Louise Erdrich, Interviewed
by Lisa Halliday
The Art of Fiction No. 208
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Only one passenger train per day makes the
Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo,
North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has
written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two
strangers.” Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, but we met in the Fargo Econo Lodge
parking lot. From there, with Erdrich’s eight-year-old daughter, Kiizh, we
drove five hours up to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, on the
Manitoba border. Every August, when tick season has subsided, Erdrich and her
sister Heid spend a week in a former monastery here to attend the Little Shell
Powwow and to conduct a writing workshop at the Turtle Mountain Community
College. One afternoon, participants took turns reciting poetry under a
basswood tree beside the single-room house where Erdrich’s mother grew up.
Another day, they ate homemade enchiladas and sang “Desperado” and “Me and
Bobby McGee,” accompanied by a fellow workshopper on the guitar. In class, the
writing is personal, the criticism charitable. It helps that Erdrich does the
exercises, too—reading out the results in her mellifluous, often mischievous
voice. In tidy fulfillment of an assignment entitled “very short fiction,” she
wrote, “You went out for the afternoon and came back with your dress on inside
out.”
Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954,
in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first of seven children raised in Wahpeton,
North Dakota, by a German American father and a mother who is half French, half
Ojibwe—Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, being one of six Native American tribes
comprised by the Anishinaabe (“Original People”). Both of Erdrich’s parents
taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. For many years, her
grandfather Patrick Gourneau was the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair.
Erdrich was in the first coed class to
attend Dartmouth, where she studied English and met her eventual husband,
Michael Dorris, another writer and the founder of the college’s new Native
American Studies program. Shortly after receiving an M.F.A. in creative writing
from Johns Hopkins, Erdrich wrote “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” a story
about the hypothermia death of June Kashpaw, an Ojibwe divorcée whose funeral
summons relatives home to a fictional North Dakota Indian reservation.
“Fishermen” won the Nelson Algren short-fiction prize and became the first
chapter of Love Medicine, Erdrich’s
debut novel and winner of a 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. Since
then, she has written twelve more novels (including The
Crown of Columbus, coauthored by Dorris), three books of poetry,
three books of nonfiction, dozens of short stories, and five children’s books.
Four of these books she illustrated herself. With Dorris, who was also her
first literary agent, she raised three adopted and three biological children
before the couple separated in 1995; two years later, Dorris committed suicide.
Erdrich returned to Dartmouth in June of
2009 to receive an honorary doctorate of letters and deliver the main
commencement address; the same year, her novel The
Plague of Doves, which centers on the lynching of four Indians
wrongly accused of murdering a white family (and which Philip Roth has called
“her dazzling masterpiece”), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After
invariably classifying Erdrich as a Native American writer, many reviewers
proceed to compare her work to that of William Faulkner or Gabriel García
Márquez: Faulkner for her tangled family trees, her ventriloquist skill, and
her expansive use of a fictional province no less fully imagined than
Yoknapatawpha County; García Márquez for her flirtations with magical realism.
But so strange are Erdrich’s narrative rhythms, and so bonded is her language
to its subject matter, that it seems just as accurate to call hers a genre of
one.
When the workshop was over, Erdrich drove
us back to Fargo for walleye cakes at the Hotel Donaldson, and then to visit
her parents, who still live in the modest house in Wahpeton where Erdrich grew
up. The next day, while Erdrich attended a wedding in Flandreau, South Dakota,
her sister took me the remaining two hundred miles to Minneapolis, where, three
days later, Erdrich and I reconvened at her bookstore and Native American arts
shop, Birchbark Books. Here, Erdrich’s eldest daughter, Persia, decides which
children’s books to stock. Taped to most of the shelves are detailed
recommendations handwritten by Erdrich herself. An upside-down canoe hangs from
the ceiling, suspended between a birch-bark reading loft and a Roman Catholic
confessional decorated with sweetgrass rosaries. We linger at the store, but
not until we make the long walk to Erdrich’s house do we finally sit down on
the back porch and turn the tape recorder on.
Erdrich was wearing her driving clothes:
jeans, sandals, and an untucked button-down shirt. A Belgian shepherd named
Maki dozed at our feet, and Erdrich’s youngest daughter came out a couple of
times—once to ask whether we wanted Play-Doh ice-cream cones, later to report
that a Mr. Sparky was on the phone. Then a neighboring buzz saw started up, and
we moved inside: up to a small attic room pleasantly cluttered with photographs,
artifacts, and many more Catholic and Ojibwe totems, including moccasins,
shells, bells, dice, bitterroot, a bone breastplate, an abalone shell for
burning sage, a turtle stool, a Huichol mask with a scorpion across its mouth
and a double-headed eagle on its brow, and a small army of Virgin statuettes.
Crowded into a bookshelf beside a worn armchair in the center of the room are
the hardbound spiral notebooks in which, in a deeply slanted longhand, Erdrich
still writes most of her books—sitting in the chair with a wooden board laid
across its arms as a desk.
INTERVIEWER
In The Beet Queen, Dot Adare’s
first-grade teacher puts Dot into the “naughty box.” Was there a naughty box in
your own childhood?
LOUISE ERDRICH
Do I have to talk about this? It is a
primal wound. Yes, I was put into the naughty box.
INTERVIEWER
What had you done?
ERDRICH
Nothing. I was a model child. It was the
teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names
of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith,
I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many
humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have
never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except
through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
INTERVIEWER
Was your teacher anything like the one in
your story “Sister Godzilla”?
ERDRICH
No, but I had Franciscan Sisters for
teachers later. Some were celestial, others were disturbed. My sixth-grade
teacher, Sister Dominica, hit home runs at recess and I loved her, but there
was no exact Sister Godzilla. As for Miss Smith, I still have her photograph.
She had cat’s-eye glasses, a blond bouffant do, and wore a chiffon scarf tied
at the tip of her chin. I’d been reading for a while before Miss Smith, but I’d
never thought about how there’s a presence inside of words. The Ojibwe say that
each word has a spirit. Miss Smith drew eyelashes on the o’s
in look, and irises in the middle of the o’s,
and suddenly look contained the act of looking. I had a
flash of pure joy.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true your father paid you a nickel
for every story you wrote as a child?
ERDRICH
Yes, he did, and he’s sick of hearing
about it. It’s also true that, about a year ago, he gave me a roll of antique
nickels and said, I owe you.
INTERVIEWER
What were the stories about?
ERDRICH
Lonely girls with hidden talents. At a
family white-elephant sale we auctioned off one of my early stories for eight
bucks—someone else got it. I’ve been trying to buy it back.
My father is my biggest literary influence.
Recently I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard
when I was a child and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters
to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my
mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures.
INTERVIEWER
What are they about?
ERDRICH
Mushroom hunting. Roman Stoics. American
Indian Movement politics. Longfellow. Stamp collecting. Apples. He and my
mother have an orchard. He used to talk about how close together meadowlarks sit
on fence posts—every seventh fence post. Now, of course, they are rare. When I
went off to college, he wrote about the family, but in highly inflated terms,
so that whatever my sisters and brothers were doing seemed outrageously funny
or tragic. If my mother bought something it would be a cumbersome, dramatic
addition to the household, but of course unnecessary. If the dog got into the
neighbor’s garbage it would be a saga of canine effort and exertion—and if the
police caught the dog it would be a case of grand injustice.
INTERVIEWER
How did your parents meet?
ERDRICH
My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and
she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been
discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his
teaching credentials. He is adventurous—he worked his way through Alaska at age
seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table. He
saved the money he made as a cook’s flunky and helped out his parents. After he
got his credentials, I guess he thought it would be interesting to work on a
reservation. He assumed there would actually be mountains in the Turtle
Mountains, so he brought his skis. In fact, on the way there, he looked north
and saw cloud formations on the horizon and thought they were mountains. But
when he arrived he found that the Turtle Mountains are low hills—no skiing. He
met my grandfather before he met my mother.
INTERVIEWER
Your mother’s father.
ERDRICH
Patrick Gourneau. Aunishinaubay was his
Ojibwe name. He had an eighth-grade education, but he was a fascinating
storyteller, wrote in exquisite script, and was the tribal chairman during the
treacherous fifties termination era (when the U.S. Congress decided to abrogate
all Indian treaties and declare Indian Nations nonexistent). My grandfather was
a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In
order to fight against our tribe’s termination, he went to newspapers and
politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also
supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer. My father,
himself a great talker, got to know Pat Gourneau as another interesting person
who loved to converse. Then he saw Pat’s daughter Rita and apparently she
knocked his socks off. My mother has always been the reserved beauty to his
smitten schoolteacher. I was born when she was nineteen and I’ve always loved
having a young mother—she is often mistaken for my sister.
INTERVIEWER
Did she speak Ojibwemowin when you were
growing up?
ERDRICH
My grandfather spoke the Red Lake dialect
of the language as his family had originated there, but he also spoke and wrote
an exquisite English. My mother learned words here and there, but you have to
be immersed in a language as a child to pick it up.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ERDRICH
We are wired to have a period of language
opportunity. It is harder to learn languages after the age of eight or ten. In
addition, Ojibwe is one of the most difficult languages to learn because its
verbs take on an unusual array of forms. There’s no masculine or feminine
designation to the nouns, but instead they’re qualified as animate or
inanimate. The verb form changes according to its status as animate or
inanimate as well as in regard to human relationships. The verbs go on and on.
Often when I’m trying to speak Ojibwe my brain freezes. But my daughter is
learning to speak it, and that has given me new resolve. Of course, English is
a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer.
English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty
is its vitality. Ojibwe is taught in colleges, increasingly in immersion
programs, but when my grandfather went to government boarding school he wasn’t
allowed to speak Ojibwe. Nor were Indian students in Catholic boarding schools,
where my mother went, as so many of our family were Catholic.
INTERVIEWER
Were you raised to be devout?
ERDRICH
Every Catholic is raised to be devout and
love the Gospels, but I was spoiled by the Old Testament. I was very young when
I started reading, and the Old Testament sucked me in. I was at the age of
magical thinking and believed sticks could change to serpents, a voice might
speak from a burning bush, angels wrestled with people. After I went to school
and started catechism I realized that religion was about rules. I remember
staring at a neighbor’s bridal-wreath bush. It bloomed every year but was
voiceless. No angels, no parting of the Red River. It all seemed so dull once I
realized that nothing spectacular was going to happen.
I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe
ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually
about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone
churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the
garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain
that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like to leave Wahpeton for
Dartmouth?
ERDRICH
My father, rightly, picked out a paragraph
in The Plague of Doves as a somewhat autobiographical piece
of the book. Evelina leaves for college and at their parting her parents give
her a love-filled stare that is devastating and sustaining. It
is an emotion they’ve never before been able to express without great awkwardness and pain. Now that she’s leaving, that love beams out in an intense form.
is an emotion they’ve never before been able to express without great awkwardness and pain. Now that she’s leaving, that love beams out in an intense form.
As the eldest child, I often felt that I
belonged more to my parents’ generation than to my own. In the beginning of the
book, Evelina is always scheming to watch television. My parents didn’t let us
watch much television. Dad had us cover our eyes when the commercials came on.
He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism.
Shakespeare’s history plays and The Three Stooges were major influences.
INTERVIEWER
What was Dartmouth like?
ERDRICH
For one thing, the ratio of men to women
was nine to one. And I was quite shy, so meeting people was painful. I’d be at
a party and because I was so quiet, someone would say, You’re stoned, aren’t
you, Karen? (My name was Karen then.) But I was only rarely stoned, just shy.
Recently I read a book by Charles Eastman,
one of the first Native American physicians in Dakota, about going to
Dartmouth. He described exactly how I felt: like I was being torn away. And
yet, I wanted to go, I wanted to get away. Sinclair Lewis knew about the crazed
feeling that you get when people think you’re a pleasant person. You get all
this praise for your good behavior but inside you’re seething. I was fairly
dutiful, and I felt that way. I’ve always loved that line from Flannery
O’Connor’s “Revelation”: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart
hog.” In Wahpeton I was a graveyard-shift waitress who wanted to destroy my
customers.
At Dartmouth, I was awkward and
suspicious. I was in the first year of the Native American program. I felt
comfortable with Chippewas and people from the Turtle Mountains, and I felt
comfortable with Dakotas because Wahpeton is part of the Dakota reservation
and I knew many Dakota people. It took me a while to get to know people from
other tribes. People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No. Do
the Irish immediately feel comfortable with the Chinese? I was intimidated by
the mighty Mohawks; it took me a long time to get to know my serene and
beautiful Navajo roommate. Certainly I didn’t understand the non-Indians, the
people who came from East Coast backgrounds. Until then, I had met three
African American people in my entire life. I had never met an East Indian
person, a Jew, a Baptist, a Muslim. I hadn’t left Wahpeton so I only knew a
peculiar Wahpeton mixture of people, all smashed and molded into a similar
shape by small-town life. I don’t have a thick skin, and I especially didn’t
then. I obsessed over everything people said, ran it over forever in my mind. I
still do that, but it’s better now.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to change your name to
Louise?
ERDRICH
There were so many Karens when I was born.
It was the 1954 name of the year. I think there was a Mouseketeer named Karen.
I was happier when I was called Louise. My grandfather was named Louis. I
thought it had a good, lucky sort of writerliness to it. There were lots of
Louises who were artists and writers: Louise Bogan, Louise Bourgeois, Louise
Glück. The only Karen writer I knew and liked was Karen Blixen and she changed
her name, so I did too.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a good literature student?
ERDRICH
I worked hard to catch up with people. I
didn’t know any of the writers other Dartmouth freshmen had read. I knew the
Old Testament, of course, and read indiscriminately from the local library—Leon
Uris and James Michener and Ayn Rand and Herman Wouk—but nobody at Dartmouth
was reading Marjorie Morningstar. They
were reading Joyce. Who was that? I did have some Shakespeare, because in
Wahpeton we’d bought a wonderful record player with green stamps, and my father
brought home recordings of the plays—the tragedies, of course. And I liked
James Welch, the Blackfeet writer. But otherwise, it was the Dune trilogy and
Isaac Asimov and The Prophet.
Before coming to Dartmouth, I won a
scholarship to an American Legion summer camp and was trapped with the John
Birch Society. So I had a strange, brief flirtation with the right. I voted for
Richard Nixon. But then Nixon was a hero to a lot of Native people. Despite
everything else, he was one of the first presidents to understand anything
about American Indians. He effectively ended the policy of termination and set
our Nations on the course of self-determination. That had a galvanizing effect
in Indian country. So I voted for Nixon and my boyfriend wanted to kill me and
I didn’t know why. Why was this so important? Nixon was even running against a
South Dakota boy, George McGovern. But McGovern had no understanding of treaty
rights, and I also thought I was voting in accordance with my father, because
he kept saying George this, George that, what a demagogue. Then about a year
ago, I said, Dad, I thought we were both against George in that election. And
he said, I was talking about George Wallace.
INTERVIEWER
How does your father feel about your
books?
ERDRICH
He gave me those nickels, remember? It
didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled
me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being
read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write
anyway—in secret. At a certain point, you have to not please your parents,
although for me that’s painful because I’m close to my parents and of course I
want them to be happy.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing Love
Medicine?
ERDRICH
I went back to North Dakota after college
and became a visiting poet in a program called Poets in the Schools. It was a
marvelous gig. I went all around the state in my Chevy Nova, teaching, until I
contracted hepatitis at the old Rudolf Hotel in Valley City. What did I expect
for eight dollars a night? I was in my smoking, brooding phase, and I was
mostly writing poetry. In time, the poems became more storylike—prose,
really—then the stories began to connect. Before the hepatitis I also drank,
much more than I do now, so I spent a lot of time in bars and had a number of
crazy conversations that went into Love Medicine. I also used to
go to tent revivals up in the Turtle Mountains—that experience eventually
became part of The Plague of Doves.
INTERVIEWER
A tent revival?
ERDRICH
Where the revivalists pitch a tent and you
sit under it and listen to preachers who try to convert you—bring you to Jesus
right in the tent. It’s like a traveling church. I went to hear that biblical
language. Maybe I thought at last I’d witness a miracle. I used to listen to
Jimmy Swaggart and Jack Van Impe, who are televangelists. I don’t listen to TV
preachers anymore because they lost their music and became political, but I
used to love it. The formality of Mass was gone—it was just you and some crazy,
powerful version of God. As a child, I couldn’t get up in the middle of Holy
Mass and shout, Come down on me! Come Spirit, Spirit! The closest version was a
charismatic Catholic group I joined called the God Squad—I was still a teenager
then—mainly I’d heard you could go on retreats and make out.
I started writing Love
Medicine after I
realized that narrative was invading the poetry. In the beginning, I was
trying to write a spare kind of poetry, like James Wright or Robert Creeley, I
suppose, but it was terrible. Then I started writing poems with inner rhymes
but as they became more complex they turned into narrative. I started telling
stories in the poems. But the poems I could write jumping up from my desk or
lying on the bed. Anywhere. At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write
prose, and I understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn’t
do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally,
could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to tie
myself into my chair. I tied myself in with a pack of cigarettes on one side
and coffee on the other, and when I instinctively bolted upright after a few
minutes, I’d say, Oh, shit. I’m tied down. I’ve got to keep writing.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you when you wrote Love
Medicine?
ERDRICH
I had come back to Fargo again and was
living downtown. I worked in a little office space with a great arched window
on the top floor. It was seventy bucks a month. It was heaven to have my own
quiet, beautiful office with a great window and green linoleum floors and a
little desk and a view that carried to the outskirts of Fargo. The apartment I
lived in over Frederick’s Flowers belonged to my brother and had no windows,
only a central air shaft that was gloomy and gray. That apartment also got into
the book. It was a peculiar apartment—you couldn’t stay in it all day or you’d
go nuts. It cost fifty dollars a month, so all I had to pay every month was one
hundred and twenty bucks in rent. I had a bicycle. I ate at the Dutch Maid
café. I was living well.
INTERVIEWER
What did you do for money?
ERDRICH
My best job was working for a man named
Joe Richardson who had a small-press outfit called Plains Distribution. He
managed to get funding for a fancy traveling RV stuffed with small-press
books. We distributed work by writers like Ted Kooser, Linda Hasselstrom, Mark
Vinz, Tom McGrath. In the middle of all of this I found myself at the trial of
Leonard Peltier. It was all taking place right near the sinister apartment I
lived in. I was surprised to see neighbors from Wahpeton and a lot of other people
I’d grown up with. They were passionate about the American Indian Movement.
They got me into the courtroom every day. After listening to all that was said,
I was astounded when Peltier was convicted. There was simply no evidence that
convicted him. He was convicted out of fear. We know how that goes.
At last, I ran out of money. I applied to
the Yaddo and MacDowell writers’ residencies. I got some time there, and I was
able to finish “Scales.” Then I thought I’d better write a real novel. So I
left everything else and wrote a book called Tracks. I started it at Johns
Hopkins, where I received a teaching stipend. I got a lot of encouragement
there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher, and Edmund White, whom I
adored—a man of tender intelligence, and a daring writer. I also got to study
with Richard Howard. What luck. He would set one of my poems aside and say,
“This one we’ll allow to leech away into the sands of discourse.” So some of
my poems leeched away into the sands of discourse. Then Richard looked at other
poems and responded from his sublime knowledge, but he always spoke with a
natural sort of kindness. I also met C. Michael Curtis at Johns Hopkins, but he
wouldn’t have remembered me. Later, he was the first person who accepted a
story of mine—“Saint Marie”—into a glossy magazine. That was a huge moment for
me. I still have his acceptance letter. I stared at it for hours and days.
After the story was published I got two letters. One from an outraged priest
who said I’d written nauseating phantasms of convent life. The other was from
Philip Roth. He sent me a letter out of the blue just to say that he liked the
story. I stared at his letter for a long time as well. I think I was too shy to
answer it, but I wrote the rest of the book.
INTERVIEWER
What happened with Tracks?
ERDRICH
It continued to be rejected. It was
rejected all over the place. And thank God for that—it was the kind of first
novel where the writer tries to take a high tone while loads of mysterious
things happen, and there was way too much Faulkner in there. People would find
themselves suddenly in cornfields with desperate, aching anguish over the
weight of history. I kept it though, the way people keep a car on blocks out in
the yard—for spare parts.
INTERVIEWER
The Tracks I’ve read is a short book.
ERDRICH
That’s because all of the spare parts got
used in other vehicles. And of course I rewroteTracks entirely
by 1989, but before that I had withdrawn it from consideration by publishers
and started again on Love Medicine.
INTERVIEWER
One of the characters in Love
Medicine says, “You
know Lulu Lamartine if you know life is made up of three kinds of people—those
who live it, those afraid to, those in between. My mother is the first.” Which
category is yours?
ERDRICH
I suppose I’ve always wanted to be the
first, but really I’m the last. By writing I can live in ways that I could not
survive. I’ve only had children with two fathers. Lulu’s had children by what,
eight? People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh,
Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly
from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it.
I suppose one develops a number of
personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of
control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice
going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a
trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for
the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to
return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost
effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is
simple persistence. I’ve had some stories for twenty years. I keep adding to
them word by word.
But if the trance happens, even though
it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling
that makes you think, It can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I
always need to go back and reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is
working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always
there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle,
and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you do that?
ERDRICH
When I can’t end a story, I usually find
that I’ve actually written past the ending. The trick of course is to go back
and decide where the last line hits.
INTERVIEWER
How do you keep all your characters
straight?
ERDRICH
I used to try to keep them straight in my
head, but I didn’t really care if they got messed up. It didn’t mean a lot to
me if I got them wrong. I’d like to say it was out of some sense of aesthetics,
or adherence to some tradition, but really I just didn’t care. I wanted to get
on with the story. If it weren’t for Trent Duffy, the best copy editor in New
York, everything would be inconsistent and I still wouldn’t be worried about
it. And, you know, there still are inconsistencies.
INTERVIEWER
But they’re not deliberate?
ERDRICH
You mean are they there so that English
and Native American literature scholars have something to work on? No.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to add family trees to
your books?
ERDRICH
I resisted for a long time, but then at
readings people began to come up and show me their painfully drawn out family
trees, so finally I was overcome by guilt. Delightfully, my dear Trent had kept
track of the relationships. Now people come up to me and say how grateful they
are that they don’t have to write out the family trees themselves. It never
seemed particularly important to me. In the Turtle Mountains, everybody is
related because there are only so many families. Nobody sits down and picks
apart their ancestry. Unless you want to date somebody.
INTERVIEWER
How do your books come into being? Where
do they start?
ERDRICH
I have little pieces of writing that sit
around collecting dust, or whatever they’re collecting. They are drawn to other
bits of narrative like iron filings. I hate looking for something to write
about. I try to have several things going before I end a book. Sometimes I
don’t have something immediately and I suffer for it.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ERDRICH
I feel certain that I’m never going to
write again. I’m positive that it’s over. The world seems boring. I can’t enjoy
anything. My family knows I’m moping. I’m not nice to live around, and I’m not
a stellar cook. Nothing seems right. The worst times are ending a book tour and
not having a book to return to. It’s sheer emptiness.
But I guess that’s an essential part of
this entire process: You feel your mortality and there’s nowhere to go. I walk
more, which is good. Then I start rummaging around, thinking, It’s all over, so
what’s there to lose? I go to our bookstore, and others, used bookstores, I
talk to the booksellers and look around. I go back to things I didn’t finish,
but then, if I didn’t finish it in the first place, it probably isn’t really
worth going back to. I go to a historical society and leaf through things. I’ll
take a drive in the car. Eventually something turns up. That’s where I am now.
I haven’t really engaged with the next book in the same way that I engaged with Shadow
Tag. I suppose I could go back to my eternal science-fiction novel,
though it is a failure.
INTERVIEWER
Then why do you go back to it?
ERDRICH
It’s irresistible, especially when I’m in
free fall. Maybe in a decade I’ll have finished it.
INTERVIEWER
Is it set in North Dakota?
ERDRICH
Yes. The North Dakota of the future!
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever feel like you’re writing one
long novel?
ERDRICH
All of the books will be connected
somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is
the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I
will have to try and follow along.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that you have control over the
cover designs of your books? Writers aren’t always afforded that privilege.
ERDRICH
That’s because the most clichéd Native
images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say.
On a foreign copy of Tracks there was a pair of massive breasts
with an amulet hanging between them. Often, a Southwestern landscape appears.
Or an Indian princess or two. A publisher once sent me a design for Master
Butchers Singing Clubthat was all huge loops of phallic sausages.
They were of every shape and all different textures, colors, sizes. I showed it
to my daughter and we looked at it in stunned silence, then we said, Yes! This
is a great cover! I have twenty copies left of that edition, and I’m going to
keep them. Sometimes I’ll show one to a man and ask what he thinks of it. He’ll
put it in his lap and look at it for a while and the strangest look will cross
his face. He’ll look sideways at the women in the room, and he’ll point and
say, I think I see myself in that one.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise already-published work?
ERDRICH
At every opportunity. Usually, I add
chapters that I have written too late to include in the original. Or I try to
improve the Ojibwe language used in the book. As I learn more or I consult my
teachers, I learn how much I don’t know. Ojibwe is something I’ll be a lifelong
failure at—it is my windmill. I’ve changed Love Medicine quite a lot, and I wanted to reviseThe Blue Jay’s Dance. For one
thing I wanted to take out the recipes. Don’t try the lemon-meringue pie, it
doesn’t work. I’ve received letters. I can’t wait to change Four
Souls. There are some big mistakes in that.
INTERVIEWER
Like what?
ERDRICH
I’m not saying; it is absurd and filthy—and
this is a family publication. But I also feel the ending is too
self-consciously poetic, maybe sentimental. I wouldn’t end it that way now. I
am engaged these days in rewriting The Antelope Wife substantially—I always had a feeling
it began well and got hijacked.
INTERVIEWER
Many of the books are hijacked by a child
in trouble.
ERDRICH
When I had to go on my first book
tour—those are the lowest points in my life, the times just before a book tour,
when I have to leave my children—I was sitting on a plane next to a
psychiatrist. I said to her, “I’ve just written this book and it has another
abandoned child in it. Another loveless person abandons another child in the
beginning. What is it about abandonment?” This psychiatrist, who had a deep,
scratchy voice, said, “My dear, we are all abandoned.”
Abandonment is in all the books: the
terror of having a bad mother or being a bad mother, or just a neglectful
mother; letting your child run around in a T-shirt longer than her shorts.
INTERVIEWER
Every summer you drive several hours north
to visit the Turtle Mountains, sometimes also Lake of the Woods. Why?
ERDRICH
Actually, I do this all year. These places
are home for me. And I like to travel. Driving takes hold of the left brain and
then the right brain is freed—that’s what some writer friends and I have
theorized. But I can’t always stop when I get an idea. It depends on the
road—North Dakota, no traffic. When I’m driving on a very empty stretch of road
I do write with one hand. It’s hardly legible, but still, you don’t want to
have to stop every time.
Of course, if you have a child along, then
you do have to stop. By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself
as a writer. I hate to pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a
mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more
than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Because of the demands on your time?
ERDRICH
No, and it’s not because of hormones or
pregnancies. It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting
sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a
primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you
become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to
you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things
happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about
them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches
as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for.
Having children also makes it difficult to
get out of the house. With a child you certainly can’t be a Bruce Chatwin or a
Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona.
If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them.
You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one’s
inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the
world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer.
Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand
life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most
challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked
off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were
alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead
of hard liquor.
INTERVIEWER
Were you ever in danger of becoming a
drunk?
ERDRICH
Likely, but for the gift of the Rudolf
Hotel. I got hepatitis. That saved me.
INTERVIEWER
On your journeys do you visit with members
of the reservation and hear their stories?
ERDRICH
You’d think so. That would make sense. But
I never hear stories that go into my work, although place description might.
Just germs of stories, and most of those I hear from my father. I’ve
internalized my father to such a degree that sometimes he has only to start a
few sentences and my mind races off. Same with my mother. She once told me a
story about a boy secretly playing a violin and it was only a few sentences,
but it became “Shamengwa.” Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like
magnetism. I love titles. I have lists of titles that I haven’t gotten to. Tales
of Burning Love and Shadow
Tag were there for
the longest time.
The closest thing to a complete story that
went into my work was a bank robbery. My dad’s great on bank robberies. He was
telling me a story about a woman taken hostage during a holdup. She was being
used as a hostage shield, and a deputy shot her in the hip. She became “Naked
Woman Playing Chopin.”
INTERVIEWER
Some people refer to your writing as
magical realism. Is that another pigeonhole?
ERDRICH
I have six brothers and sisters, and
nearly all of them work with Ojibwe or Dakota or other Native people. My
youngest brother, youngest sister, and brother-in-law have worked with the
Indian Health Service for a total of more than forty years. My second-oldest
brother works in northern Minnesota sorting out the environmental issues for
all of the Ojibwe Nations throughout the entire Midwest. Their experiences make
magical realism seem ho-hum. It’s too bad I can’t use their experiences
because everyone would know who they are, but believe me, my writing comes
from ordinary life.
INTERVIEWER
A man nursing a baby in The
Antelope Wife?
ERDRICH
What’s strange about that? There are
several documented cases of male lactation. It’s sometimes uncomfortable for me
to read that scene in front of mixed audiences. Men get upset. But I think it’s
a great idea. It would solve about half of the world’s problems.
INTERVIEWER
A violin washing ashore in an empty canoe
in The Plague of Doves?
ERDRICH
It made the story.
INTERVIEWER
When you’re writing and a character or situation
starts to approach the supernatural, do you think twice about writing it?
ERDRICH
I’m not aware of the supernatural in the
same way, so I can’t tell when it starts to approach. Maybe it goes back to
childhood, still spoiled by the Old Testament. Maybe it’s Catholic after all,
this conviction that there are miracles and things like violins appearing in a
canoe. To me that was possible. I love it when a story begins to write itself,
and that particular story did. The piece in The Plague of Doves where the men are taking on a surreal
journey—there’s nothing magical in the least about it. “Town Fever” is based on
a historical trip that ended up in Wahpeton. There is now a stone that
commemorates their near starvation. It fascinated me that they began right down
at the river here in what became Minneapolis, where I go every week or so. With
their ox-pulled sleighs, they traveled what is now Interstate 94. So I knew the
exact route they took, and my description was based on reality. Daniel
Johnston, who wrote the account, recorded that the party had bowel troubles and
so took “a remedy.” Then it only remained for me to look up what remedy there
was at the time, and it was laudanum. They were high on opium the whole time.
Then I read The Pursuit of Oblivion and became interested in what it is
like to be high all the time. And last week you saw me reading Methland.
You must think I’m obsessed with drugs.
INTERVIEWER
Do you discuss your books with other
writers?
ERDRICH
I talked to Gail Caldwell quite a bit about Shadow
Tag and Last
Report. She describes this wonderful state when there’s “fire in
the room.” When there’s a fire burning in the room, and it’s illuminated and
warm, you can’t stop reading. With Shadow Tag, she told me when
the fire was in the room. And she was kind when the fire went out, which a
number of times it did.
INTERVIEWER
At what point do you show a manuscript to
your editor?
ERDRICH
Terry Karten has been my editor since The
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I have no rule about
when to show her something; I trust her, and often we talk about books I’m
thinking about before I do show the work to her. She is ruthlessly honest, has
superb instincts, and is a true book person. There are probably very few
relationships like this left in the publishing world. I have also worked with
Jane Beirn all of my writing life—another person of the highest caliber. I
don’t know what I would do without her.
INTERVIEWER
What do you do when you can’t make
something work?
ERDRICH
I walk—I usually have a little pen and
some note cards with me. But one day I didn’t and I was halfway around the lake
when the words started to appear, the end of Shadow Tag. The words rained
into my mind. I looked up and saw my sister Heid’s car on the road around the lake,
and I ran over to her, flagged down her car, and said, “Give me a pencil and
paper! Quick, quick, quick! Please.” I still have the piece of paper that she
gave me taped into my notebook.
INTERVIEWER
If not with a title, how did you begin
working on what you’re working on now?
ERDRICH
That began with digging shoots and
saplings out of the foundation of my parents’ house. I was quite aware that
this was the beginning of something. Driving from Wahpeton to Minneapolis, I
started writing it in my head and I had to pull over and start writing. I
pulled over because I had my youngest child in the car.
I figured I was all washed-up when I
learned I was going to have another baby at forty-six. I thought, Oh, the hell
with it. I’m never going to get out of this. But before she was born, I had all
of this pent-up desperation and I wrote The Master Butchers Singing Club.
I’d always wanted to write that book. I wrote the first part of the book by
hand, but because I was pregnant I started writing my first draft on the
computer. My baby was getting bigger and bigger, and my arms were stretching
farther and farther to reach over her to the keyboard.
INTERVIEWER
Were you concerned that the quality of
your writing would suffer?
ERDRICH
It’s a touchstone for me to have everything
written down by hand.
INTERVIEWER
Do you transfer your writing to the
computer yourself?
ERDRICH
I don’t let anybody touch my writing.
INTERVIEWER
And do you revise at that point?
ERDRICH
I revise as I type, and I write a lot by
hand on the printouts so they feel repossessed. I have always kept notebooks—I
have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They
are my compost pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in, and after a number of years
I’ll get a handful of earth. I am working right now out of a notebook I used
when I wrote The Blue Jay’s Dance.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote in that book about moments in
which suicide was appealing.
ERDRICH
Postpartum depression, but I beat that
thought down. Certainly after Michael’s death it became clear that I wouldn’t
kill myself to save my life. At that point I realized that the main thing a
parent has to do is stay alive. It doesn’t matter how rotten you are, or if you
fail. A failed parent is better than a dead parent. A failed parent at least gives
you someone to rail against. A former army psychiatrist said something that
struck me. He said that there are people who will kill themselves no matter
what, and there are people who won’t do it no matter what. There are people who
can go through an endless level of psychological pain, and still they will not
kill themselves. I want to be that last person.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote The
Crown of Columbus with
your husband, Michael. How was that different from the experience of writing
your other books?
ERDRICH
I’ve not spoken much about what it was
like to work with Michael, partly because I feel that there’s something unfair
about it. He can’t tell his side of the story. I have everything that we once
had together. It touches me that he left me as his literary executor. I think
he trusted that I would be good to his words, and I have tried to do that. So
it’s difficult to set the record straight because it would be my view, the way
I see it. Still, he controlled our narrative when he was living. I am weary of
all of the old leftover assumptions, and what else, really, do people have to
go on?
I would have loved for Michael to have had
his own life as a writer and not covet my life as a writer. But he couldn’t
help himself. So in agreeing to write The Crown of Columbus I really made a deal, at least in my
thoughts, that if we wrote this one book together, then we could openly work separately—as
we always did in truth, of course. I wanted to make him happy, you know. He was
the kind of person whom people want to make happy. People did this all the
time, they tried to make him happy, but there was a deep impossibility within
him and he couldn’t really be happy. Or he couldn’t be happy alone. So I’d had
the idea for The Crown of Columbus; I’d
done the research and I said, This is the project. We can do it together
because you can write your part and I can write mine and both of our names will
be on the cover.
I haven’t ever read the published book.
I’ve never watched the movie of The Broken Cord either. There are just certain things
that I’ve never been able to get close to again. I haven’t been able to revisit
most of the year 1997. I hoped that The Crown of Columbuswould be
what Michael needed in order to say, Now it is enough, we truly collaborated.
Instead, it became the beginning of what he wanted for every book. When he told
me he wanted both of our names on every book now, something in me—the writer,
I guess—couldn’t bear it any longer and that was the beginning of the long
ending. We’re talking only of our writing relationship, as distinct from the
tangle of our family.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think he wanted and needed so
badly to see himself as a writer?
ERDRICH
Perhaps because I loved writing so much
and he loved me. Perhaps because he was a very good writer. Or perhaps—I don’t
say this in a negative or judgmental way, because this is the case with writers
whether they admit it or not—Michael also adored everything that went with the
identity. He adored meeting other writers, adored being part of a literary
world. He would answer everyone who wrote to him, beautiful letters, every
single person. I don’t take much pleasure in being “the writer.” That’s what my
bookstore is for. So that people can visit a version of the writer, and
incidentally, visit a real bookstore. I can’t talk to people, so—
INTERVIEWER
You can’t talk to people?
ERDRICH
Still socially awkward. Once I was in a
bookstore in New York and a very short man reached up and patted me on the top
of my head and said, “I think you’re a good little writer.” So I patted him on
the head and said, “Thank you. You’re a good little reader.” Then I thought, I
can’t take this anymore. It’s just what I tried to get away from in Wahpeton,
being a good little anything.
INTERVIEWER
How did the relationship with Michael
break down?
ERDRICH
There were signs from the beginning, but I
ignored them or even exhaustedly encouraged them. He took over as the agent for Love
Medicine. After it won an award andThe Beet Queen was
published, we went to New York for an interview with The
New York Times. I was walking out the door to meet the interviewer,
and I noticed that he was dressed up, too. So I asked him where he was going.
He said, “I’m going to be in the interview.” And I said, “No, they asked me.”
And he said, “What do you mean—I can’t come?” So it was both of us from then
on. As long as he was content with being in on the interview and saying what he
needed to say, I wasn’t that unhappy. Actually, I was tired. Love
Medicine and Jacklightwere
published in 1984, and I had a baby. The Beet Queen was published in 1985, and I bore my
second daughter in that year. What kind of woman can do that? A tired woman who
lets her husband do the talking because she has the two best things—the babies
and the writing. Yet at some point the talking infected the writing. I looked
into the mirror and I saw Michael. I began to write again in secret and put
together a novel that I didn’t show him.
INTERVIEWER
Was he a good agent?
ERDRICH
He was a terrific agent. He had the energy
for it, and the excitement about the book world. He was a very good and
generous editor, too. Not to mention a teacher.
INTERVIEWER
A journalist once asked you what advice
you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the
project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?
ERDRICH
I think I meant that grand ideas kill
first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.
I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how
good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will
look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort
itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m
nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are
a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life.
INTERVIEWER
How?
ERDRICH
I needed a way to go at life. I needed
meaning. I might have chosen something more self-destructive had I not found
writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do your daughters help you when you write
your books for children?
ERDRICH
They are great editors—they read and
react. When my older daughters were little, I used to tell them the story of a
little girl marooned alone on an island; everyone else had died. My daughters
wanted that story over and over, so finally I wrote it down and showed it to a
friend who said, This is the anti–“Little House on the Prairie”! Of course,
“Little House on the Prairie” is foundational literature. Everyone refers to
it. But the series has an appalling view of how the American settlers went into
an empty world: There was no one there, so Pa set out his claim. The Indians
are always slinking off and Ma’s holding her nose. But I do love the parts
about making sausage.
I thought I would write about the other
side, the people who were in that “empty” space, the people who were forced
ahead of the settlers and what happened to them. The path taken by these people
in the Birchbark books roughly mirrors the path the Ojibwe side of my family
took crossing from Madeline Island, over what is now Minnesota, up to Lake of
the Woods and over to the Turtle Mountains. So far in the series, I’ve reached
Lake of the Woods.
INTERVIEWER
How is writing novels for children
different from writing them for adults?
ERDRICH
One of the jobs I had in the old days was
writing for children’s textbooks. I followed a mathematical formula to choose
big words and little words in combination to make each sentence. A maddening
challenge for a young writer. Writing for children now, I pare back
description, stick to action, humor, trouble, triumph. Of course there also has
to be death, but not too much. I have to watch that. I can’t become Cormac
McCarthy for the middle reader.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever fall into the wonderful
writing trance when you’re working on nonfiction?
ERDRICH
Nonfiction is always a grind for me. A
great deal of research goes into the fiction, but when the research is for
nonfiction all the pleasure is dulled. And no, I never fall into a trance.
INTERVIEWER
Are you still writing poetry?
ERDRICH
I stopped thinking like a poet back when I
started writing narrative poems. Occasionally I get some poetry, and I’ll write
poetry for as long as I can. But it is as though I’ve been temporarily excused
by the novel, and it wants me back. So I usually put whatever poetry I would
have written into the novel. I only keep a few of my poems as poems.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ERDRICH
It usually turns out that the poem was
connected to the prose in a subterranean way. If I am writing a novel, it casts
an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phrases, at all
times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of
immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful
that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with
children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my
ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore.
INTERVIEWER
You said before that your bookstore is a way
you have of meeting with other people. Is the business still working?
ERDRICH
Birchbark Books is still here! In fact,
doing well. But I’m not a business person. At first I looked at the bookstore
as a work of art that would survive on its own artfulness. Now I get that it’s
a business, but it is also much more. Any good business is about its people.
Marvelous people work at Birchbark Books. That’s why it’s still alive. Walking
into a huge bookstore feels a bit like walking into Amazon.com. But walking into
a small bookstore, you immediately feel the presence of the mind that has
chosen the books on the shelves. You communicate intellectually with the buyer.
Then, if you’re lucky, you meet another great reader in person—our manager,
Susan White, ready with ideas for you. People need bookstores and need other
readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We
don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced,
but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are
community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too
inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has
to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit
status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can
thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is
going to manage to do that and become the paradigm for the rest.
INTERVIEWER
What do you do to differentiate your
store?
ERDRICH
We attract writers, especially Native
writers, and we host literary events, which means, again, the bookstore is more
than a business—it is an arts organization. We support a number of Native
artists: basket makers and jewelers and painters. We sell medicines grown by a
Dakota family: sage, sweetgrass, bear root. My sister Heid and I launched an
affiliated nonprofit press that will publish in the Ojibwe and Dakota
languages. With a small bookstore, you get to encourage your eccentricities.
It’s quite a wonderful thing, this bookstore. I thought it would be a project
for my daughters and me, some work we could do together, and that has happened.
Each daughter has worked in the store.
There’s something very wrong in our country—and
not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks
like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t
know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of
large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country
we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees
who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the
soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of
countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo
and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the
edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to
look like Legoland.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find any shortage of good books
being published these days?
ERDRICH
Writing is better than ever. As for the
book as an object, it’s like bread. It is such a perfectly evolved piece of
technology that it will be hard to top. A hardcover book is a beautiful and
durable piece of work. The paperback—so low-tech and high-tech at the same
time—is also a great piece of technology because you don’t mind passing it
along. It is inexpensive. Even if you drop it in the bathtub, you haven’t
really lost much. You can leave a paperback somewhere and buy a used one for
the price of a loaf of bread. You can’t pass on an electronic reader, you can’t
page back in the same way, you can’t write in it; you’ve lost the tactile sense
of being able to fold it over, rip it up, feel its weight. I also like that you
can throw books across the room, as people have done with mine. Plus, you don’t
need a power source. The whole absence of touching and feeling a book would be
a loss, though I think there are a number of readers who really only want the
text, so they’ll adopt electronic books. Ultimately it’s just another form of
publishing, so I’m not against it. I don’t feel that sense of alarm and threat
that some writers seem to feel about e-books.
INTERVIEWER
Is writing a lonely life for you?
ERDRICH
Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded
by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is
perfect.
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