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Study Guide

Sou t h D a ko ta Huma n i t i e s C ounc i l

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Save the DateEach year thousands of people converge on the annual South Dakota Festival of Books, a weekend-long event that features more than 40 well-known authors participating in book signings, presentations, panel discussions and readings. Author presentations are separated into six tracks: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s/young adult, his-tory/tribal and writer’s support.

This year’s festival will take place Sept. 20-22 in Deadwood. As always, the Festival will feature national, regional and South Dakota authors. The headliner for 2013 will be One Book South Dakota au-thor Danielle Sosin, whose book The Long-Shining Waters represents our current theme of “Water.”

Over the course of nine festivals, many distinguished authors and cultural figures have attended, such as Sherman Alexie, Roy Blount Jr., Marilynne Robinson, Ted Kooser, Sonia Monzano, Annie Proulx, Quincy Troupe, Dan O’Brien, Susan Power, Louise Erdrich, Pete Dex-ter, Dave Eggers and Ivan Doig. This year’s lineup includes Ambassa-dor for Children’s Literature Walter Dean Myers and mystery writers Lori Armstrong and Karin Slaughter.

Many more will be confirmed throughout the year, so please keep an eye on www.sdbookfestival.com and future issues of our e-newsletter (sign up at http://sdhumanities.org/enewsletter.htm).

The Deadwood Mountain Grand will provide a large centralized loca-tion for lodging and events. In 2013, Exhibitor’s Hall will move from the Deadwood Pavilion to the Deadwood Mountain Grand. The beau-tiful Black Hills will provide a true vacation destination for Festival-goers. Please join us for the 11th annual Festival of Books!

The South Dakota Festival of Books is organized by the South Dakota Center for the Book and the South Dakota Humanities Council. Please contact us with any questions or comments during our normal hours of operation, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CDT, at (605) 688-6113.

Thank you for participating in One Book South Dakota!

This program was made possible by the generous financial support of donors across the state and by the following people who volunteer to serve on the South Dakota Humanities Council Board of Directors:

Jean Nicholson, ChairCommunity Volunteer/Bookkeeper

Lawrence Piersol

Federal Judge

Scott Rausch (Gov. Appointee)Retired Engineer/Adjunct University

Faculty

Rebecca Schenk (Gov. Appointee)Retired Teacher

Ann McKay Thompson, Past Chair

Hospital Administrator

Corey VilhauerMarketing

David Cremean

Professor, Author

Tom Dempster, SecretaryFormer Legislator/Financial Advisor

Michelle Deyo-Amende, Chair-Elect

Administrator

Tom FishbackBanker

Doris Giago, executive committee

Professor

Anne Gormley, TreasurerRetired Banker

Fee Jacobsen (Gov. Appointee)Retired Entrepreneur

Dick BrownDevelopment Director

Judith Meierhenry

Retired Judge

Matthew Moen (Gov. Appointee)Academic Dean

Julie Moore-PetersonLibrarian

Elden LawrenceRetired Professor/Author

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Table of contents• Aboutthebook 4• Abouttheauthor 5• Praiseforthebook 6-7• Review 8-9• Notes 10• Q&Awithauthor 11-14• DiscussionQuestions 15-16• CharacterList 16• LakeSuperiorMap 17• AboutOneBookSD 18• Thankyou 19

About One Book South DakotaAfter ten years, most South Dakotans are familiar with the One Book program, which encourages readers throughout the state to come together to discuss a single book. This year, the program is expanding to offer even more opportunities to interact with other readers, as well as with the author.

To promote exploration of the themes in the 2013 One Book South Dakota selection, The Long-Shining Waters, author Danielle Sosin will make four week-long book tours throughout the state. These tours will take her to one region of the state each month, beginning in June and culminating at the 2013 Festival of Books in Deadwood, September 20-22. If you’d like your community to be one of the 20 in which Sosin will meet readers, sign books and discuss her work, please complete a 2013 One Book Tour application at www.sdhumanities.org. Any cultural or community organization is eligible to host an event, including libraries, historical societies, museums and book clubs.

Selected host organizations receive:• 20 copies of The Long-Shining Waters• Resource toolkit of promotional materials • $250 in Community Cash for coordinator stipend (of up to $50), print-

ing, postage, advertising and promotion expenses• Sosin’s travel and lodging expenses paid directly by the SDHC

As always, support is available for One Book South Dakota community reading programs based on The Long-Shining Waters. SDHC will distribute 2,000 books to schools, libraries and targeted reading groups through our lending library. If you are interested in holding a One Book South Dakota discussion led by a community member or SDHC scholar, please complete a Quick Grant/One Book application at www.sdhumanities.org. For more information, contact us at 605-688-6113 or info@sdhumanities.org.

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About The Long-Shining Waters A luminous debut novel set along the turbulent

shores of Lake Superior.Lake Superior, the north country, the great fresh-water expanse. Frigid. Lethal. Wildly beautiful. The Long-Shining Waters gives us three stories whose charac-ters are separated by centuries and circumstance, yet connected across time by the place they inhabit.

In 1622, Grey Rabbit -- an Ojibwe woman, mother and wife -- struggles to understand a dream-life that has taken on fear-ful dimensions. As she and her family experience the abundance and hardship of living near the “big water,” her psyche and her world edge toward irrevers-ible change. Berit and Gunnar, a Norwegian couple, fish the great lake in 1902. Berit, who is unable to conceive, finds the lake anchors her isolated life, yet those same waters ultimately test the limits of her endurance and spirit. And in 2000, Nora, a seasoned bar owner, experiences a disaster in her life. Left facing an open-ended future, she’s drawn into a reluctant road trip around the lake.

These narratives unfold with the mesmerizing rhythm of waves, as a fourth mysterious character comes into relief. Haunting, rich in historical detail, and universal in its exploration of the human desire for meaning when faced with uncertainty, The Long-Shining Waters is an unforgettable and singular debut, by an author whose work effort-lessly “captures unexpected moments of beauty and clarity” (New York Times Book Review).

Lake Superior Map

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10. You could look at the book’s three storylines as being about three women, but you could also view them as being about a family group/tribe, a largely isolated couple, and a single woman. Does considering the stories in this alternate way lead to different conclusions?

11. While the novel focuses largely on the experiences of three women, what role do the male characters play throughout the novel?

12. How do you imagine the futures of Grey Rabbit, Berit and Nora? Why do you think the author chose each story’s particular ending?

13. What have you taken away from this novel? What has left the strongest impression on you?

Author Danielle Sosin began writing fiction in the late 1980s, through classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Since then, writ-ing has been central to her life. In 2000, she published her first book, a collection of short stories, Garden Primitives, with Coffee House Press. The stories in the collection span nearly a decade. After the publication of Garden Primitives, she found herself obsessed with an idea that was too large to succeed as a short story. She wanted to write about Lake Superior, to discover what it was about that enormous body of water that so moved and haunted her. The result, eight years later, was The Long-Shining Waters.

The Long-Shining Waters was published by Milkweed Editions in 2011. The book was the winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award and The Midwest Independent Bookseller’s Choice Award. Sosin has received many awards and fellowships from organizations including the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the Loft Literary Center. She lives and works in Duluth, Minnesota.

About the author

Grey Rabbit – 1622 Ojibwe woman struggling to feed her family and experiencing frightening dreams

Night Cloud – her husbandStanding Bird – her older sonLittle Cedar/Little No Eyes – her younger sonBullhead – her mother-in-law

Berit Kleiven – 1902 Norwegian settler dealing with infertility, isolation and unexpected tragedy

Gunnar – her husband, a fishermanJohn Runninghorse – a Native trapper, friend of Gunnar

Nora Truneau – 2000 Woman from Superior, Wisconsin, who journeys around the lake after experi-encing a personal disaster

Janelle – her daughterNikki (“Bun”) – her granddaughterRose – the tenant above the bar

Character List

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Praise for The Long-Shining Waters“Danielle Sosin constructs a truly inspiring work of fiction near the ‘big waters’ of Minnesota. It is an ambitious novel, haunting in its depiction of the life of the characters. It is a wonderful book. I loved it.” —Nuruddin Farah, author of Knots and Links

“You don’t see writing like this often, so infused with an intimate relationship to nature, certainly not in debut novels. It may be that with nature shrinking away from us, young writers don’t marinate in the sounds, smells, colors and emotions that were once readily avail-able. Whatever the reason, Sosin writes about Lake Superior as if it were a character, a parent, a lover, an enemy. Three stories are linked between the covers of The Long-Shining Waters: Grey Rabbit, an Ojibwe woman living on the shores of Lake Superior, tries to protect her children from starvation, even as her dream life warns that they will die; Gunnar, a Norwegian fisherman living on the lake in 1902 with his beloved wife, Berit, is haunted by the discovery of a dead man in the lake; and Nora, a middle-aged woman whose business on the shores of the lake burns down in 2000, takes a journey around its perimeter. A single thread joins them through history; their stories link in the novel’s subconscious like a fable. ‘Superior should be com-prehensible,’ Gunnar thinks as he reluctantly leaves the body in the lake so as not to frighten Berit. ‘It’s not. And that discord is readily felt. The Great Lake is movement at peripheral vision. It is sound at the limit of audible frequency. It is the illusion of the ability to under-stand.’—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“Danielle Sosin has written the first great novel about Lake Supe-rior—and its many ghosts.”—Tim Gihring, Minnesota Monthly

“We are plunged, fascinated and chilled, into one of three alternately narrated stories that make up this masterful ode to the sprawling, shape-shifting freshwater sea that is Lake Superior. . . . The construct is brilliant, the prose fine, the characters beautifully developed, the regional sense powerful…This ode to the greatest of all lakes is noth-ing less than grand.”—Pamela Miller, Star Tribune

1. The Long-Shining Waters features three storylines: Grey Rabbit in 1622, Berit Kleiven in 1902 and Nora Truneau in 2000. How did you relate to each of the storylines? Did you find them to be equally compelling? Did your opinion change over the course of the novel?

2. The three main characters, while separated by centuries, are connected in a number of different ways. How are they similar? What threads run through all the stories?

3. Each of the women is faced with great uncertainty in her life. How do the characters cope with change and the unknown? What might readers learn from the ways the three women react to the challenges they face?

4. The voice of a fourth and mysterious character speaks from in the water. How did you interpret this voice, and how does its inclusion influence your understanding of the other three narratives and of the book as a whole?

5. The idea of time is important in this story. How would you describe the way that time moves over the course of the book? How does the structure, with its overlapping stories, affect your reading of the novel?

6. In each era depicted in the novel (as well as in the fourth voice), the writ-ing is different. How does it differ in each of the sections?

7. The setting -- the shores of Lake Superior -- is clearly important to the book. In what ways do the characters themselves view this large body of water? Do you think of the lake as a constant throughout the novel, or is it different in each section? Could the lake itself be considered a character?

8. In each of the storylines the relationship of the characters to the natural world is different. How do those relationships compare and contrast? How do they compare and contrast to your own relationship with the natural world?

9. As a reader, you are shown some of the character’s dreams, or their frag-mented waking memories of dreams. What is the function of dreams in the novel?

Discussion questions

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then crosses over to mystery, leaving the last entry omniscient. The other characters in the book can’t hear the voice, though they may experience it as they do anything else that is held in the waters, as a feeling, or a fleeting part of a dream.

Uncertainty seems to be a shared state among these characters. Is that, to some degree, because they depend on the lake?

Danielle Sosin: I don’t think so. The lake is pretty dependable. It’s drinking water, it’s food, transportation, livelihood. Of course it can be lethal as well. I think that the characters are uncertain because they are all experiencing loss in some way.

Loss disturbs daily rhythms; it calls into question the rituals and routines one has grown accustomed to. It asks us to redefine what is important. Loss can bring with it an unbelievably beautiful and rari-fied state of mind of which the search for meaning and uncertainty is a part.

Who are some of your favorite authors? Favorite books? Other books set along Lake Superior?

Danielle Sosin: I love Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, An-nie Dillard’s For the Time Being, and many of the works of Michael Ondaatje. Virginia Woolf’s work has been very influential. I was thrilled when I first read her and realized that that territory of inner life, observation, and minutia could be made into great art. Presently, I’m on my second read of Paul Hardings Tinkers -- it’s gorgeous.

As for books set along Lake Superior, I was amazed to discover how few there were. Most everything was non-fiction, though there is a great deal of poetry about the lake, and also (not surprisingly) many mysteries set on its shores. My absolute favorite, and the only book I found that was interested in the lake in the same way that I was is a book called Superior: The Haunted Shore (photographs by Bruce LittleJohn, with text by the late Wayland Drew). His writing focuses on human transience in the face of the wilderness. His work is won-derful. I wished I could have met Wayland Drew.

“Elegant. . . . Through the stories of three women who lived centu-ries apart, Danielle Sosin evokes the unforgettable pull of this watery expanse [Lake Superior].”—Don George, National Geographic Explorer “The Long-Shining Waters is as observant and smart as its author. Never sentimental, yet filled with feeling, poetic but alive with com-plex characters and drama, her book makes the spirit, history, and concrete presence of Lake Superior palpable and relevant.”—Alison Morse, MNArtists

“The riveting opening moments of The Long-Shining Waters deliver us to the animate world of Grey Rabbit, four hundred years gone, and we realize we are in the hands of a visionary writer. Danielle Sosin’s beautiful, resonant prose is a joy, and her devotion to what compels us to gather on the shores of great waters distinguishes this novel that is, as well, a great story. The intimate portrait of three women bound by their times and coming unbound in the great tidal pull of history is deeply affecting, wise and true. The Long-Shining Waters is an enchantment, a challenge, a tale to fall into and carry long after it’s done.”—Patricia Francisco, author of Telling

“At its heart, this book – like many great stories – tells about the discovery of self through the events of a world that is wonderful and terrible, a world that takes as readily as it gives…The breadth of [So-sin’s] language for characterizing this world and its powers is quite simply astonishing. Through her words, we hear the heartbeat of both people and waters, and come away just as visitors to the lake have done for millennia—in awe and understanding.” —Kathleen Ambrogi, Belletrista

“Sosin writes with quiet authority…subtly illuminating the ways hu-man society changes over the centuries, while [Lake Superior] re-mains the same, magnificent and terrifying.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Sosin writes sensously detailed prose and distills the emotions of her characters into a profound and universal need for acceptance and love.”—Publishers Weekly

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How did you come to the title, The Long-Shining Waters?

Danielle Sosin: The title was a struggle. I have notebook pages filled with lists of possible titles. Really, pages and pages. For a while I was convinced that the word “Superior” had to be included. It’s not an easy word to incorporate. One working title was Superior’s Keep. I finally gave up on using the word “Superior,” and decided it was more important that the title include both time and water. Again, a million lists. And then one morning my honey woke having dreamt the title The Long-Shining Waters.

In the novel, Nora, Grey Rabbit, and Berit endure, or have endured loss and face numerous challenges. Yet, it’s also clear that each of them considers their lives to be filled with small blessings. Can you talk about how that came together?

Danielle Sosin: That’s life, yes? That is my experience of life. The blessings are a constant if you choose to notice them. Yet, it is some-thing much easier said than done. Even in the midst of the deepest grief Berit sees the beauty of the orange light on the water. “There are two options and neither feels like a choice, either she’ll stretch large enough to hold both, or she’ll rip in a way that will be beyond mend-ing.” Living well, or maybe mental health, is partially about being able to hold life’s contradictions.

Woven through the three narratives is a fourth voice that offers a wholly new perspective, more poetic, and reflective. How does that voice relate to the three characters—Nora, Grey Rabbit, and Berit—we’ve already come to know?

Danielle Sosin: This voice is only experienced directly by the reader. It is the voice of a character who is lost to the lake. Its identity is revealed part-way through the book. The voice takes full advantage of that aspect of fiction that allows one to imagine and express the unknowable. It takes the reader underwater, shows us objects that are down there, lets us experience the currents of history it encounters.The voice speaks from lake-time, it reports its experience as it follows another to the depths of the lake. It starts out in first person, though as it journeys, its consciousness expands and its singular voice dimin-ishes. That is until it reaches a certain point on the lake bed, where it

May 27, 2011

By Mike FischerMilwaukee Journal Sentinal Onlinewww.jsonline.com

An Ojibwe wife and mother, just before the Europeans arrive. The childless wife of a Norwegian fisherman, living on Minnesota’s North Shore at the beginning of the last century. A 57-year-old woman from Superior, trying to start over at the dawn of our own.

In The Long-Shining Waters, her remarkable debut novel, Danielle Sosin tells the story of these three women - as well as a fourth charac-ter who dominates their lives: Lake Superior itself, seemingly self-contained but ultimately unknowable.

We meet Grey Rabbit first. It is the winter of 1622. Game is scarce, and her family is on the verge of starvation. She is wracked with dreams of dying children that threaten her sanity.

Just four pages later, we meet Nora, taking down her Christmas orna-ments from the bar she has owned and run on her own after losing her husband 24 years earlier.

Busy making a living, Nora hasn’t spent much time thinking about who she is or where she is going. When her bar burns to the ground, she embarks on a journey around the Great Lake she has always called home but never really known.

Last up is Berit. In 1902, she will suffer a devastating crisis of her own that shatters the hard-earned peace she and her husband have won in their isolated cottage overlooking one of Superior’s coves.

Sosin uses a round-robin format and free indirect narration to slowly unfold these stories - each wonderfully written, whether she is de-scribing winter branches that “knock and stir like an army of skel-etons” or a sky in mining country that is “worked hard, as if all the

Review of the Long-Shining Waters

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Though the different sections of the book are clearly set in particu-lar years across time, one gets the sense while reading, that to some degree these distinct stories overlap. They almost feel as if they’re happening simultaneously. Could you talk about how you feel time operates in this novel?

Danielle Sosin: Well if you take to heart the premise that lake holds its history, then lake-time, if you will, is non-linear. All the stories are held in the waters at once.

Though one reads each story line in a linear time sense, lake-time affects the characters as it courses through their dreams, and rises to their consciousness. The intent was to create a sense of things hap-pening simultaneously. So I’m happy to hear that this worked. Per-haps, it is in the italicized fourth voice that lake-time is most starkly realized. The identity of that character can only be truly understood in the context of the rest of the book if one understands that it speaks from lake-time.

Why did you choose the dates 1622, 1902, and 2000? Is there some-thing significant about those years? Danielle Sosin: Each story and its date have a particular reason for being. It was essential that the book have a Native American story as Lake Superior was/is, the heart of the Ojibwe Nation. The choice of that story’s specific date, 1622, was for reasons of plot. The late 1800s, and early 1900s was a period of great physical changes around the lake, so I wanted to set one of the storylines during that time. And the story set in 2000 was written to bring the novel up to modern day.

The three eras allow for much to compare and contrast. For example in 1622, Grey Rabbit’s culture was animistic. Everything was known to have a spirit essence. In 1902, the then dominant culture saw them-selves as separate from nature, land was subjugated to the will of the society, and spirit had moved to the realm of the sky. In 2000, ques-tions of spirit are a take it or leave it proposition, as is one’s perceived relationship with nature. Nora can watch a storm on the television in her bar. She can say, “I’m not much of a water person,” despite the fact that she can’t live without it.

metal below the ground had leeched up and was tarnishing the air.”

All three stories are amazingly textured, reflecting lightly worn re-search on topics including Ojibwe life, Superior geology and - espe-cially - the tools and rituals of daily work, from sewing and fishing to bartending and glassblowing.

Parceled out in increments that rarely last longer than a few pages, these three stories are themselves interwoven with brief, lyric inter-ludes that recount Superior’s own history and give voice to both the Great Lake itself and to the drowned - from inanimate timber to lost sailors - entombed there.

These four voices aren’t always heard in the same order, which allows them to gradually bleed into each other, becoming part of the larger story of a lake around which “everything,” as Nora comes to learn, “is about the past.”

Its echoes accompany Nora throughout her circling journey - in an agate she discovers on a Wisconsin beach; in a shipwreck museum she visits in Michigan; in the native pictographs she sees in Ontario - and that Grey Rabbit had visited centuries before; in a cottage she rents in Minnesota - which might once have been Berit’s own.

Nora doesn’t always grasp the significance of what she sees, just as Berit does not understand why an Indian friend angrily flicks away a gaudy trading bead she finds - and as Grey Rabbit fails to interpret her own prophetic dream about disappearing beavers.

That half-knowledge rings true, reflecting how life is lived before being reduced to history and underscoring how much less any of us ever knows than we think we do - of either the past we inherit or the present we inhabit.

Superior itself, Sosin suggests, is a chilling reminder of how much remains eternally unfathomable, even in those places and people we know best and love most.

Mike Fischer is a Milwaukee writer and lawyer.

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The Long-Shining Waters follows multiple characters, who are separated by centuries (sections of the book are set in the years 1622, 1902, and 2000) but who are connected in a number of dif-ferent ways, not simply by the fact that they live along the shores of Lake Superior. Can you talk a little bit about how these sections relate to each other?

Danielle Sosin: This is largely a novel about place. It’s my attempt to explore the question -- what is Lake Superior’s strange power? It’s a body of water like no other, imbued with a palpable sense of mystery, and hauntedness. I’ve based the book on the premise that the lake holds its history, literally as in objects in the lake, but also, and more importantly, in a watery subconscious way, so that everything that has happened on and around the lake is held there in the waters, and that affects all the people who live on its shores.

Lake Superior is the main connecting force between the stories. All of the characters experience the lake, and rely on it in both practical and profound ways. “The water is like that. It gets in your head,” the character Tinker says to Nora in the year 2000. Because the lake holds its history in a watery subconscious way, it affects the characters in both awake and dream states. (In Grey Rabbit’s case, 1622, it is more apt to say a dream/vision state.) The characters experience pieces of each other’s existence.

They sometimes feel each other’s presence, or feel some presence held in the waters. They dream fragments of each other’s lives, dream similar dreams. Currents of story may join and diverge, place may overlap.

And of course the humanity of the characters connects them. They all face issues of loss and fear, they encounter beauty, they question and grapple with fragments of knowledge and feelings of wonder -- things we as humans know only at the edges, things we intuit about the mys-teries of existence.

Notes: Q&A with Danielle Sosin