The University of Bender, Grand Forks Herald
Posted 7/29/10 (Thu)
By: Paulette Tobin, Grand Forks Herald
Every writer has his process and every book has a history. For “The Last Ghost Dancer,” a new novel by North Dakota author Tony Bender, that history began 10 years ago, when Bender started writing his first, tremendously ambitious novel.
“Someone once said about first novels that you should write them and put them in a box on the closet shelf and never look at them again,” Bender said. “And I can definitely see why many first novels are like that.”
Even then, Bender said, he knew in his heart his book was about 85 percent to 95 percent of what he wanted it to be. In his naïveté, he thought the publisher would assign him an editor who would fix everything, he said.
“But that’s not the way it works,” Bender said. “It’s a simple book to read but there are a lot of levels, and only I could fix it. It took seven rewrites and edits to get it where I wanted it to be.”
This isn’t Bender’s first book, nor is it his first published novel, even though it was the first he’d written. His first novel was “If Every Month Were June.” He’s also published three books of his award-winning newspaper column: “Loons in the Kitchen,” “The Great and Mighty Da-Da” and “Prairie Beat.”
Bender and his wife, Julie, affectionately referred as “The Redhead” in his column, own and publish two newspapers in south central North Dakota’s McIntosh County, The Ashley Tribune and The Wishek Star.
They live out in the country, just three miles from tiny Venturia, N.D., which they can see from their deck. Venturia used to be a bustling little town on the railroad, but today there’s just a few houses, a Baptist church, and the Duck Inn Bar, where the motto is, “Duck in and waddle out.” The Benders have two children, Dylan, 13, and India, 9.
Bender is well-known in North Dakota newspaper circles. He’s a former president of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, and has won two first-place awards for humor writing from the National Newspaper Association. In 1999, Bender won the first-ever NDNA First Amendment Award.
Small-town setting
Bender, 51, was born in Ashley, N.D., but spent most of his formative years in Frederick, S.D., a town of about 400 on U.S. Highway 281 just south of the state line.
“That was really an amazing place to grow up,” he said. “There were a lot of characters on Main Street. I have always said I had kind of a Tom Sawyer existence growing up there. We had a river we swam and fished in. We did all the things kids do, like baseball. Even as a kid, I really appreciated that town and the people in it.”
“The Last Ghost Dancer” is set in a small town, albeit in the western part of the state, but Bender said, in his mind, it’s Frederick. The West River part of it comes from the years he spent as editor of the Adams County Record in Hettinger, N.D., a place that became home to him, too.
A book about the endurance and loyalty of friendships, “The Last Ghost Dancer” is often described as a coming-of-age story. Its setting is a place called Pale Butte, which originally was a nod to White Butte, the highest spot in North Dakota, Bender wrote in the preface of “The Last Ghost Dancer.”
“The characters in this book belong to Pale Butte alone,” Bender wrote. “Now and again they may echo the best qualities of those I have held in my heart or wispy reflections of incidents and events from long ago, but that is all they are — echoes and reflections.”
Joe Big Cloud
One of the pivotal characters is Joe Big Cloud, a Lakota medicine man with a mysterious gift and a mysterious past. The narrator is Bones, a wry, funny, observer of life, a mechanic in Pale Butte’s only gas station, often remembered for the day he dropped a Ford Edsel off the hoist. He’s also a dreamer of apocalyptic dreams, remembering the miracles and spiritual discovery that marked the summer of 1977.
Bender said he always wanted to be a writer, but first he was a radio disc jockey, and then a newspaper reporter and editor.
“I did travel around, I wanted to that before I started a family,” Bender said, “because if you’re a disc jockey, you get fired about every half hour.”
After graduating from high school in 1972, he attended South Dakota State University for a year to study broadcasting. After that, he got a part-time radio job at KKAA in Aberdeen, S.D., and decided that was what he really wanted to do.
“I just really wanted to be a professional smart aleck. And once I realized I could do that without four years of college — not that I’m recommending that path — I have to keep telling my kids that, too — but I’ve always really been self taught in everything,” he said, “whether it’s writing and journalism or anything like that.”
Bender’s radio career took him from Aberdeen to Jamestown, N.D., to Denver. In 1986 he moved to Juneau, Alaska, for three years, and then to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he lived “just long enough to enjoy Hurricane Hugo,” he said.
University of Bender
In 1990, he returned to North Dakota and worked for about a year at Y93 in Bismarck.
“At that point, I was just done. I was just tired of radio,” he said. “I took a three-month sabbatical and hung out with Grandpa Spilloway in Gackle, N.D. My grandma had just died. I realized I wasn’t going to have a lot of years with him. I think we kind of needed each other then.”
And he started writing, which made him realize how woefully rusty and terrible he was, he said. But he did convince Connie Groop, editor of the Brown County News in Frederick, to publish his column.
“The idea was that I am kind of a slacker at heart,” he said. “If I was, I was going to get paid for it. Plus, the idea was just to force myself to write in a creative vein to polish my skills with the goal to be that I would write some books. So it was my own college — University of Bender.”
And what did he learn at University of Bender?
“If I really revealed something I was almost embarrassed to print, I learned to go ahead and print it anyway,” he said. “I discovered most people share these feelings but don’t really know how to express them. So I think they appreciate when they find someone who does. You don’t even know where the edge is unless you go over, and I’ve gone over more than once.”
Even when you go too far, he said, readers will welcome you back to see you pick yourself up and see where you’re going next.
'Perfect place'
Bender said his columns never really became political until after the 9/11 terrorist attack. He began to see a lot of things “going the wrong way” in America after that, he said, and began writing about it.
“I just felt if I didn’t express it, I would regret it or just explode,” he said. “That hurt me because now I was a ‘liberal’ columnist.”
Bender said he’s since decided his strength lies in being funny. He was a big fan of the late, longtime North Dakota syndicated columnist and feature writer Wayne Lubenow. Bender said he realized if he wanted to be political, he needed to be political AND entertaining.
Bender’s column for the Frederick newspaper led him to a brief stint as the police reporter at the Williston Herald. Then he was offered the editor’s job at the Hettinger newspaper.
“The place was losing money and going into receivership, so I thought, ‘This is the perfect place for me,’” Bender said. “I thought I could catch a break there. We won a couple of general excellence awards and when the new company came in, they made me their newest director. That was really a great break for me because it got me into management and kept me writing.”
Bender said he found he was good at managing a newspaper and not afraid of controversy.
“I ran just a very sassy newspaper,” he said. “I didn’t really know everything I needed to know, but I lived alone and I didn’t have a drinking problem. So, I had a lot of time to work. And I worked very hard.”
He and Julie bought the Ashley and Wishek newspaper (owned by Redhead Publishing) in 1998. Both towns have populations of less than 1,000 people.
“It’s always a challenge (for the newspapers) because you don’t have the retail businesses that historically advertised more, so you have to fight a little harder for the income. It’s just always an economic challenge to keep things going,” Bender said.
Bender said he feels good when his newspapers contribute to growth in the community or help steer the community in the right direction.
“The communities that invest — those are the communities that will do well,” he said. “In Wishek and Ashley, I see enough community leaders with that vision. I think we have a chance. Things larger than ourselves will dictate who will survive. But again those communities that are prepared, those are the communities that will have the best chance. I like to think we’ve contributed to the dialogue and the progress. There are times when I look back and think we weren’t as aggressive on an issue. I think we should have or could have done a better job, But I think I’ll probably always think that on anything we do.”
Some advice: Don’t be afraid
That’s his life as an editor and publisher. In his life as an author, he’s writing more books and working on screenplays — which brings him back to “The Last Ghost Dancer,” and how it came to be.
After the book was rejected, Bender said, he eventually began considering what he should do next.
“I talked to a really good writer friend of mine about this book and he said, ‘Don’t change too much. Be true to the writer you were at this time.’ I thought that was really good. And then I also took something from Mark Twain, who said, ‘Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.’ And I was a serial killer by the end I finished re-writing.”
Seven edits of a book
“I would never write this book the same way, but I love the way it turned out,” he said.
Reach Tobin at (701) 780-1134; (800) 477-6572, ext. 134; or send e-mail to ptobin@gfherald.com.
