The Writer with Swag

David Treuer is not your average writer.

His first novel, Little—originally one of his senior theses at Princeton University—earned a 1996 Minnesota Book Award four years later and praise from Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison. He was declared to have “truly an original voice” by the San Francisco Chronicle following the publication of his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. He has received praise from Morrison and Edmund White for his newest novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles: A Love Story, available this month from Graywolf Press. He also has swag: cool black T-shirts and tanks silk-screened with an image from the cover of Dr Apelles. “I wanted tour T-shirts like a rock star has!” says the thirty-five-year-old Treuer.

Treuer grew up around writers—his father is Robert Treuer, and Gary Paulsen is the father of his best childhood friend—so, he says, “Writing was within the realm of possibility, but I never really wanted to do it.” Instead, he did what his other tribe mates on the Leech Lake Reservation did—hunted, fished, set rabbit snares. But there were things he and his older brother did that even their mother’s Ojibwe family didn’t do. “I’d come home from school, check my rabbit snares, then try and practice the piano when my fingers were really stiff from the cold,” recalls Treuer. He also remembers making maple syrup, with his dad stirring a huge pot of boiling sap and reciting the witches’ speech from Macbeth. “I knew we were weird, you know, different from everyone else,” says Treuer, “but I didn’t feel different or separate.”

Shortly after graduating from high school, he studied the Ojibwe language on his own and began working to develop a curriculum for teaching the language. As a Princeton undergraduate, he had his sights set on being an Olympic fencer and had no idea who Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and Toni Morrison were, much less that they were on the school’s faculty. But growing frustration with fencing and a bet with a friend resulted in Treuer, an anthropology major, applying to and getting accepted by Princeton’s creative writing program. “I immediately fell in love with writing,” he says, “and I wanted to become really good, and quickly.”

Of his four books (Graywolf is also publishing Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, an exploration of contemporary Native writers), Treuer feels most satisfied with Dr Apelles, which juxtaposes the sweet fairy tale of Bimaadiz and Eta with the gloomy real life of Dr. Apelles (uh-PEL-ess), a translator of Native American language who embarks on a search for love. “For the first time in a long time, when I was writing Apelles I felt the giddiness of invention,” says Treuer, who also teaches literature at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. “I feel like I was finally able to write a book on all the levels and with all the speeds and exuberance and precision that I’m capable of.” It’s also a book that encourages the reader to savor the beauty and clarity of the writing.

“I’m addicted to writing,” says Treuer when asked about his next project. The morning after he turned in the corrected galleys for Dr Apelles, he sat down and began, as he always does, scribbling the rough draft of his next book in a brand-new spiral-bound notebook.

University of Minnesota Bookstore, Coffman Memorial Union
300 Washington, Ave. SE, Mpls., 612-625-6564, davidtreur.com