Danielle Sosin

I began writing fiction in the late 1980s, through classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Since then, writing has been central to my life. I have made a living at part-time work in order to keep writing time intact. Jobs in food service, and working as a gardener have been my main support.

In 2000, I published a collection of short stories, Garden Primitives, with Coffee House Press. The stories in the collection span nearly a decade. I am a slow and deliberate writer, not one of those who is filled with a million ideas and not enough time to get them on paper. The blank page has always been daunting. In time, though, something would happen to induce a work.

Unexpectedly, during my day, I’d come across a loaded image. A turtle track in the sand on a beach in Mexico (“Submersion”), a single farm facing a huge housing development (“Ice Age”). Or some challenge of structure would interest me-write a story of mostly dialogue where the people conversing are not connecting (“There Are No Green Butterflies”), write a story whose two parts converge into a single last line (“Internal Medicine”).

Regardless of how the stories were conceived or executed, I found that the magic, as well as the challenge of short fiction, stemmed from the same source: brevity. Every element of a story needed to do its part to keep the whole revolving tightly around its center. When it worked, the feeling was undeniable as everything moved toward a singularity of effect that reverberated beyond the story's end. What occurred was not an act of simplification; it was more like light passing through a prism.

After the publication of Garden Primitives, I found myself obsessed with an idea that was too large to succeed (I tried) as a short story. I wanted to write about Lake Superior, to discover what it was about that enormous body of water that so moved and haunted me. The thought of writing a novel was intriguing. A huge challenge, but one I wanted to take on. I also saw it as a way to escape the blank page between stories. The result, eight years later, was The Long-Shining Waters.

The first year and a half of my new endeavor was spent solely on research at libraries and the Minnesota Historical Society. My far-ranging topics included: the lake’s geological formation, the Ojibwe who have lived there for hundreds of years, the Native copper miners who date back nearly 10,0000 years, the fur trade, the copper booms of the Keweenaw and Isle Royale, the lumber industry that felled the vast white pine forests, the rise and fall of the fishing industry, and the iron ore mines of the north and south shores. I read about the lake’s weather, its shipwrecks, and lighthouses and I listened to hours of oral histories taken from immigrants and their descendents, as well as conducted interviews myself.

The process was both exhilarating and confounding. It was like gathering reels of footage without any knowledge of how, or if, the pieces would fit together.

With a jammed 3-ring notebook and a handful of characters, I moved from Minneapolis to Duluth. My aim was to simplify access to local archives, museums, and people, and to create a new and uncluttered space to write. Most importantly, I wanted to immerse myself in place. I wanted the lake out my window. I moved into a school converted into living space for artists. My efficiency was a classroom, a chalkboard down one wall, and four ten-foot windows facing the lake.

The challenges I faced with a novel were markedly different than those of a short story—How to work in arcs of hundreds of pages; how to sustain tension through those extended arcs; how to keep one’s bearings psychologically; how to spin multiple plates at varying speeds; how to make the book's story lines not only balance, but harmonize, and through juxtaposition create tones of their own; how to successfully bring a long piece to conclusion. Some weeks I found these challenges exciting, others, completely stupefying. “Trust the process it’s bigger than you,” I wrote across the top of the chalkboard. And later, in the years of revision once the whole was created, my favorite, Annie Dillard’s “What are you a woman or a mouse?”

So now I’m on to my next project: a novel, still elusive. And the process begins all over again.

Many thanks for your interest. I hope you enjoy these books. If you need more information or have questions there are links available to you on the contact page.