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(woman) Funding for this program
is provided by the partners
of Read North Dakota--
our authors, our stories--
and by the members of Prairie Public.
(male narrator) Louise Erdrich is an award-winning author
of children's books, poetry and novels,
including "The Plague of Doves,"
which was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The oldest of 7 children, Louise was born in Little Falls, Minnesota,
but grew up in Wahpeton North Dakota,
where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School.
Louise is a graduate of Dartmouth College
and earned a Master's Degree
in Creative Writing
from Johns Hopkins University.
She's an enrolled member of
the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and is
the owner of the Birchbark Bookstore in Minneapolis.
Read North Dakota is proud to present,
A Conversation with Louise Erdrich.
Welcome to a conversation
with the award-winning author, Louise Erdrich.
I'm your host, Bob Dambach, and on the show,
we'll talk to Louise about her career as a writer,
the challenges of running an independent bookstore,
and Louise will read some passages from her books.
Thanks for joining us Louise.
It's my pleasure Bob, I'm glad to be here.
And we're delighted you're here.
I'm sure when you were growing up,
there was a lot of storytelling going on in your home.
Well, there was; my parents were both teachers.
My father taught 6th grade for many years,
then 8th grade, and then he became a substitute teacher
at Wahpeton high school.
He was known as "Super Sub."
And part of his charm was that he is very good
at telling a story on any subject you might imagine.
My mother's side of the family is Turtle Mountain Chippewa,
and her father was a magnificent storyteller.
My mother also was herself.
It's not that people sit around
and sort of formally come up with a story,
it's more in the context of a typical family gathering,
where people have reminiscences and memories
and maybe embroider a little and laugh on
about certain parts of the family history,
or as my father does,
pick out certain local pieces of history and memorize them
and tell them as stories.
You mentioned to me that he put little pieces of paper
around your house with different words on them.
Yeah, he did; he was always teaching, and he's 87,
so I'd like to say happy birthday to him.
He's still teaching to this day.
You know, his grandchildren sit down with him
and he'll, he opens the atlas up, or he starts talking
on a subject that he has been reading about.
So when we were little,
he wanted to teach us different languages,
and so we had French, you know, little pieces of paper
in French, Spanish, German, all over the house.
We had different labels on everything that we could see.
(Bob) And also, your mom and dad had some interesting ways
of getting the kids to write.
Yes, you know, they really wanted us to do
what we felt comfortable with and to explore our own minds,
and to have an inner mental life,
whether it be drawing or art, or writing.
And so my father used to pay me when I finished a story,
and I would hand it over and he would give me a nickel.
And for me, you know, this is the time
of having unlimited access to a small town.
I could walk down to the nearest mom and pop grocery store
and buy a grape Popsicle.
In Wahpeton, you know, walking down on a hot sidewalk,
and getting your Popsicle, it was worth it to become a writer.
[laughter] I decided right then, this was my calling!
That's wonderful, and what did your mom do?
My mother did everything with us.
My dad did things with us too, more in the terms of sports.
He took us hunting, you know, we would ski,
we'd do all kinds of interesting--
we'd ditch ski, which I'll get to later.
Ditch skiing is probably a North Dakota sport
people don't really know about in other parts of the country.
But my mother would sit down with us,
and for me she would draw, she would teach me
how to draw whatever I wanted to draw.
Sewing, knitting, canning-- every single thing
that she knew how to do, she would take the time
to teach the rest of us.
Now, I know you're very interested in your heritage,
both your Native American heritage and then
your white immigrant American heritage as well,
and that shows up in your writing,
but are you learning the Ojibwe language now?
I'm trying; it's a language that for some time was listed
in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most difficult,
so I don't really fault myself
for being such a terrible speaker,
but I am also lazy, that's part of my...
I'm trying-- my daughter is studying it
at a very serious level, and so I'm trying
to renew my commitment to study the language as well.
Did your grandparents speak?
My grandfather spoke Ojibwe; he spoke the Red Lake dialect.
And although he lived in the Turtle Mountains,
his family had come over from Red Lake.
So in addition to the language being
a very intricate, verb-based language, you know,
our language, the English has nouns, nouns nouns.
We're a thing oriented people.
the Ojibwe are an action oriented people,
there are very few nouns,
but many, many, many verbs, which can be changed,
sometimes each verb will have so many as a hundred different ways
it can be used, so it's a difficult language to learn.
(Bob) As you're learning that, as you've been learning it,
has it changed the way you write at all, your prose at all?
I think it has, you know, working up to actually
include an Ojibwe word changes the shape of the book,
and there are now more and more Ojibwe words in the books.
The children's book always includes a glossary
and a pronunciation guide, and I go back to each book
as I learn a little more, as I get closer to my teachers,
and I revise the Ojibwe in the books.
So they get changed all the time.
Well, you're quite a prolific author;
you've written many novels, you've written children's books,
as you just mentioned, you also write poetry.
What we'd like you to do now is not write, but read for us.
So if you could select, I think you have "The Antelope Wife" there,
and you have something for us to listen to.
(Louise) So this book, I'm delighted with this because
I never thought I'd get a chance to go back and rework a book.
And I reworked this book at a level
that it's more than just revising,
it's even more than just rewriting.
I was able to reform and reshape the entire narrative
to become something more of a story
that I think was intended from the beginning.
Now when I asked my father, he said he wanted,
I said, "What should I read from this?"
And he said, "Read from the voice of the dog."
[laughs] So there's a dog in here.
The dog is original dog, windigo dog, he's a res dog,
but he's an ancient, he's an ancient creature,
and he's the creature who really has, he feels,
has stood by the human race longer than any other animal
and deserves a lot more respect.
And he's talking about now that, he's talking to his fellow dogs,
or in Ojibwe, [speaks Ojibwe]
and he's telling them how to survive.
Survival rules for [speaks Ojibwe]
"...all my children, there are the slick and deadly wheels
of reservation cars, poisons occasionally set out
for our weaker cousins, the mice and the rats,
not to speak of coyotes,
the paw-snapping jaws of Ojibwe trapper steel,
and we may well happen into the snare set as well for our enemies,
lynx, marten, feral cats, bears, whom we worship.
I learned early, eat anything you can,
anytime, fast, bolt it down.
Stay cute, but stay elusive;
don't let them think twice when they get the hatchet out.
I see cold steel, and I'm gone, believe it.
And there are all sorts of illnesses we dread.
Avoid the bite of the fox; it is madness.
Avoid all bats, avoid all
black-and-white striped moving objects, [laughter]
and slow things with spiny quills.
Avoid all humans when they get into a feasting mood.
Get near the tables fast, once the food is cooked,
stay close to their feet, stay ready,
but don't steal from their plates.
Avoid medicine men, snakes, boys with bb guns,
Anything ropelike or easily used to hang or tie.
Avoid outhouse holes, [laughter]
cats that live indoors,
do not sleep under cars or with horses.
Do not eat anything attached to a skinny burning string.
Do not eat lard from the table, do not go into the house at all
unless no one is watching.
Do not, unless you are certain you can blame it on a cat,
eat any of their chickens.
[laughter] Do not eat pies,
decks of cards, plastic jugs, dry beans or dish sponges,
and if you must eat a shoe, eat both of the pair, [laughter]
every scrap, untraceable, always.
When in doubt, the rule is you are better off underneath the house.
Don't chase cars driven by young boys.
Don't chase cars driven by old ladies.
Don't growl or bark at men cradling rifles.
Don't get wet in winter and don't let yourself dry out
when the hot winds of August blow.
We're not equipped to sweat.
Keep your mouth open, visit the lake, pee often.
Take messages from tree stumps and the corners of buildings.
And don't forget to leave and return a polite and respectful hello.
You never know when it will come in handy.
Your contact, your friend, you never know
whom you will need to rely upon, which is how I come to
the next story of my survival."
Did you have a dog growing up?
[laughs] I always have had a dog; I still have a dog.
And this is about as different a piece of the narrative,
as you can see, this is about an antelope wife.
She's a strange, mysterious woman,
who is connected with this dog since time began really.
But she's someone who, a man in Minneapolis
falls in love with her out in Montana.
He really kidnaps her and he brings her home
and she proceeds to destroy his life.
And it's only the dog who brings back
sanity into their relationship and allows everyone to go on.
What was it about this book that made you
want to retake this book, take it on once again?
Well you know, I had 30 good pages, 30 really good pages,
and after that it fell apart.
I could just tell that chaos started and I,
some of the voice was okay, but I couldn't,
I couldn't get the narrative to really connect.
So I snipped it and scrapped it
and threw it away and took it back,
and finally made it into a new book,
and now, it's really a new book.
You seem delighted with it.
I am, I really am;
it's so satisfying to be able to do that.
Well, one of the other hats you wear is
that you and your sister have a bookstore
and this is a really tough time, I would think,
to have a bookstore, but tell us about your bookstore.
The bookstore is called Birchbark Books,
and well, maybe it would be obvious,
but we have our dogs often suggest what books to read.
They have their own blog on our website [laughter]
and they tell about their reading habits.
And we have a wonderful collection of people
who really run this bookstore.
I'm not, if I was there every day, I'd never get to write.
So we have just terrific people who work there every day
and pick out books that they really hope people are going to like.
This is something that I think is really essential in this,
in our society, is to have a place where you can go,
where you can talk about books
and where you can look at the books and touch the books,
and pick them up and look into them,
where the person who is suggesting a book
actually knows you and is not an algorithm on a computer.
What you usually get if you're on Amazon, is you get,
you like this book, algorithm, algorithm, here,
you might like this book.
Well like, you know, how are you ever really going to
discover a new book that way?
In a small bookstore, there's just something,
I think, that's so human and necessary
about the interchange that people have.
So that's why I've always, you know, I didn't grow up
with a bookstore in Wahpeton.
There's a wonderful one there now called Bookhaven,
and we have Zandbroz here, another wonderful bookstore.
But really, the small bookstore, I think,
is a little oasis of humanity.
It's a little outpost in this big box world,
where people can really go and talk about
what they love in literature and what it is about literature
that's truly important to them, and get ideas from other people
about what might be good to read.
You enjoy William Faulkner, why don't you tell us
about your relationship with the writing of Faulkner.
Well, you know, I remember my first,
I still have the first Faulkner I picked up.
They're old paperbacks, you know,
from the Cambridge Bookstore in Harvard Square.
And uh, I still read them;
I'll go back and read them every so often.
I don't know if I have a more
a longer relationship with Faulkner
than with any other writer, or if it's more important,
because I, a lot of the books get compared with Faulkner's,
but I think it's more because they concentrate
on one group of people, and they elaborate
on the connections between people.
But I actually think our writing is very different
and in terms of writing, some of my heroes are Virginia Woolf,
Isak Dinesen, I love Toni Morrison's writing,
I like W.G. Sebald's writing.
You know, I have different writing stylists I would say
are more important to me than Faulkner,
but what I love about him is his sense of connection
and his sense of the endurance of,
the greatest part of the human is the endurance.
Um, his, his willingness
as people of valor and courage.
So I do love Faulkner,
I don't say that's he's the only influence though.
Could you read something else for us again?
I think you have something from your newest book.
Oh sure, this book, "The Round House,"
is the newest book that's coming out,
and it's not going to look like this.
It's a different cover entirely.
I don't know why, but it does.
This is not my decision exactly, but I will just read
a bit of the beginning of "The Round House."
"The Round House," I'll explain first,
is a tribal setting for dances and ceremonies.
So this round house is a place where I put myself imaginatively
and um, I'm thinking of one roundhouse in particular,
but I've been in many.
But it's, the roundhouse is the gathering place for the spirit.
And in this book, it's violated by an act of,
of desperate cruelty.
And the year is 1988; the boy who is speaking is named Joe.
He's 13 and this book answers one simple question.
How will this boy save his mother?
How will he save her?
And is it his job? That's not even the question after a while.
He's the only one who can save her
and who can bring her attacker to justice,
and how is he going to do that?
So that's what this book is about.
"We backed down the gravel drive,
circled the empty parking lot..."
of the tribal enrollment office, "...empty, windows dark.
As we came back out the entrance, we turned right.
'She went to hoop dance, I'll bet,' said my father.
'She needed something for dinner,
so maybe she was going to surprise us Joe.'
I'm the second Antoine Bazil Coutts,
but I'd fight anyone who'd put a junior in back of my name,
or a number or called me Basil.
I decided I was Joe when I was 6.
But even then, I saw myself as different,
though I didn't know how yet.
Tamping down my anxiety as we went looking for my mother,
who had gone to the grocery store
just that surely, a little errand.
I was aware that what was happening was in the nature
of something that was unusual, a missing mother,
a thing that didn't happen to the son of a judge,
even one who lived on a reservation.
In a vague way, I hoped something was going to happen.
I was the sort of kid who'd spend a Sunday afternoon
prying little trees out of the foundation of his parent's house,
so I should have given in to the inevitable truth
that this was the sort of person I would become.
Yet, when I say I wanted there to be something,
I meant nothing bad.
A rare occurrence, a sighting, a bingo win,
though this was Sunday and not a bingo day.
Halfway to hoop dance, it occurred to me
that the grocery store was closed on Sunday.
Of course, it is.
My father's chin jutted; his hands tightened on the wheel.
He had a profile that would look Indian on a movie poster,
Roman on a coin.
There was a classic stoicism in his heavy beak and jaw.
He kept driving because he said, 'She might have forgotten,
it was Sunday too,' which was when we passed her.
There, she whizzed by us in the other lane, riveted,
driving over the speed limit, anxious to get back home to us,
but here we were.
We laughed at her set face, as we did a U-turn
there in the highway and followed her, eating her dust.
'She's mad,' my father laughed, so relieved.
'See, I told you, she forgot, went to the grocery
and forgot it was closed, mad now she wasted gas.'
'Oh Geraldine,' there was amusement, adoration,
amazement in his voice when he said those words,
'Oh Geraldine.'
Just from those two words it was clear that he was
and always had been in love with my mother.
He had never stopped being grateful that she had married him,
and right afterward, given him a son when he'd come to believe
he was the end of the line.
'Ah Geraldine,' he shook his head smiling as we drove along,
and everything was alright, more than alright.
We could now admit we'd been worried
by my mother's uncharacteristic absence.
So it was our turn then to worry her, just a little,
let her in for a taste of her own medicine.
So we took our time walking up the hill,
this time anticipating my mother's indignant questions, 'Where were you?'
I could just see her hands knuckled at her hip,
her smile twitching to jump from behind her frown.
She'd laugh when she heard the story.
We walked up the dirt drive.
Alongside it, in a strict row,
Mom had planted the pansy seedlings
she'd grown in paper milk cartons.
She'd put them out early,
the only flower that could stand a frost.
As we came up the drive, we saw she was still in the car,
sitting in the driver's seat,
before the blank wall of the garage door.
My father started running, and I could see it too,
in the set of her body-- something fixed, rigid, wrong.
When he got to her car, he opened the driver's side door,
her hands were clenched on the wheel and she was staring,
blindly ahead, as she had been when we passed her
going the opposite way on the road to Hoop Dance.
We'd seen her intense stare and we'd laughed then.
She's mad at the wasted gas.
I was just behind my father, careful even then
to step over the scalloped pansy leaves and buds.
He put his hands on hers
and carefully pried her fingers off the steering wheel.
Cradling her elbows, he lifted her from the car
and supported her as she shifted toward him,
still bent in the shape of the car seat.
She slumped against him, stared past me.
There was vomit down the front of her dress
and soaking her skirt,
and soaking the gray cloth of the car seat, her dark blood.
'Go down to [speaks Ojibwe],' said my father, 'go down and
say I am taking your mother straight to emergency,
hoop dance emergency, and tell them to follow.'
With one hand, he opened the door to the backseat
and then, as though they were dancing in some awful way,
he maneuvered Mom to the edge of the seat,
and very slowly laid her back.
He helped her turn over to the side.
She was silent, though now she moistened
her cracked, bleeding lips with the tip of her tongue.
I saw her blink, a little frown, her face was beginning to swell.
I went around the other side and got in with her.
I lifted her head and slid my leg underneath.
I sat with her, holding my arm over her shoulder.
She vibrated with a steady shudder,
like a switch had been flipped inside.
A strong smell rose from her,
something else, like gas or kerosene.
'I'll drop you off down there,' my father said,
backing out, car tires screeching.
No, I'm coming too; I've got to hold on to her Dad,
we'll call from the hospital.
I had never, almost never challenged my father
in word or deed, but it didn't even register between us.
There had been that look, odd, as if between two grown men,
and I had not been ready, which didn't matter.
I was holding my mother tightly now in the backseat of the car.
Her blood was on me.
I reached onto the back window ledge
and pulled down an old plaid quilt we kept there.
She was shaking so bad I was scared she would fly apart.
'Hurry Dad.'
'Alright,' he said, and then we flew there.
He had the car up past 90; we just flew."
Thank you Louise, you read as well as you write, that's wonderful.
We want to thank you for joining us
with this conversation with Louise Erdrich,
and we want to thank you for coming here Louise.
My pleasure. Thank you.
[applause]
(Bob) Thank you for joining us
for this Read North Dakota presentation
of "A Conversation with Louise Erdrich."
If you'd like to learn more
about Read North Dakota activities,
you can visit us at readnd.org.
(woman) Funding for this program
is provided by the partners
of Read North Dakota--
our authors, our stories--
and by the members of Prairie Public.