and his life and imagining what is going on with him now is infinitely entertaining to me and, I hope, to readers as well.

TSM: I also find it interesting that Cork comes from a mixed heritage background, as someone who is mixed race myself. What was the decision-making process behind that? How did you go about writing a character with a mixed heritage?

 WKK: Well, you probably know more about that than I do. But I have lots of friends within the Native community who come from mixed heritage. I decided when I started Iron Leg that I would make Cork a man of mixed heritage because when you write fiction, you always look for conflict. Conflict drives great stories. I thought that it would be interesting to create a character whose background mirrors the conflict between the two dominant cultures in Northern Minnesota: the Ojibwe and those of European descent. So, I decided to make him a man of mixed heritage, and I had to figure out what that heritage was going to be. If you are of mixed heritage here in Northern Minnesota, you could be Ojibwe, and for a variety of reasons I decided to make Cork Ojibwe and Irish—because everyone knows how mythic the Irish are, and it seemed to me a good marriage of cultures with great storytelling traditions on both sides. Cork struggles with being of mixed heritage enough. He’s not white enough or Ojibwe enough, so he often struggles with his own identity. I guess that’s an issue for anyone of mixed heritage, regardless of your ethnic backgrounds.

TSM: I admire that choice so much, being of mixed heritage myself. So, tell us what readers can expect from Spirit Crossing.

WKK: Well, anyone who has read my series understands that, more often than not, I will center a story around an issue that is significant in the Native community. My Native friends have recently made me tragically aware of the situation involving missing and murdered Indigenous people. Here are some statistics for you. The murder rate among Indigenous women is ten times higher than that of any other ethnicity. Murder is the third leading cause of death among Indigenous women, and there are more than 4,200 unsolved missing and murder cases in the Indigenous community. So, it’s an enormous crisis that has been going on for a very long time. It’s only recently that awareness of this has spread beyond Indian country.

I was talking with my Native friends, and I decided it was time to write a story involving MMIP, Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. So, I checked in with my friends and asked if this is something I can tackle as a white man, and they said, “Yes.” So, I went ahead, did my due diligence in my research, and tried to create a story that is about that issue and also a really good mystery, since that’s first and foremost. I was able to incorporate the issue of oil pipelines running from Canada through Minnesota, which has been an issue for a long time. So, I incorporated a bit of that. I also threw in some really meaningful, personal family stuff for Cork and his family.

This is really a mixture of a lot of things. At heart, though, I think it’s a really compelling, suspenseful story.

 TSM: How do you balance the fictional, mystery aspects of the story with the real-world issues that you tackle? How do you strike that balance?

WKK: It’s magic. Actually, it’s just years and years of being a storyteller and doing this. Something that I always keep in mind is that I am first and foremost a storyteller. So, whatever else I do, I always have to tell a compelling story. Over the years, I’ve learned how to weave in all of the themes that I want to be a part of the story fairly seamlessly so I can offer the reader the information I need them to have without feeling like they’re beaten over the head with it. I don’t want to offer them a diatribe, so I offer them the best story I can with the elements I want. I want the reader to feel like I’m giving them a good story with important information. I don’t want the information to outweigh the other compelling elements of the story itself.

TSM: Right, and I’ve read books that may try to incorporate outside information. More often than not, they feel like textbook readings. So, I was also wondering about your research process. How do you know that you’ve done enough research vs. not doing enough? How do you avoid that textbook feeling in your writing?

WKK: The truth is that none of us do as much research as we should. I do have friends who get so lost in their research that they don’t get around to writing the story. When I have a story in mind and a sense of what I need to know, I seek out the people who can inform me. For Spirit Crossing, I knew that jurisdictional issues are part of the problem with MMIP investigations. So, I talked to law enforcement at all levels: tribal police, federal officials and authorities, the state authorities, people who would all have jurisdictional knowledge. I would ask how they handle certain things, how they see certain things: “What problems does this create for you and for the other jurisdictions?” They were incredibly helpful in that. I did an enormous amount of reading about the issue of MMIP in this nation and in Canada—so, a lot of research upfront. Then, I began the writing. In writing, you always discover things that you need to know and that you didn’t know you needed to know. So, you have to do research as you go along. In the end, I still find myself going back, smoothing over, and making sure everything is accurate. The research is never done until the book comes out and is on bookshelves.

TSM: What’s your writing process like? I’ve read about your writing process, and you have your routine of writing longhand. What’s the value of writing longhand in today’s technological age?

WKK: Well, I have to disavow you of that notion. I wrote the first twelve novels longhand. If you write longhand, there is that step that involves transcribing, which takes time. So at about the twelfth novel, I was looking at being behind the deadline, and I hated that. I thought that if I could write this directly to the computer, maybe I could meet deadlines since I wouldn’t have to take that additional step. That was really a risky proposition because writing longhand was a part of the magic of the process. The idea started in my head, passed through my heart, the pen, and onto the page. I was afraid that if I didn’t do longhand, then the magic wouldn’t happen anymore. I gave it a try, and it worked. So, I write directly into a computer now.

I do miss writing longhand for a number of reasons. It gave me a chronicle of the writing process itself. It took me maybe six or seven notebooks to create a novel. Back in the day, I could look at it and have a chronicle of how the book got created. But I have found that writing on a laptop is just fine, too. It has not ruined the magic in the end. I have colleagues who continue to write longhand. I have friends who compose on old typewriters since that’s what they’ve always done. But I have advanced into the age of new technology.

TSM: I suppose that you could see the volume of work in those notebooks, which might be more rewarding than looking at the page count on a computer.

WKK: You can see very clearly the editing process. Things get crossed out, circled with arrows, or whatever. I can look back and see how my mind was working as I created that story. That just doesn’t exist now.

TSM: What are you reading now? Any recommendations?

WKK: Two names come to mind in terms of influence. First is Tony Hillerman. I do what I do because of Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn series. That really opened the door for a lot of mysteries to be written about cultures that are not the dominant culture in our nation. And James Lee Burke influenced me tremendously. I’ve always tried to write as beautifully as James Lee Burke writes, although I’m not sure I made it there. He’s certainly given me something to shoot for.

I’m currently reading lots of books in the genre, but they are ARCs that won’t be out for another eight months to a year. One of the books that I highly recommend is called Shelterwood, by Lisa Wingate. It’s a mystery that takes place in Oklahoma, in a beautiful, fairly unknown area.

TSM: What is one piece of advice you would have liked to have known at the beginning of your career that you know now?

WKK: That writing is a little bit like sex—if you’re not enjoying yourself, you’re probably not doing it right.

TSM: You have to enjoy what you’re doing. I guess that’s the magic of it. WKK: You should write because that’s what you like to do, first and foremost.

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