This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Dennis E. Staples, whose novel Passing Through a Prairie Country is out today from Counterpoint Press. The novel is a darkly humorous tale about the ghosts that haunt casinos, and the people caught in their web. Recovering from a recent breakup, Marion Lafournier, a mid-twenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machines. He barely escapes an encounter with “the sandman,” a dark force that has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation for decades, when his cousins, Alana and Cherie, save him. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while enjoying the thrills of the casino. Marian and Alana, members of the Bullhead clan, are the only ones able to fully understand the danger of the sandman. But even they find themselves in a battle for their lives and for the souls of the reservation’s residents. Publishers Weekly praised the novel for illuminating “how a community attempts to cope with ancestral trauma,” and Booklist noted how the novel’s “sense of timelessness and multiple points of view add to [its] chaotic suspense.” Dennis E. Staples is an Ojibwe writer from Bemidji, Minnesota, and the author of This Town Sleeps (Counterpoint Press, 2020). He holds an MFA in fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a graduate of the 2018 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. His work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Nightmare magazine. He is a member of the Red Lake Nation.
1. How long did it take you to write Passing Through a Prairie Country?
It took me about two and a half years from the initial conception to my first full draft. There were also somewhere between one and two hundred pages of other stories and concepts that did not make it in.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The chapter orders in Part Two and Three of the book presented a lot of challenge because of the timeline. My editor Harry and I worked hard to make sure it flowed well. It involved a lot of simplifying of some intentional ambiguity I was trying for.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
These days I like to write in open spaces: the gym at night, a hospital cafeteria, sometimes a work break room. I used to do more writing at my desk but I’m finding it harder these days to sit down in one place and concentrate for longer than an hour or two.
4. What are you reading right now?
Suicide Woods (Graywolf Press, 2019) by Benjamin Percy and The Bingo Palace (HarperCollins, 1994) by Louise Erdrich. I’ve been reading more and more of Percy since about 2020. His advice on writing horror/thriller fiction was very helpful in the drafting of Passing Through a Prairie Country. I love so many of Erdrich’s books. I had the book before I started my own rez casino novel, but I decided to wait until I was done to visit hers. So far, I’m loving the differences in time period and technology. Crazy to think about, but she was writing in Indian gaming settings in the mid-1980s and I wrote mine about the late 2010s in the first half of the 2020s.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
David Tromblay. His books are visceral and strong.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Work, family, and my easily distractable mind.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
There was discussion in the initial submission of the manuscript from my editor that my character Glenn might be cut from the story altogether. I had to do some revising to convince him, as I was convinced, that Glenn was actually very important to how the stage is set for maximum Indian Casino Hell and hijinx. This comment helped me revise Chapter Ten into what I feel might be one of the best things I’ve written so far.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Passing Through a Prairie Country, what would you say?
Don’t spend that $80 at the casino for “research purposes.” Also, don’t date any man you meet in a casino.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Passing Through a Prairie Country?
I did quite a bit of research into the history and laws that turned our culture towards the casino economy. I read a lot of early accounts of Ojibwe life and stories that were thankfully recorded before they were lost. I also wrote a few songs with similar dark casino themes parallel to writing the book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Half as long.... Again, half as long.” It comes from the scene in the beginning of the film A River Runs Through It. Young Norman brings his father his essay and is told to rewrite it half as long, two times, before his father is satisfied with his work. Editing down is something I dread in the abstract because I know I can lose motivation easily. But this book has ingrained the lesson in me fully. Some might say the book could be longer, and it could, but I’m very pleased with the way it turned out in the editing process.