The Levee--William Kent Krueger

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We've talked a lot about audio books here on the blog lately (you all know it's one of my soapboxes!) Audio is the thing in publishing these days, and it's very fertile ground for authors to explore--as our very special guest today, WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, will tell us. His audio novella, THE LEVEE, is just out and it's fabulous. Here's Kent with the story behind the project:

The Levee: A Literary Experiment

 

For the past several months, my publisher and I have been collaborating on a literary experiment. Last Tuesday, our work came to fruition. My novella The Levee was released by Simon and Schuster as an original audiobook. This has all been a completely new experience for me, and I’m still waiting to see the full outcome.

Why did I agree to be a part of this experiment? Here’s the main reason: I consider myself an artist. I believe all writers should think of themselves as artists, and words are our medium. If we do this, it means that we should always be trying to grow, to push our limitations, expand our reach. The Levee represents a new kind of storytelling for me, both in its length and in the venue of its offering.

Briefly, The Levee is set in the spring of 1927, during the worst flood in our nation’s history. In that spring, the lower Mississippi River spilled from its banks and covered more that 27,000 square miles with water up to thirty feet high. The river below Memphis, Tennessee, reached a width of eighty miles. In my story, at the height of this flood, four men are assigned the task of battling the treacherous river in a desperate attempt to rescue a family trapped by the rising waters.

This flood of Biblical proportions inspired William Faulkner’s classic novella The Old Man, which is the story of a convict conscripted to rescue a pregnant woman trapped by the raging river. I read that novella when I was in my mid-twenties. As with most of Faulkner’s work, I found the prose to be complex and difficult, but I also found the storyline compelling. As a young man dreaming of being a writer, I was inspired to create what I hoped might be a more accessible story of my own, which I titled “The Levee.” I never tried to get the story published. But, as every writer knows, you never throw anything away. So, I set the piece atop the pile of the other unpublished stories I’d written and moved on.

 In my mid-forties, still unpublished, I resurrected and reworked “The Levee” for a creative writing class I’d enrolled in at the University of Minnesota. Across the twenty intervening years, the heart of the piece had haunted me. I continued to be intrigued by the idea of an adventure story that probed deeper themes. The class and the instructor quite liked what I’d written, but the general consensus was that there was still a larger tale to be told. Again, I set the story aside.

In the long period of self-isolation that followed the descent of the pandemic in 2020, I entered one of the most productive periods of my life as a writer. I completed two novel-length manuscripts for my publisher, Atria Books, and drafted a couple of novellas. But I was still eager for more. So I reached into my vault of old, unpublished stories and pulled out “The Levee.”

Rather than merely rework that earlier attempt, I completely rethought the story. Maybe because I’ve been telling tales for a living for nearly a quarter of a century now, this new piece just seemed to flow from my imagination. For me, it became a story of the conundrum of both man and the natural world, the idea that each can behave in surprising ways and yet those surprises are predictably a part of the nature of each.

 When I announced the release of the novella, I got a lot of pushback from readers who insisted that they never listen to audiobooks. Holding a real book in their hands was the only way they wanted to access literature. If that’s the way the feel, it’s perfectly fine. But I’ve tried to point out to them that for countless millennia, long before the advent of written language and before the printing press made books accessible to the masses, storytelling was an oral tradition, and the storytellers were celebrated. Good stories are meant to fall trippingly off the tongue. I don’t know about other writers, but I always read my work out loud, both as I’m writing it and as I’m revising. I find that I can hear the clunk, the redundancies, the unnecessary words, the cadences that don’t quite work. It’s important to me to hear the flow of the story.

I’ve become a huge fan of audiobooks myself. Because I make a lot of speaking appearances across the country and because I’m not fond of flying, I drive thousands of miles every year. Just before I depart, I download audiobooks for the trip. Oh, my god, do the miles fly by when I’m listening to a good story read by a compelling narrator.

The question I’ve been asked most frequently is whether there will be a print version. I don’t know the answer. There aren’t a lot of platforms for a novella-length piece these days. Magazines such as Life that, in the old days, regularly published longer fiction, don’t exist anymore. And most publishers don’t consider a novella to be a viable length for print publication, unless it’s a part of a larger collection of work.

So, for the moment, The Levee is just available as an audiobook. Will this experiment succeed? In my own mind, it already has. I feel that I’ve grown as a writer, as an artist. So who knows? Maybe there will be more novellas down the road.

If you’d like to listen to an excerpt of the audiobook, here’s the link. 

DEBS: Let me just say that The Levee is absolutely gripping and if you're new to audio, this novella is a great place to start. It's available on many platforms--you don't have to have a subscription to listen.

Here's more about The Levee:

An audio original novella from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land, The Levee is a powerful, captivating story of a family, a storm, a complicated rescue, and the true cost of survival.

It’s 1927, and the most devastating flood in American history has swelled the Mississippi River to a width of eighty miles. In an attempt to save a family trapped by the rising water, four men in a tiny rowboat battle the treacherous flow: three are convicts, on loan from the local prison and pressed into service; the fourth, the leader of the team, is driven by his own hidden motives. But to their surprise upon arrival at Ballymore, an ancestral home protected by a high, circular levee, not everyone in the family feels the need to be saved. Pride, greed, loyalty, and even love create their own complex currents behind the massive wall. As the threat from the flood increases and time ticks away, the crew and the family must decide on a course of action, and a desperate plan is hatched to save the weakening levee and all it was built to protect.

The Levee is a propulsive, heartfelt tale of courage, cowardice, and sacrifice in a historic moment when the indomitable human spirit is pitted against the awesome and destructive power of nature.

And here's more about Kent (who is, I have to add, one of the nicest people in the mystery writing business, and I'm so tickled to have him on the blog!):

Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Krueger briefly attended Stanford University—before being kicked out for radical activities. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He’s been married for nearly fifty years to a marvelous woman who is a retired attorney. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.

Krueger writes a mystery series set in the north woods of Minnesota. His protagonist is Cork O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe. His work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers.

Ordinary Grace, his stand-alone novel published in 2013, received the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition for the best novel published in that year. The companion novel, This Tender Land, was published in September 2019 and spent nearly six months on the New York Times bestseller list.

DEBS: How about it, dear readers? Are you willing to give something new a try? Pretend you're sitting around then campfire... Then pop back in and visit with Kent, who will be here to chat!