[In the following excerpt, based on a conversation with King, Weaver provides a general overview of King's career.]

The first thing one notices upon entering Thomas King's home—a rambling, three-story Victorian near the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, where its owner chairs the Native American studies department—is a large taxidermied coyote. The coyote is perched on a table, and seems to be howling at the ceiling.

"I don't like stuffed animals, and I would never have one," explains King, "except that a magazine in Canada flew me up to Montreal for a photo shoot. I spent eight hours in the studio with this coyote, and got attached to her." He bought it, and brought the animal home as carry-on luggage. The coyote now dominates a house filled with Native American art, at home with an author who has written often about its mythic counterpart.

Coyote, the best-known of traditional Indian trickster figures, has figured prominently in several King stories and does so again in his second novel, Green Grass, Running Water, just out from Houghton Mifflin.

With Green Grass, King emerges as a sort of Native American Kurt Vonnegut, addressing contemporary Native American life with a wild and comic imagination. The title refers to old treaties between the U.S. government and the native nations which often promised land to the Indians "as long as the grass is green and the water runs." King skillfully blends various Native, Judeo-Christian and literary stories in such a way as to expose both the truth and the falsity in each. The book's intricate plot revolves around four mysterious, very old (perhaps ageless) Indians (whimsically named Hawkeye, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe and the Lone Ranger) who periodically escape from a mental institution to "fix things" in the outside world. This time they are determined to avert an environmental disaster about to take place in Canada. During their picaresque adventure they become involved with some off-beat modern Natives, who variously help and hinder the fugitives' attempt to restore nature's balance.

The desire for harmony, in fact, runs through much of King's work. "Within Native communities, there's a desire to maintain a balance, to make things right if they're wrong—not to make everything good, but to maintain a balance," he declares. "The old Indians [in my book] recognize that they haven't taken such good care of the world. Things went wrong—as things will. It's like having too many people on a teeter-totter and never having the right balance. You try for it, and the important thing is that attempt."

For someone who professes to be a "savage introvert" and would prefer to retreat to his house "and just write," King talks expansively enough about his work, punctuating his conversation with a booming laugh. His words flow easily, reflecting his career as a university professor and challenging stereotypes about Indian taciturnity.

King challenges stereotypes in other ways, too. For one thing, he makes a point of defining himself as of Cherokee, Greek and German descent. "I don't want people to get the mistaken idea that I am an 'authentic Indian,' or that they're getting the kind of Indian that they'd like to have," he states, observing that what they'd like is instead "some 19th-century Native on a pinto pony in a teepee." He continues, "I didn't grow a mustache until I was 35 or 36 years old. And some friends said, 'Tom, look, you gotta get rid of the mustache. You're in the Indian business. You can't go around with a mustache.' And I thought, maybe I shouldn't wear a suit; maybe I should wear a loincloth, while I'm at it. Those are some of the misconceptions I like to play around with."

King's father, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, deserted the family when King was about five, leaving King and his brother to be raised by their mother in a small town in central California. Although they made "a couple of trips back to Oklahoma to visit relatives" when they were small, the boys were, King acknowledges, "for the most part raised outside of Cherokee culture." Today, he claims he probably knows as much about Blackfoot culture, the milieu of Green Grass and his previous novel, Medicine River, as he does about the Cherokees.

Yet gaps in knowledge may have proved an asset, allowing King greater freedom in writing about Native American themes. "In some ways, I'm this Native writer who's out there in the middle, not of nowhere, but I don't have strong tribal affiliations. My responsibilities are to the story and to the people from whom I get some of the stories. Other than that, I feel rather free to ask some of the really nasty questions that other writers may not want to ask or may not be in a position to ask." He continues, "One of the questions that's important to ask is, 'Who is an Indian? How do we get this idea of Indianness?'"

King in fact portrays Natives in varied circumstances and walks of life. For instance, Lionel Red Dog, the rather lazy protagonist of Green Grass sells TVs and electronic equipment. "There are people who think this is a lousy job for an Indian," says King. "His Auntie Norma doesn't think much of it. His Uncle Eli thinks it's okay as long as you have a job. Eli's a university professor. I wanted to make sure these people had what society thinks of as legitimate jobs, so that they would not be dismissed out of hand. And I didn't want to make them shamans on the reserves, so that people would say, 'Oh yeah, wow, truths are going to come out of the mouth of this particular character.'"

Green Grass, like King's other work, is steeped in Native oral tradition—the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah. And the novelist still loves to sit and listen to traditional storytellers, whose skill amazes him. "They're going down the line at 150 miles an hour—and make a right turn! You're following close behind them, and you just run right off the road." Their narrative style influenced King to think of his novels as "oral pieces. It's a good trick to learn. I think a lot of novelists believe that there are places they can rest, where they can take time out from telling the story for a while and cruise. But that's deadly. If you let a reader start to cruise, you lose the reader."

Naturally enough, King's interest in oral narrative also leads to a reliance on dialogue in his fiction. "I like to hear my characters talking. I like to hear their voices. Although I greatly admire writers like N. Scott Momaday, who can go for pages and never have anyone say anything, I'd go nuts if I couldn't hear my characters speak."…

King has also edited an anthology of short fiction by Canadian Native writers, All My Relations. Originally published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 1990, it was picked up by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1992 as part of a series edited by King's friend and fellow Native author, Gerald Vizenor, whom King cites as a major influence. He also published a children's book, A Coyote Columbus Story, with Groundwood [in] 1992.

Short stories "fall by the wayside" whenever King is working on a novel, when he becomes, by his own admission, "monomaniacal." Focused dedication was necessary for Green Grass, whose plot is so convoluted and involved that King had to draw flowcharts to keep it straight. "It almost killed me," he says, and claims that he's not anxious to do it again. He assesses Green Grass as "probably the most complex and difficult novel I'll ever write."

He is already three chapters into his next book and, although reluctant to talk about it, acknowledges that it will be a comic novel, but perhaps "less comic" than the others. He also discloses that he is departing from the Blackfoot reserve setting. "I'm trying to move away from a culturally specific area completely. The Indians in [the next book] aren't identified by tribe, for instance, and as a matter of fact, they're not even much identified by geographic area." The novel takes place in two towns on either side of the U.S.—Canadian border, divided by a river. "People are going to guess where it is, and their guesses will probably be pretty accurate. But I'm trying to keep the tribal names out of it, if I can. I want to figure out a way to write a more pan-Indian novel."

King's other current projects include screenplays, which allow him to exercise his ear for dialogue. He wrote the script for the TV movie of Medicine River, starring the Native actor Graham Greene; filmed in Canada, it will air this spring. He even played a small part in it, that of an over-the-hill basketball player (at 6′6″ he is well qualified). He is also adapting his short stories for the screen.

In spite of his growing prominence, King is still a bit dumbstruck by all the attention. He professes to be amazed that anyone would want to interview him, and wonders why, ultimately, the dominant culture is paying much attention to him. "I really don't care about the white audience," he says. "They don't have an understanding of the intricacies of Native life, and I don't think they're much interested in it, quite frankly." With Green Grass, Thomas King is likely to attract them regardless, and in the process, to interest and educate an impressive number of readers.