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| Louise Erdrich |
Karen
Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich,
(Little Falls, Minnesota June 7, 1954) is an American author of novels, poetry,
and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is
an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of
the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich is widely
acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native
American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of
Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National
Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round
House. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent
bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the
Native community in the Twin Cities. Presenting an Interview of Louise Erdrich Interviewed
by Lisa Halliday in 2010 : Being Poet
Lisa Halliday : 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.
Lisa : What had you done?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Was your teacher anything like the one in your story “Sister
Godzilla”?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Is it true your father paid you a nickel for every story you
wrote as a child?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : What were the stories about?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : What are they about?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : How did your parents meet?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Your mother’s father.
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Did she speak Ojibwemowin when you were growing up?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Why?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Were you raised to be devout?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : What was it like to leave Wahpeton for Dartmouth?
Louise : 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.
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.
Lisa : What was Dartmouth like?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Why did you decide to change your name to Louise?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Were you a good literature student?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : How does your father feel about your books?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : When did you start writing Love Medicine?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : A tent revival?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Where were you when you wrote Love Medicine?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : What did you do for money?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : What happened with Tracks?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : The Tracks I’ve read is a short book.
Louise : That’s because all of the spare parts
got used in other vehicles. And of course I rewrote Tracks entirely by 1989,
but before that I had withdrawn it from consideration by publishers and started
again on Love Medicine.
Lisa : 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?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Why do you do that?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : How do you keep all your characters straight?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : But they’re not deliberate?
Louise : You mean are they there so that English
and Native American literature scholars have something to work on? No.
Lisa : Why did you decide to add family trees to your books?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : How do your books come into being? Where do they start?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Why?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Then why do you go back to it?
Louise : It’s irresistible, especially when I’m
in free fall. Maybe in a decade I’ll have finished it.
Lisa : Is it set in North Dakota?
Louise : Yes. The North Dakota of the future!
Lisa : Do you ever feel like you’re writing one long novel?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Is it true that you have control over the cover designs of
your books? Writers aren’t always afforded that privilege.
Louise : 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
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, 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.
Lisa : Do you revise already-published work?
Louise : 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 revise The 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.
Lisa : Like what?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Many of the books are hijacked by a child in trouble.
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Every summer you drive several hours north to visit the
Turtle Mountains, sometimes also Lake of the Woods. Why?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Because of the demands on your time?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : Were you concerned that the quality of your writing would
suffer?
Louise : It’s a touchstone for me to have
everything written down by hand.
Lisa : Do you transfer your writing to the computer yourself?
Louise : I don’t let anybody touch my writing.
Lisa : And do you revise at that point?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : You wrote in that book about moments in which suicide was
appealing.
Louise : 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.
Lisa : You wrote The Crown of Columbus with your husband, Michael.
How was that different from the experience of writing your other books?
Louise : 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
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 Columbus would 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.
Lisa : Why do you think he wanted and needed so badly to see himself
as a writer?
Louise : 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—
Lisa : You can’t talk to people?
Louise : 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.
Lisa : How did the relationship with Michael break down?
Louise : 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 and The 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 Jacklight were 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.
(source : theparisreview.org)
