Duluth writer Leif Enger heads to Red Wing for Talking Volumes with ‘I Cheerfully Refuse’

Leif Enger has been great at describing nature as far back as his debut novel, “Peace Like a River,” in 2001. But it took moving within spitting distance of Lake Superior before he could put that great lake at the center of a book.

The novelist’s fourth book, “I Cheerfully Refuse,” a near-future retelling of the Orpheus myth that critic Laurie Hertzel called “stunning” in her review, is about musician Rainy and bookseller Lark, a married couple who live on the North Shore. A series of disasters result in Rainy fleeing to the storm-tossed lake, with a young girl named Sol, in a rickety sailboat.

Enger, who is 63, will discuss “I Cheerfully Refuse” with MPR’s Kerri Miller at a Talking Volumes event in Red Wing June 4, where they’ll be joined by singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna Graves as the musical guest. We spoke with Enger, who previously lived on a farm in Aitkin County, about big storms, being a slow writer and what makes Duluth residents crabby.

Q: You have lived in Duluth for about six years now. Do you and your wife Robin feel like full-fledged Duluthians?

A: We do. People have been really neighborly and kind. It’s a wonderful place to live. We get awakened at three in the morning with the ships’ horns. We live six or seven blocks off the water, up on the hillside. If you go up to our attic, where my wife has her quilting studio, you can look out the window and catch a glimpse of the water. In the summer, you can’t because there are too many leaves.

Q: Presumably that had a big impact on the writing of “Cheerfully Refuse.”

A: It would be hard to write a book this Lake Superior-centric if I didn’t live so close to it. One thing you realize is whatever mood the lake is in, that mood transfers to the people. If it’s wild and confused and violent and dark, it seems to me like everyone is slightly on edge. Maybe it’s just me and I’m projecting it on everyone else. But I’m productive. I write a lot on days like that. If it’s benign and there’s a gentle wind out of the west and sunshine, everybody is nicer and I’m in a great mood. So, I just absorb whatever is happening and pour it onto the page.

Q: Did that affect your characters? As in, “It’s a nice day out, so I better write a scene in which the characters are pleasant to each other?”

A: I didn’t even realize why it was different writing here than it had been anywhere else at first. But as I got through that first rough draft, I began to see that I was writing more one way when it was benign outside and another when it was stormy. I had never had that happen before and I’ve always lived a life that was fairly close to the ground. When we lived on the farm, I was outside more than I was in so I should have been used to that.

Q: There are some huge storms in “Cheerfully Refuse.” Have you experienced any like those?

A: A few weeks after we moved in, this gigantic nor’easter came blasting in. We got in the car, drove down to Brighton Beach and these massive waves were lifting up rocks from the bottom of the lake and throwing them on the road, rocks the size of snapping turtles, clattering across the road. It was terrifying and beautiful. We stayed at a safe distance and just watched. That stays with you once you’ve seen it.

Q: And your thinking about the novel actually started with Lake Superior?

A: Right. And the second thing was I wanted it to be set in the near future. When I started making notes, it was 2017 and we had all of us entered the age of alternative facts and conspiracy thinking and it felt to me like a corner had been turned. It made me think of Dickens, that scene in “A Christmas Carol” when the ghost lifts his robe and reveals to Scrooge the feral children who are desperate and their names are Ignorance and Want. I thought, “It seems like these kids are about to have their day, so what does the world look like if we have them run the show?”

Q: That sounds a lot darker than the book actually feels!

A: Once Rainy and Lark and Sol got their feet under them, the story took off. There was this lovely discovery that the canvas might be dark and the world might be screwed up but people still make friends and do wild and romantic and senseless things for the people we love. The story became my lifeline, my refusal of despair.

Q: So, the experience of writing the book was hopeful?

A: It was really a joy to write. I wrote it during the pandemic. I’d been working on notes for it for a couple years, I had it in my mind, but I didn’t really get going on it until the week we went into lockdown. It might have been the same day. My wife Robin finally said, “You know, we’re not going anywhere. Why don’t you just get started on it?” So, I dove in and it became something I loved doing every day. I completed the first draft within three or four months, which is fast for me, and then spent years turning it into something.

Q: What made the writing so joyful?

A: It seems funny to say but the whole pandemic thing was pretty good to me. Every day we would go for long walks. Duluth is a great walking city anytime, but it was especially good in the pandemic. There are these lovely, shady walking paths and people were staying 6 feet away from each other. It felt great. It was so quiet, so that made for a good, evocative writing setting.

Q: Is that why you opted to give the characters names from nature: Rainy/Rainier, Lark, Sol (Sun)?

A: I don’t think I thought about that until you mentioned it. I always liked the name Rainier, after the mountain. It’s such a pretty place. I suppose I thought if I could pick my own name, what would it be? Rainier would be pretty good and Rainy was natural to call him. It fits the mood of Lake Superior. Lark? What’s more joyful than a songbird? She’s kind of the spirit of the novel, this librarian and bookseller who can’t give up on the written word and the idea that as long as people read, they’ll dream and as long as they dream, they can’t be vanquished.

Q: And, of course, like Lark, your wife Robin is named after a bird...

A: Yeah. Robin has been in my life for 45 years. Every woman I write has bits and pieces of the woman I know best and love best in my life. Absolutely. I would say Lark’s generosity and her insight are — I don’t want to say too much about this because it’s quite personal – but again I didn’t name her Lark because Robin is also named after a bird. Maybe this stuff is unconscious. No doubt it is. I didn’t really think about it until later.

Q: Your books have been eight or more years apart but “Cheerfully Refuse” is just six years after the last, “Virgil Wander.” Are you in danger of becoming prolific?

A: It was a combination of the pandemic and a real urgency I felt about the story. I needed to take advantage of the urgency I felt. And I am slow. I don’t know what to say about it. So many beautiful writers are fast and God bless them. I wish I could be one of them. But, for one thing, I have to write so many drafts before I’m happy with them.

Q: Since you had such a good time sheltering in place with them in the pandemic, was it hard to say goodbye to these characters?

A: This was the first time I got to the end of the book and didn’t want to stop rewriting it. I wanted to keep playing with it. I wanted to remain in the company of these characters. Usually, it’s “Yay, I can wash my hands of these characters.” But this was the opposite. I wanted to remain in that world. I didn’t want to stop writing in Rainy’s voice.

Q: Maybe there will be a sequel?

A: I haven’t made any notes, but it’s tempting.

Talking Volumes with Leif Enger

Who: Sponsored by the Star Tribune and MPR.

When: 7 p.m. Tue.

Where: Sheldon Theatre, 443 W. 3rd St., Red Wing.

Tickets: $20-$25, mprevents.org.

An excerpt from “I Cheerfully Refuse”:

“Lark was gone when I woke. Clean sunlight shifted on the ceiling, ravens murmured in the eaves. For the first time in weeks I couldn’t hear waves hitting shore.

Like always I stepped outside first to see what the lake was thinking.

It’s called a lake because it is not salt, but this corpus is a fearsome sea and if you live in its reach you should know at all times what it’s up to.

For now a calm day beckoned, the sky washed clean.

You enjoy these days when they come. They are not what the lake is known for. The year after we moved in a cloud gathered on the surface and rose in a column twenty thousand feet high. It was opaque and grainy and stayed there all summer like a pillar of smoke. That season two freighters went down in separate storms — a domestic carrying taconite and a Russian loaded with coal. People blamed the dark cloud because in both cases it shredded before an arriving storm only to reconstitute after, like a sated monster at rest.”

Excerpted from “I Cheerfully Refuse” by Leif Enger © 2024 by Reuben Land Corporation. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.