November 10, 2025
Schneiderman leads 2025 Lake Forest Reads conversation with author
Davis Schneiderman (left) interviews bestselling novelist William Kent Krueger. | Submitted photo
Executive Director of the Krebs Center for the Humanities and Professor of English Davis Schneiderman guided a lively, wide-ranging conversation with bestselling novelist William Kent Krueger at this year’s Lake Forest Reads community event, which drew strong attendance to the Gorton Center for the program’s first-ever daytime weekend gathering.
Readers filled the John & Nancy Hughes Theater November 2 to hear Krueger, author of The River We Remember and the popular Cork O’Connor mystery series, discuss his craft, his characters, and the enduring themes that shape his work. Comparing Krueger’s new novel to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Schneiderman described The River We Remember as “a mystery of who gets to remember, whose stories are told, and what’s at stake in these questions.”
Set in 1950s rural Minnesota, the book begins with the discovery of a body in the Alabaster River and unfolds into a meditation on memory, justice, and the scars of war. Krueger opened the afternoon with a tribute to libraries, recalling a Boy Scout reading badge that first connected him to literature: “Our libraries are the archives of our culture…when our libraries are gone—and our librarians along with them—there goes everything we are as a people.”
During their conversation, Krueger distinguished his mystery series from his standalone novels: “A mystery is an intellectual construct—its success depends on the timing of the reveals,” he said. “But Ordinary Grace, This Tender Land, and The River We Remember came from my heart. I allowed the story to reveal itself as I wrote.”
“A mystery is an intellectual construct—its success depends on the timing of the reveals.” —William Kent Krueger
He credited Minnesota as both muse and moral landscape. “If I can ground the reader profoundly in place, it’s easier to understand everything else,” he said, calling his novels “valentines to the Upper Midwest.” On the book’s title, Krueger explained, “We all remember a different river—the currents of our lives shape what we recall.”
Schneiderman pressed Krueger on the story’s moral and historical depth, from Sheriff Brody Dern’s decision to conceal evidence to the town’s prejudice against Dakota veteran Noah Bluestone and his Japanese wife, Kyoko. Krueger linked these conflicts to his own family history and postwar America: “I’ve wondered all my life—when you come back from that kind of wounding, how do you heal? If our brokenness is embraced, you can move forward—even if the tenderness of the wound remains.”
The event marked another successful collaboration among Lake Forest College, Lake Forest Library, The Gorton Center, Lake Forest Open Lands, Lake Forest Book Store, and Dickinson Hall, with sponsorship from the Friends of Lake Forest Library.
“We are so fortunate and honored to have someone of Dr. Schneiderman’s caliber moderate these conversations with notable authors for the past several years,” said Lake Forest Library Executive Director Ishwar Laxminarayan.
Since 2012, Lake Forest Reads has united the community each year around a single book and author. Past guests have included Luis Urrea, Rebecca Makkai, Ruth Ozeki, Jean Kwok, Jamie Ford, Marie Benedict, Diane Wilson, and Shelby Van Pelt. With its high turnout and engaging dialogue, this year’s program affirmed the power of conversation, community, and the written word to keep Lake Forest’s literary spirit thriving.
About the Krebs Center: The Krebs Center for the Humanities, housed in an Italianate villa on the Lake Forest College campus, fosters creativity, critical thinking, and empathy through interdisciplinary engagement with literature, philosophy, history, and the arts. The Center underscores the College’s commitment to preparing students to meet an ever-evolving future where humanistic inquiry remains central.