No church like Rose of Sharon existed in the Arrowhead region in the late 1990s. The monument to the Duluth lynchings was not defaced during this time. So, why is the novel set in Minnesota, a progressive state with a reputation for tolerance?
This story started with a dog, or rather a husband and wife who asked me to care for their house in the country while they were gone for the winter. They gave me one strict instruction: make sure the dog survives. Over winter, the loneliest winter of my life, I did just that, and when the owners returned in spring they put the old dog to sleep. It’s not much as anecdotes go. I have never liked irony. Yet that winter haunted my imagination. Here I was out in the country, surrounded by wilderness, visited at night by coyotes. I hadn’t ever experienced such cold, or waded through such deep snow. I worried over their koi, frozen in the pond.
A curious thing happens when memory mingles with the imagination. When I started this novel I meant to set it in the Inland Northwest, which was where I was living at the time I cared for that house. I wanted to set it there for family reasons as well. You see, the title for The Land comes from family history. My family knows the pull of the wilderness. In the 1980s my grandparents purchased heavily forested land in Northern California. The entire family, all six of their children, invested in the purchase of this land. Legend has it they were inspired by the publication of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book that predicted the End Times were upon us. I grew up hearing about the Great Tribulation from my grandparents, listened while great uncles debated gravely about the Mark of the Beast and the coming of the Antichrist. My grandparents named the property they bought The Land. It was meant to be partly a vacation spot, but also as a refuge against the Apocalypse. Later in 1999, as fears about Y2K spread, some members of my family looked again to the property as a place of safety. One relative talked openly about a man he knew who could dynamite the only bridges heading into Scotts Valley. While The Land as described in the novel bears a resemblance to the place we knew and have long since sold, I want to be clear that my family never belonged to any Christian Identity church. This novel is not about my family or anyone in it, but instead explores what happens when the fearful eschatology of dispensationalism intermingles with racist belief systems. As a Christian, I have long been concerned with how American Christianity has been co-opted by nationalism and other toxic ideologies. And while I have sometimes been accused of having an overly gothic mindset, if your grandmother reads to you from the Book of Revelation when you are a child, it does things to your imagination. I have kept the faith in my own way. Writing the novel allowed me to return to The Land.
So, how and why did the novel’s setting move from the Inland Northwest to the Upper Midwest? In the mid-1990s the botched Federal raid of the Weaver cabin and the violent deaths of three people during an eleven-day siege had left enduring scars on the region where I lived. Yet as I did research, all signs kept pointing me back to the Midwest. Randy and Vicki Weaver were from small towns in Iowa and were married in Fort Dodge. The 1990s spawned the Posse Comitatus in North Dakota while the Aryan Republican Army was busy robbing banks across Ohio. Timothy McVeigh, who lived for a time in Michigan, committed the worst act of domestic terrorism the nation had yet experienced in Oklahoma City.
Local research offered no reprieve. I discovered a Christian Identity church like the one described in the novel right over in Fridley, Minnesota, no more than ten miles from my home. (The church is no longer active.) I found out that Charles Weisman, a prolific publisher of racist propaganda for the Christian Identity movement, operated his press out of a home in Apple Valley, Minnesota. The white supremacists whom I had been ready to consign to the mountains of Idaho or to the Deep South? They were right here living among us, in our very backyard. As I wrote, I thought about how white supremacy and the violence such groups engender are a little like natural disasters. They only happen in other places, not where we live, and certainly not in the private spaces of our hearts. The more I read and researched, the more I knew I had to bring this novel home.
For all these reasons, the setting moved to the wildest and most beautiful place I knew in Minnesota, the Arrowhead region. Meanwhile, as I wrote, residents of Grand Marais were unable to stop the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon cult from settling on a property west of town. It was another reminder of how this can happen anywhere.
Dreamers and visionaries have long known the inexorable allure of the wilderness, a part of our American psyche. It’s The Land that calls to so many of us.