Transcripts

WAYNE JOHNSON: I found it fascinating. The further I became familiar with them, I got to know the stories that they told in their culture, and I was brought to powwows and things of that sort from the time I was very little.

SPEAKER: Did it occur to you that you might be taking kind of a risk by writing from an Indian perspective that some readers and critics might say, who does this white guy think he is?

WAYNE JOHNSON: Well, I'm really not so concerned about that as you might think I would be, because I'm just writing about people I know. That's what it comes down to. I'm really writing out of people that I've met and listened to over the years. Since I got so connected to their families and their concerns, that's what it came out of.

SPEAKER: This story seems more than most to have grown up right out of the landscape. Paul wouldn't be who he is without the deep lakes and the trees and so forth. What is it about the northern ground that gets a hold of you?

WAYNE JOHNSON: I think it's absolutely extraordinary. This lake, in particular, Lake of the Woods, because it's got 15,000 islands on it, more than any other lake in the continental United States. They're all basalt and granite. There's white pine and tamarack growing on them. It's just beautiful. There's 65,000 miles of shoreline on Lake of the Woods, which is more than Lake Superior.

The feeling that you get for the history of the area, if you really take some time and learn how to read the lakes and islands-- for example, there's a place called Agawa Rock, where for over 1,000 years Anishinaabe have been meeting and having rituals there. There's petroglyphs. One of the best petroglyphs of Mishipeshu is there, which is this horned underwater panther.

And the lake is labyrinthine. It's beautiful. It's the kind of place you really have to get a feel for to navigate even.

SPEAKER: Quite a bit of the social scene in the book takes place in the community of Pine Point. Maybe you would describe Al's place, the Ramblers Inn.

WAYNE JOHNSON: Sure. It's a meeting place for people, has been for a long time. It's got a number of bicycle frames on the roof with Christmas lights wrapped around them. So they form a big star on the roof. It actually is based on a real place. In fact, when I first went up there and I went to a bowling alley, the pins were still set by hand. There were kids that set the pins by hand.

And they had a big Pepsi-Cola machine that said "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. Eight full ounces, that's a lot," which seemed brazenly optimistic to me at the time.

SPEAKER: One thing I liked a lot about Don't Think Twice is that it's a crime novel without being a procedural. There are more vague hunches than hard clues.

WAYNE JOHNSON: Well, one thing that I really wanted to do with the book was initially give a sense of this character, Paul Two Persons, who I think is fascinating. he's a real mix of all kinds of things. The book's focus is not so much a procedural as it is a character in some really serious trouble. He's disconnected in so many ways socially because he's an insider, but he's also an outsider.

He's been away culturally. He's had an experience out on the east-- out in the East, which makes him different. And he's also had some bad experiences, or knows of them anyway through his father, who has been burned in tribal politics. So his real challenge is to really get to the bottom of this whole thing through his friends and by his own wits.

SPEAKER: Paul is so reticent. In the age of public confession, he bares his devilments alone.

WAYNE JOHNSON: I think actually the way Paul communicates with people is very characteristic of communication in general up there. Face-to-face confrontation usually isn't the way to go. You've got to come at things slant, imply things. There's a kind of indirectness of communication there. It really serves to preserve group unity, but at the same time, it creates some real difficulties.