Photo by Paul Dinndorf
In August, St. Paul author William Kent Krueger released “God’s Country,” the 22nd novel in his best-selling Cork O’Connor series. He debuted his first story about the fictional private investigator—who is of Irish and Ojibwe heritage—solving crimes in Minnesota’s Northwoods in 1998, but the idea for the Cork O’Connor character had been marinating his Krueger’s mind for years.
“All I knew about him in the very beginning was he was going to be the kind of man who was so resilient that, no matter how far life pushed him down, he would always bob back to the surface, and his name would be Cork,” Krueger explains. “I knew that he was going to rise up from that dark place. What I’ve seen over the years is that resilience in Cork that I always saw from the very beginning.”
Minnesota Monthly caught up with Krueger on the heels of his latest book launch to explore the inspiration Minnesota continues to provide his storytelling, and the evolution of Cork O’Connor—and Krueger himself.
You created the character of Cork O’Connor more than three decades ago. What has it been like to grow alongside this character?
Cork and I have been together quite a long time. By the time the “Iron Lake” came out, I was already beginning to see that this was a guy with a lot of depth, a lot of dimensions possible to him. When I brought him into the series with that first book, he was a man who had probably hit bottom. He had lost his job as sheriff, his family was in disillusion, he had stopped believing in himself and the great mystery. He had nowhere to go but up.
Over the years, Cork’s shoulders have grown really broad. Cork does a lot of things I would never do. In fact, I find myself writing the stories and Cork is about to do something and I go, ‘Oh my God, is that nuts or what?’ But typically, he’ll go ahead and do it, and the problem for me is, how to get him through that nutsy thing that he does.
I have seen him age 20 years. Across time, he has fought against and had to embrace that he was born “ogichidaa,” an Ojibwe word that strictly translated means “warrior.” But my friends in the Native community tell me it really means one who stands between evil and his people—and that’s Cork. He tried to take himself off that particular journey for a while, and then had to embrace the fact that this is who he is: “This is why I was put here—to protect the people I love and those people who are innocent and need protection.”
I’m often asked, “Is Cork you or are you Cork?” Here’s how I respond to that. O’Connor is Irish. Krueger is not an Irish name. Cork is Catholic. I’m Methodist. Cork has Native blood running through his veins. I have none. Cork has a significant law enforcement background. I spent a night in jail once. There are a lot of things that are different about Cork and me. But who Cork is at heart, how he sees the world, the things that are important to him, that comes out of me.
For readers who have followed Cork O’Connor on this 22-book journey, what are some challenges people can expect him to face in this novel?
Well, anybody who goes into the Boundary Waters understands that there are going to be challenges. It just goes with the territory. Rain, mosquitoes, black flies, long portages, mud. Cork is going to encounter all of those. On top of that, he has to deal with a couple of people who he stumbles across along the way whose souls belong to the devil. So that adds to the potential misery for Cork.
You have a fondness for the Boundary Waters, spending time there and participating in reader retreats there. It’s a place where you and many Minnesotans find peace and community. In “God’s Country,” the Boundary Waters is the backdrop for something more sinister. What drove your decision to make it the setting for this book?
When I’m doing events these days, I tell my audience up front that “God’s Country” is a dark story, and there’s a reason for the darkness. … We’ve been going through some incredibly dark times of late. These days when I look around the world, I see such pain, such suffering, such sadness, such chaos. And I’m a guy who believes that the Great Spirit is always with us, is always at work in the world. And if that’s true, how do you explain all of that chaos, all of that suffering, all of that sadness, all of that pain? I wanted to write a story that would allow me to explore what I think of as the dichotomy of the human heart. The human heart is capable of such incredible beauty. It is also capable of perpetrating the worst deeds you could possibly imagine.
An Ojibwe elder long ago shared with me a saying in the Native community goes like this: In the human heart, there are always two wolves battling. One is the wolf of love, the other is the wolf of hate. Which wolf wins that battle? The one you feed—always the one you feed.
I wanted to write a story that would allow me to explore that darkness and light both existing in the human heart, and I wanted to use Cork O’Connor to accomplish that. I couldn’t think of a more beautiful and challenging setting, sort of the light and the dark, than the Boundary Waters. It seemed a natural place to set the story.
The Cork O’Connor books largely take place in contemporary Northwoods times, and your standalone novels take place in other regions of Minnesota during other time periods. What have you learned about Minnesota through writing?
Honestly, I have discovered Minnesota in all of its regions as a result of publishing—and then also visiting just about every library in this entire state at one time or another. So, I know Minnesota pretty well by now.
I love the fact that the Cork O’Connor series allows me to put on display that great dramatic beauty of the North Country, which for most people in the United States who have never been to Minnesota, is really exotic terrain. I love giving readers that piece of Minnesota in a very sensory way so that when they finish reading a Cork O’Connor novel, they feel like they’ve actually been there. They can smell the pine-scented air or the campfire or taste that pure water that comes out of the lake.
I grew up many years in the Midwest, and so the southern agrarian beauty of Minnesota appeals to me a great deal as well. I’ve chosen to set all of my standalones there because what that allows me to do is go back and recall how I felt about that setting when I was a kid and everything I learned as a kid, and also tap into all of those memories I had as a kid and actually use them in the construction of the stories down there.
I try to offer readers essentially a valentine to this adopted home of mine so that maybe when they have closed a book, they have a sense of why I love it, and maybe they love it a little bit too.
Water is important to Minnesota and is also a powerful storytelling device in many of your novels. How do rivers and lakes help you tell a story?
Every storyteller knows that rivers are wonderful because they can be metaphors for so many things. In my novels, I’ve used them as a metaphor for the journey from childhood to the sad wisdom of adulthood. The spiritual journey. The journey and the creation of family. I’ve used rivers, particularly in “The River We Remember,” as a way of tying the past and the present together, as a way of tying the land itself together. They are so iconic in all of our thinking, all of our history, all of our memory. I can’t tell you the number of people who write to me and respond, “I grew up on a river.” I just find it really rich territory to weave into my stories in so many ways. That’s true of southern Minnesota and northern Minnesota.
Everything in northern Minnesota revolves around water. All of the lakes, the ricing, the ancient cultures, all are there because of the water. So there is a spirit involved in water in so many ways. I mean, let’s talk about Lake Superior. What an incredible spirit. You can’t set a book in northern Minnesota and set it on the north shore without recognizing and using the great spirit of gichigami, of course.
Are you able to reveal anything about what you’re working on next?
For the last three years I’ve been working on what I believe is going to be my next standalone novel. The first draft of it is finished, but it needs a lot of polishing and a good deal more research before I’m ready to put it in the hands of readers. I’m looking toward that coming out in 2028. It is a novel inspired by “Moby Dick.” At the same time, I have finished the first half of the next manuscript for the Cork O’Connor series. That novel will be called “Eagle’s Rest.” I have another Cork O’Connor in mind and another standalone in mind.
The work never ends!
It’s my passion. It’s what my heart tells me to do. When I’m sometimes asked, “Are you ever going to step back from the writing?” My answer is this: They’ll have to pry the pen out of my cold, dead hand.
