INTERVIEWER:
What happened with what was actually your first novel
, 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.
INTERVIEWER:
Why did you decide to add family trees to your books?
ERDRICH
: I resisted for many years, but then at readings people began to come up and show me their painfully drawn out family trees. At long last, I was overcome by guilt.
INTERVIEWER:
How do your books come into being? Where do they start?
ERDRICH
: I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting magnetism. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings. Eventually, by some process I am hardly aware of, the pieces of writing suggest a narrative. One of the pieces might be told in a particular voice—that voice might tell everything. Or an image might throw the piece into third person—or whatever person. I don’t have control over whether I get ideas, voices, images. The trick is to maintain control and to shape what I get.
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. A European publisher once sent me a design for
Master Butchers Singing Club
that 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. Sometimes I’ll show one to a man and ask what he thinks of it. He’ll put it in his lap and stare at it for a while and then an odd expression will cross his face. He’ll look sideways at the women in the room, point the biggest sausage out, 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. With
The Bluejay’s Dancer
I wanted to take out the recipes. Don’t try the lemon-meringue pie, it doesn’t work. I’ve received letters. The most thoroughly revised book I’ve ever republished is
The Antelope Wife
. It is really a completely different novel, but I feel it is the true novel that was hidden in the first version. The beginning is the same, and then the book changes utterly. Sometimes a writer needs fifteen or twenty years to follow the thread laid out by a set of characters and a narrative.
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 or Manitoba, light 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.
INTERVIEWER:
Does this interrupt your thinking
?
ERDRICH
: Sometimes. I will usually pull up into a Culver’s or gas station parking lot and say, “if you are very quiet while I write, there will be french fries.” That almost always works, but still, there are times the thought vanishes just because I, then, think of french fries. Perhaps by having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. Being 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
: Not entirely, and it’s not altogether because of hormones or pregnancies either. All writers struggle with some obstacle, but being a mother sets up specific problems—for one thing, motherhood is a cliché-ridden state. 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. There is also one’s inclination to be charming to neighbors, teachers, your children’s friends, so that they won’t be labeled as associated with a freakish mother. One must take care that this ingratiation not leak into the writing. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less vehemence; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. Also, I have them to fight for, so actually, I don’t pull my punches. Without my children I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed. 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:
Perhaps, but for the gift of the Rudolf Hotel. I got hepatitis. That saved me.
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 tense. But I think it’s a great idea. It would solve about half of the world’s problems.
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. The piece in
The Plague of Doves
where the men are taking what becomes 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.
INTERVIEWER:
What do you do if you get writer’s block?
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?
[
Note: this turned out to be
The Round House.]
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 write everything out when I get home. 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:
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
: By transforming the madness I have in me.
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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About the Revision
T
HE ORIGINAL
A
NTELOPE
W
IFE
was written in the 1990s; because I rarely read my books after they are published, I didn’t return to this one until three years ago. When I did read the original, I was astonished that I’d dropped the powerful characters from the first thirty pages. Having discovered their flawed depth, I wanted them back. Once I started thinking of them and sketching out their lives, a different, overwhelmingly insistent vision of the book took shape. The voices I’d abandoned, new sources of humor, characters I thought I had given up, soon gripped me.
Revising this book was like repairing an old piece of beadwork. I stitched in new connections and added entirely new chapters. I dropped some chaos but kept some of the mistakes. Ojibwe floral beadwork usually employs one sinuous vine with marvelously inventive offshoots. That became my pattern for the book. The Antelope Woman’s narrative would be the vine, the chapters the flowers— some true to life, some wildly dreamlike, some a mixture of real and surreal.
It has taken me twenty years to understand where I was going when I first started
The Antelope Wife
. I think this was how the book was supposed to be written all along. Still, I have tenderness for the old version. It seems to me that the characters were patiently waiting for me to return and continue with their stories.
—Louise