This Tender Land
This Tender Land
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William Kent Krueger on This Tender Land
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A debt to Twain, paid lateThe seed was planted in fifth grade, when a teacher read aloud after lunch each day and sent him straight from Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn. That encounter lodged itself so deeply that it eventually determined the shape of his whole career.
My heart was in it this time. I could feel like I cared about this story again. [paraphrased from audio]
He tried the Twain homage more than once over the following decades and could not make it work. What finally cleared the path was a collapse.
After Ordinary Grace won the Edgar Award in 2014, Krueger signed a contract for a companion novel, took a substantial advance, and spent two years writing something he ultimately could not publish. The abandonment cost him professionally, but the relief of it was immediate.
The expectations for that follow-up novel were enormous, and while I was writing the story, I felt crushed by the weight of all those expectations. And really what I was doing was trying to meet everyone else’s expectations instead of writing the story that spoke to me from my heart. But when I made the decision not to deliver the manuscript, a huge weight lifted from my shoulders and I felt free again.
The Depression setting was never an abstract historical choice. Krueger’s parents had lived through it, and their accounts made it feel less like history than like something that had happened just before his own life began.
My father was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and he often recounted his experiences during the Dust Bowl years of watching mud rain from the sky and of scouring the edges of the railroad tracks and vacant areas in search of greens to supplement the family food supply. My mother was born in Ellendale, North Dakota, to a family struggling to feed too many mouths in a time of privation. At the age of four, she was taken in by distant relatives in Wyoming and eventually adopted. So, the Depression to me was not historical; it was my parents’ life and had occurred just around the corner from my own life’s beginning.
The boarding school at the center of the novel’s opening section came from more than two decades of researching Ojibwe history for the Cork O’Connor series. By the time he began this book, the era’s atrocities were not new to him. His challenge was deciding how to use that knowledge.
In This Tender Land, I wanted the Four Vagabonds to be running from the worst of horrors, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse than one of these boarding schools.
How he wrote it
The Odyssey as a secret skeletonBefore the first scene was written, Krueger had decided on an organizing principle that most readers would never detect. He mapped the four orphans’ river journey onto the wanderings of Odysseus, assigning specific Homeric episodes to each leg of the trip.
I’d decided early on that the story would be crafted in such a way that the adventures of the four orphans would mirror the adventures of Odysseus as he made his way from Troy back home to Ithaca.
He acknowledged the mapping was esoteric and that it escapes many readers entirely, but he called it invaluable to his own thinking throughout the writing.
The Homeric blueprint gave him structure, but within it he worked in a way that was the opposite of his process for the Cork O’Connor mysteries, where every plot point must be worked out before any prose goes down. He drew a sharp line between what a mystery demands and what a standalone novel allows.
A mystery is an intellectual construct. It’s a puzzle that you create in your head. These standalones don’t come from my head, they come from my heart. [paraphrased from audio]
The research was physical as well as archival. Krueger paddled the rivers the four vagabonds travel, locating specific real-world sites for each scene. He also spent long hours at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul reading through newspapers from the summer of 1932, and watched 1930s films to absorb the period’s speech patterns.
In a kayak and a canoe, I traveled the rivers that carry the Four Vagabonds along in their journey. I found the site for One-Eyed Jack’s farm, the meadow where the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade sets up its tent village, the joining of rivers where the gathering of homeless families establish their shanty town called Hopersville, the street corner where Gertie’s restaurant would have stood.
The writing itself was spread across three years, slotted into the gaps between drafts of Cork O’Connor books. That rhythm, unplanned but consistent, gave the manuscript something it might not have had if written straight through.
So it was largely composed in fits and starts, which allowed me lots of time to consider the actions and elements of the piece and conduct the necessary research.
One of the most consequential decisions was about what to leave out. Survivors’ accounts of the boarding school era were, in his telling, worse than anything he put on the page. He pulled back deliberately, because he needed readers to pass through the opening darkness and reach what he saw as the book’s true subject.
I knew very few details of the story when I began the writing. Then I began the writing and simply let the story reveal itself to me as I composed. It was an extraordinarily exhilarating experience, creating my own epic tale.
The personal thread
Odie as the boy he wanted to beThe four central characters were not invented from scratch. Krueger mapped two of them onto his actual siblings: his oldest brother, who had died before the book was published, became Albert, and his younger sister shaped Emmy. The third, the narrator, came from somewhere closer.
And Odie, well, he came out of me, the wily, fierce, resilient, big-hearted kid I wanted to be but always felt I was falling short of.
Mose, the fourth vagabond, carries weight that is historical as well as personal. For nearly a century, until the passage of the National Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, Native families had no legal recourse when the government came to take their children. Krueger wanted that fact embodied in a character, not delivered as exposition.
Mose and his muteness came as an inspiration for symbolizing Native Americans who had no voice in the heartless policies the government instituted to deal with them.
On what the book is wrestling with
What privation does to a human heartThe Depression’s effect on children was the research discovery that surprised Krueger most. He had expected economic hardship; what he found in the historical record was family dissolution on a scale he had not anticipated, with teenagers across the country cut loose to survive on their own.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Depression for me was the effect it had on families. So many families were torn apart by the economic distresses of the Great Depression years. Children, especially, were drastically affected. Their education was put on hold. Their health suffered. They were farmed out to relatives or others who were willing to take them in, or they were simply abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers became itinerant, traveling the roads or riding the rails on their own, trying to find work, food, shelter, a place to call home.
That historical context opened onto the questions he was really interested in. He named the Depression as a setting that forced characters, and readers, to confront four problems at once, problems he saw as inseparable.
What is home? What is family? What is God? How can the human heart be capable of both great cruelty and great compassion?
What he wants us to sit with
Compassion as the lesson history owes usHe was direct about what he hoped the boarding school sections would accomplish. A summary of historical wrongdoing can be absorbed and set aside; a visceral re-creation is harder to leave behind. He wanted readers to carry the experience out of the book with them.
In recreating for my story the environment of a Native American boarding school, I hoped that the visceral sense of the place would communicate the reality of this horrific experience in a more affecting way than a straight-forward historical account might. History ought to offer valuable lessons. My hope is that the lesson learned from that long tragedy proves to be one of compassion.
Beyond the boarding school history, he wanted the book to function as an argument about endurance. The four vagabonds travel through a world that has broken most of the adults they meet, and Krueger had a specific idea about what keeps people going when structures fail.
One of the messages I hope readers take from This Tender Land is that as long as we have hope, we’ll find a way to a better place. It’s only when we lose hope that we have no future.