Louise Erdrich on Her New Story Collection and the Mystery of Writing

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Download the New York Times app to start watching. I was going to ask you about one story in particular, the love of my days, that I read somewhere was written over eight years. It's a ten-page story.

“What are you doing to these stories over that time?”

Are you leaving them for a year? Are you coming back and changing a sentence? What is the work that is being done on them? Well, it's hard to know about this story because I started it quite a while ago. And I put it away, I didn't even know I had it.

And I think I was changing from Microsoft to pages. What is this? That's right there. There it is. That's how it came to be.

It's the book review for the New York Times. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and today on the show we are talking to, Pulitzer Prize in National Book Award winner, Louise Errick.

Since the publication of her first novel, Love Medicine in 1984,

Louise has made her mark in just about every corner of the American literary scene. She's one of the most prolific Native American authors and has published a couple dozen books from fiction to nonfiction to poetry and books for kids. Her latest is a collection of short stories that she wrote over the past two decades. It's called Python's Kiss.

So I sat down with Louise. That's where we started. So I want to talk about stories for a bit. What are the nuggets?

“How do you find that there's a thing that turns into a story?”

I like how you ask what are the nuggets because that is really what happens. I have a set of words just randomly pop up and I'll write, keep notebooks, I write something down, and sometimes something keeps going for a while,

but it always fizzles out and I think,

"Well, that's gone. That energy is gone." Whatever was there, but for these stories, something came back and then I would write a little more and a little more. It just crept along, is army crawled along the forest floor somehow until it got to the end. And you, I mean, the answer is obviously yes because you have finished these stories,

but you have the patience to army crawl through years of working on a single story intermittently. It isn't really patience. Everything I do is it's to amuse myself in so many ways. So I probably got impatient with the story because it wasn't getting anywhere. And I went on to something else and then I lost my patience with it there, and then I came back to something and then maybe I get a little bit of a reward

or I get a blind or even a paragraph. And then I'm hooked again. Yeah. You know, easily hooked.

“I'm wondering how do you know when something is a story as opposed to a novel or a poem or a children's book?”

What is it that in your mind leads to you saying this is going to exist in this box? It announces itself. I don't have a way of changing it if it's not going to be what it wants to be. If it's going to be a novel then it keeps going. It simply won't stop. If it's a story, it evolves toward an ending in the next 15 or 20 pages. And I can't really explain it better than that. I mean, it's a process that seems to happen outside of my will or exactly what I want to be doing.

I mean, it's what the writing wants to do with itself. You can't really control everything that's going to happen in your writing life and your art life and whatever you do.

And you have to be comfortable with that. And I always, I think I always was because I was never a very in-control person. It's never been me.

I mean, I didn't have a lot of control over my, I didn't really know how to control a lot of my behavior, how to work with people around me, a lot of awkwardness. I have a lot of experience, but I have a very rudimentary ability to process my experience except through writing.

That's my only, that's always been my only real way of processing.

It's changed as it goes along. I keep a lot of diaries, probably because it's helping me.

“Are those diaries, things, you know, like daily reflections that these are things that happen to me or they sort of more philosophical?”

Well, they started as cries of woe. That's how a lot of diaries start. Oh, it's a great place to start. It's a cry of woe. Every, I may, I've looked through my, my old notebooks and they're very funny because nothing as dramatic or stupid is ever happened to anybody else but me or that Louise from back then. But then they slowly became more invested in taking note of what was happening and what really has been helpful for me and looking back is that.

I, to a surprising extent, did write about things that were happening around me about not so much people, but about a little travels I did. I wrote lots of detail down.

“And this is from an early age, from when you were a teenager, from when you were in university, like when did you start this?”

I started it in fifth grade. Oh, my, that's very early. Yeah, because I was so overwhelmed. I worked in a movie theater and I was so overwhelmed by seeing planet of the apes. Really knock me over. It's one of the great movie endings of all time. It's a great movie. You know, damn you. Damn you. You did it. You know, hopefully I'm not spoiling it for anyone. We all know what happens at the end of plenty of the age.

Do you remember why it was so jarring for you? I do because then you immediately assume, okay, it was a nuclear war. This is what happened.

At the time growing up in North Dakota, our state was the third largest nuclear power in the world.

We were surrounded by hundreds of ICBM missiles, just so much nuclear power. It was, it was astounding. We were kind of proud of it in some purited way because we were a national sacrifice area. So the end of planet of the apes was, I decided that I should really take this seriously. And then I started thinking a lot more about it throughout my life. I would return to it. And you're referring to all of, you know, all of the ICBMs that are in missile silos underground that on the off chance.

We got into a nuclear conflagration with someone, they would all launch from all of those around you. They would all launch from North Dakota, but North Dakota was the sponge that would pick the up all of the ones that were launched at us. It's come back to me a lot now. I'm working on a different book, but I don't want to get into it actually. Okay, let's just leave it. Okay, we'll move away from it for now. So I ask, I feel like I ask authors all the time about influences or favorite writers or favorite books,

but actually rarely or in the stab at least I've rarely gotten a chance to talk about short stories here, authors talk about short stories. I'd love to hear, you know, writers or stories that have influenced you in writing in this particular form. Anton Chekov, number one, I mean, most writers say Anton Chekov, I mean, there's, that's one person I go back to all the time to read. George Saunders, of course. A man who himself loves Chekov.

“Absolutely. Yeah, I think everyone I admire always goes back to Chekov.”

I read Lauren Groffs, Brawler, the first story.

But that story, who else?

“Can I interrupt you to ask what it was? What was it about it that made you emotional?”

Yes, there's a part in a story where you think that something has happened, but then it turns around and says, if only that had happened. And then tells the truth of what happened. And at that point, you know, your heart starts beating a little differently, and by the end of it, you're wrecked on the page, because it's also about, this is something that I love in fiction.

That's the child hero, a child who is a hero. And this hero is trying to save her family. And it does, you know, I don't want to say, sure. Exactly what happens. It makes it cry.

I feel like right after this interview, I'm going to go read the story. I think we have a copy downstairs. Yeah, I have to. I'm curious, just off that note, off that feeling.

“That emotional feeling, reading that Lauren Grofstor, do you?”

Do you ever get readers of yours telling you that they got emotional cried at certain parts? And is that something that, if and when it happens does, is it surprising to you?

Do you know that things are going to have a certain effect with readers or can you never tell?

If something I write surprises me into tearing up, then I think maybe it will. And for instance, the end of Love of My Days did get to me that way. It's wonderful to hear that because it strikes as someone who doesn't write fiction. Never has the idea that I would. Something would come out of me.

I would write something. I would, I would be the person who's brain invented it. And yet it would still strike me or surprise me in such a way that I would have an additional emotional reaction is.

It's another reason why art is amazing.

It's just like, you know, you, the writer, put something down on paper. It wouldn't exist without you and yet you are tearing up at the thing that you invented. It is very strange because I know you hear this from other writers, but it's very true. There's really no way to control everything that happens in a piece of art. So whatever is in you that's writing down the words can take over and you sometimes I don't even think I wrote it.

Sometimes, for instance, when I look back at the story that I was talking about how it took me a long time to write it. Some of these stories, I wasn't sure that I had written it or I had. It didn't seem like something I had written yet, obviously it was in my handwriting.

“So how does that, is the creation part of it still mysterious to you in some way?”

Yeah, thank God. I mean, we have to have a mystery. I don't think I'd like it if I knew much more about it than I do. I like working on a level that isn't all me. I'm in my real life a boring person.

I don't have interesting things to. I'm sorry anyone is listening. Interesting things to say, I don't really have kind of... Not a political personality, but the stories write themselves. The novels, and I must have something to do with it because I do have an immense amount of

research that goes to everything and thought and emotion. But there's some piece of it that belongs to some other world, some other entity, not an entity, but that place where art happens, whatever it is. After the break, Louise explains why crawling around on the floor is part of her writing process. In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family.

Anyone's first cousin could be plotting murder. This is UC4735, and today is...

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals.

But it's one thing to know.

And another thing to understand. Alan, murder, me. It's another thing so much worse than I thought I knew. The price is eminently reasonable. What the hell was Alan thinking?

Let me just say that I am literally pissed off. Yeah, I get it.

From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm Em Guesson, and this is the idiot.

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. In Python's case, your collection, you have one story that read to me for much of it like a ghost story, a story called "Borsalino." You have two interlink stories that are essentially science fiction.

“I'm wondering, do you think about genre when you're writing or is it just this is the story I wrote?”

And I am Louise, and these are the elements, and let's say when I was categorized. I love how you say that. I am Louise. Let's someone else figure it out. Yeah, that's how it is. I don't really think about the genre. To be honest, I don't know.

I felt like this is the way things are trending that there'd be an afterlife that's run by various competing corporations, and you wanted to get in. And I even have more of it that's about that I wrote a long time ago about giant data centers that have to be tended by low wage workers, and so I didn't think of it as science fiction. No, I thought of it as a speculative fiction.

I like that kind of that term.

“I'm curious. If I were to ask your children, what it looks like when you're writing?”

What do you think they would say? Are you lost in your thoughts? Why are you walking around? Or do you have to disappear into a room of your own? Or have you been able to integrate it into your daily life in a way where you don't have to remove yourself? Well, I do prefer to remove myself, but I rarely can really remove myself. And I think they would just say that either I have a glazed look and I have sort of a glazed affect.

Or when one of them asks me, "You seem a little off today. Are you crawling around in the floor again?" Because that's how I find my sometimes I just have to throw everything on the floor that I have. All these notebooks, these crazy notes and everything that I've taken, and I have to crawl through them and put them in order and I'm crawling around in the floor. That's part of my process.

That's incredible. It's, you know, physicalizing this intellectual act.

“That's what it is. I feel like it's what it is. You know, you have these little, little scraps of paper and you need to, there needs to be a part of your body that's sort of working with it.”

Yeah, I'm like putting them in stacks and then I'll find one that maybe, you know, I forgot it might be the beginning of the story or something. So I had the chance last year to interview Isabelle Iende and she talked about the fact that she had decades worth of letters from her mother. She estimated that she had more than 20,000 letters. Mm-hmm. We're not here to compare numbers, but I know that you and your own way have a real cash of letters from a parent's letters from your father.

I'm sort of jealous of both of you to have something that you could refer to, go back and refer to time and again. I'd love to hear about those letters and what that relationship was like, this written relationship. Did your dad consider himself a writer? I think he did. I mean, I consider him a writer. He included poems, stories. He would make a story out of anything that happened in our family.

Your mother is canning again and he would enlarge it to. She's canned the toads and the garden. She's canned the slugs on the plants. She's canned everything. And he'd go in this long list of things that she'd canned and he would, you know, they're wonderful letters. He also started this project that I eventually made into a booklet which was, which was to write a limerick about every town in North Dakota.

So I was, his letters are really one of the treasures of my life. I have stacks of them.

“My mother also wrote letters. We were a letter writing family. My grandfather, I have my grandfather's letters from when he was a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and he went through.”

It's, it's, but the Night Watchman is based on a personality that I knew from the letters and knew from being around him. I know when you have spoken about the Night Watchman, again, the book whose main character is based in part in your grandfather, which won the Pulitzer Prize. You've, you've said, you know, that the award didn't go to you. The Pulitzer Prize didn't go to you. It went to the book. And maybe by extension, I went to your grandfather. And I'm curious about the way that you've talked about this book, because it seems, even though each of the books that you've written are surely personal in some way, that there's something about this one in particular.

And, and all the accolades that it has gotten that, that has made you talk about it in a very specific way. Well, it's very special to me, because I, I wasn't, for instance, this happened to me later in my life when I knew that I shouldn't attempt to take a control of a book. When I had, I had less ego invested in it. When I wrote, say, the Master Butcher Singing Club, I had too much of my own ego invested. I thought I had some great ideas, but I could have done a much better book, if I'd been older, and if I'd understood that sometimes, the book is very simple.

“And you have to stay with the simplicity. That's what happened with night walksman. I just decided that I would stay simple.”

Can I just ask you one or two questions about your bookstore, which I've never been to, and I would love to go to one day?

Yes. In 2001, you opened a bookstore in Minneapolis. It's been opened for a quarter century now. And there's nothing to guarantee that any business, let alone an indie bookstore, what is going to succeed. I'm wondering how involved are you in the bookstore, and whether or not owning this store and mainly with customers and doing all that stuff, has it made you think differently about books and the way they exist in people's lives. It's entirely changed my way of looking at books and the way they affect people and how they, how, you know, the survival of this bookstore has been, it's been a levitating act. It really has.

There were times I thought I, I didn't know how it could go on. It was very hard, rough going. I'd started it right when Amazon started taking over so much of the industry and so much of book life.

But when I first started, there was only one set of shelves that had any native titles on them. And they were mostly by non-native authors about native people.

And now, we could feel the whole bookstore. It's not a huge bookstore. It's small. But we could fill it all with native books. It's a general bookstore, but something has happened, and indigenous writing has just exploded into, and I knew this was going to happen, because I knew that once a lot of people from a lot of different tribes began to write about their backgrounds.

“There would be some similarities, but they would be so uniquely different that people would want to read them, and there would be book after book after book. And that's what's happened.”

Is there, as you said, you could fill your entire bookstore with native authors if you so wished. I'm wondering if there are other few authors or, you know, a few categories that you would recommend to our listeners who, you know, maybe their experience of native authors. Starts and ends with you or starts at ends with you and Joy Harjo, or, you know, or goes as far as Stephen Graham Jones, but who are some other people that we should be reading?

Well, first of all, this is a writer I returned to over and over and read a book over and over. This is James Welch.

But it's the most beautiful, bleak, short, funny, intensely personal book.

“It's a novel that I, I would love to have written. It's an amazing book. It begins and ends and wraps up in a story that goes back and forth through time, but it's really the story of a kind of”

a binge story, but it's funny and it's beautiful. I don't know. It's one of my favorite books of all time. Coming up, you might be as surprised as I was to learn what book Louise currently has on her shelf.

We're here to talk a little bit more about books. For more than a decade, I think as you know, because you participated in this feature almost exactly 10 years ago in April 2016.

More than a decade, the New York Times book review has been doing by the book. It is a series in which we ask authors a set of recurring questions about their reading, their reading habits books that they love. We do an audio version of that now, and I want to ask you a few questions.

“Okay. Let's start with this one. What is the, what's the last book that you've recommended to a member of your family and you said you have to read this.”

So my family, a lot of my family haven't saw me on. So we do. We listen to books. What is to sleep? And I have one that is perfect for sleeping too. It's not somebody who's going to listen to this. The pillow book was written around 1000. It's a very old. It's incredibly fresh and new. Everything about it. It's a book of miscellaneous. And it is a book with entries like hateful things, depressing things, splendid things. And there's this beautiful list and there's beautiful descriptions of the sliver of a moon at sunrise. And things that just are so evocative, but they're disconnected. So they're perfect for falling asleep too.

Louise, I'm going to give it a shot. I often have to listen to something myself to fall asleep at night. So. Okay.

“Next question. Are there books that you find yourself returning to time and again?”

Well, I do return to winter in the blood by James Welch. The death of the heart. I Elizabeth Bowen. I've read several times. I've read this story collection called Save Me Stranger by Erica Krause. There's something about it. It's like a very traditional set of story-form stories. And they are just that is blow your way. Bluest eye and osterlets. I listen. I get back to osterlets all the time. Tell me a little more about osterlets. This is the W. G. Save Old Book.

Yeah. I find it one of the most capaciously endlessly fascinating books I've ever read. There's so many parts of it that you just want to read over and over and over. There's a part about moths. There's a part about something called a nocturrama. There's parts of it that take you off in these long side pieces.

But it always returns to this central theme of osterlets trying to put together who he is, where he's from. And when he finally does, it's a wrenching part of the book.

There's a line in osterlets that's so predictive of what happened on 9/11 and it's a line that goes something like giant buildings always have in them a preview of their own destruction.

Yeah, of course. And you never knew where it was going and the mixture that he does of photos and real stuff and fictional stuff is quite unique.

Right.

“I guess you answered this one already. The last book that made you cry. You would probably say it was that story in in Brawler. But is there is there another book that would fall into this category? What is the last book that made you cry?”

Well, now I don't often cry at stories. It's unusual, but this was not too long ago. Also, and it's the end of a book that's not out yet. I got to see it in that reader and it's and patch it's next book, Whistler. It's extraordinary. All right. That's quite a tease, Louise. Yeah. I'm not going to say anything else. You got to read it. These bookstore owner/authors are colluding right here. Oh, yeah. It's both Lauren and Anne. That's the three of you. You wonder. When do we have time? I do want. I continue to wonder that. I'm curious. Do you think your reading tastes have changed over time?

Yes. I am more critical. I will throw. I will just put a book down if it doesn't interest me enough in the beginning or if it has certain things.

I don't like any snorting. I don't like any giggling. I don't like overused things like giggling. I mean, can you find a better word? Or if it's repeating people are repeatedly gasping at something they hear or something. There's certain things that if they repeat them more than once, I can't take it. Or if there's a word that is always repeated by a character. Or if someone says something, say, "cavalierly." Then it happens again to pages later. I can't take that. It sounds like you're standard. It sounds like you're just increased.

The more books you've read.

That's fine. That's just taste. I support this. Thank you.

“Are there any books that you think people would be surprised to find on your shelves?”

Yes. It's right here. It's make the golf course a public sex forest. Please tell me what this book is about. This book is a mini-applas book. It's one of the reasons I love mini-applas so much. There is a controversy about a golf course that's in the city and is taking up a lot of green space and is polluting a lot of water. It's in our public park system. It's only used by golfers.

A lot of people want to keep it, but a lot of people who'd rather have public sex would not want to keep it. This book is a companion of essays on how to change this into a public sex forest, this part of the golf course.

“You know, I'm glad to have done this interview with you Louise.”

If only for me to have learned what a public sex forest is. Well, I'm glad you know too now, and I'll just tell you that it's a published, a book published by Maitland Systems Engineering. So, engineering problems may be also addressed in here. I'm not sure. Louise Erdrich, thank you so much for coming on the book review to talk about your new collection of stories Python's kiss.

This was just a delight of a conversation. It's a joy to have you on. It's been a pleasure for me to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by LaRissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Azado, original music by Alicia by YouTube. Special thanks to Dahlia Hadad and Paula Shuman.

We want to hear what you think about the show. Send us an email at [email protected]. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.