Transcripts

SPEAKER: Let's talk next about a new book. It's Dennis Staple's debut novel, This Town Sleeps. It depicts the struggle of a gay Ojibwe man to accept a native tradition where he rarely felt at home while escaping a reservation he could never quite leave. Staples, a member of the Red Lake Nation, says while the story is fiction, he mined a lot of material from his own life. Reporter John Enger met up with staples recently at a Bemidji coffee shop and has this report.

JOHN ENGER: The beginnings of This Town Sleeps came to Dennis Staples on a bleary 2:00 in the morning car ride. The man who helped Staples come out as gay had recently died of an opioid overdose. Their relationship had ended years before but it still unmoored Staples.

DENNIS STAPLES: I was just in a place of mourning and death was on my mind.

JOHN ENGER: So he did what he always did when he couldn't sleep, he drove through his hometown of Cass Lake, past the school playground where he spent his childhood. There's a merry-go-round there that nobody ever played on because of a rumor that a dog had crawled under it and died and its spirit lingered. It was a visceral memory.

DENNIS STAPLES: There is an Ojibwe tradition, I would say, of fearing the dead or fearing the dead that won't stay dead. And when I got home, I wrote, the dog went under the merry-go-round to die. On the night I brought it back to life, a train passed through town.

JOHN ENGER: Over the next four years, that thought grew into Staples' debut novel. This Town Sleeps weaves together the story of a murdered teenager, a forbidden romance, and generations of Ojibwe legend, all told through the eyes of a 20 something narrator who bears a striking resemblance to staples himself. He admits the book pulls a great deal from his own life.

Staples is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, but he grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation. His family was big and their house was small. Instead of a bedroom, he had a corner of the living room. He was always around for his grandmother's traditional stories, but also bore witness to the desperation and substance abuse that plagued so much of Northern Minnesota. The chaos of life on the reservation gave him a huge amount of material for his fiction, but sometimes it was too much, so he found his own escape.

DENNIS STAPLES: From sixth grade onward, that was when I constantly had books checked out of the library. So my first major obsession was Lord of the Rings. And everyone loved the movies and there were some people who did like the books, but not like 24/7.

JOHN ENGER: He wrote from a young age, but it wasn't until after high school that he started writing in earnest about what he really knew. Tragedies are remembered for a long time in Cass Lake, he says. Rumors live forever. People still remember the dead dog under the merry-go-round and that maybe never happened at all. And the teenage basketball star whose murder forms the backbone of This Town Sleeps, Staples said he could have been any of a number of young Native men whose deaths have become local legends.

And there's another theme he lifted from his childhood, the pull of the Reservation. His narrator spends a good chunk of the book trying to build enough momentum to break free. Staples still remembers the lecture his buddy's parents gave them when they were kids.

DENNIS STAPLES: It was something like, there's more to this life than this Reservation or staying here after high school. You guys have to complete school, you guys got to take it seriously, and you guys got to get out of here.

JOHN ENGER: Staples went to Bemidji State, then he enrolled in a distance learning MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. He still lives in Bemidji. It's 20 miles from his hometown. He works at a local casino. The publication of his first book at age 27 and the good reviews that followed could give him the momentum he needs to finally leave, but he doesn't plan on doing that.

Escaping the Reservation, the town that sleeps, was a very useful narrative device, he says, but he's not his narrator. It's fiction after all, not memoir. He's come to love the area. And for now, he says, he still really needs that casino job. John Enger, MPR News, Bemidji.