SOURCE: Erdrich, Louise, and Jan George. “Interview with Louise Erdrich.” North Dakota Quarterly 53, no. 2 (spring 1985): 240-7.

[In the following interview, Erdrich discusses her early works and talks about the life experiences that influence her poetry and fiction.]

“If there's a story there, that's enough,” says Louise Erdrich, who brings to life the history and mythology of her people and, therefore, her identity: Chippewa, German, woman, Midwesterner. By juxtaposing and weaving past and present together, Erdrich gives shape to the prairie land and its people in her book of poems, Jacklight, and her novel, Love Medicine (both 1984, Holt, Rinehart & Winston).

She draws on her years in North Dakota to create and recreate characters who endure despite adversity and affliction, who continue simply because they must go on. Erdrich says she is close to the prairie and its people; her life touches all those who live and have lived on that land. And this interrelatedness is evident in her writing, especially in the stories of Love Medicine where the characters' lives are intermingled in spirit as well as history.

Growing up in North Dakota, Erdrich had the advantage of a geographical closeness to the heritage she was, even as a child, interested in. Learning about her connections to her German and Chippewa past yielded a love for the people of which she's a part, a love that is evident in the pages of her books.

But it wasn't until several years after she left North Dakota that Erdrich was to find this knowledge a great resource in her writing: “I didn't realize that [at first]. It wasn't really a source to me until I got out of college. When I was in college, I began to recognize what it was, but I didn't know what to do with it. I did write while I was in college, but I didn't know where to go to look for a source for my writing. I didn't really find out how important it was until after college.”

Admitted to Dartmouth in 1972, Erdrich was among the first class of women accepted at the previously all-male college. She majored in English and Creative Writing, winning several awards for her fiction and poetry. Following graduation, Erdrich returned to North Dakota where she spent time as a publications director for a small-press distribution company and as a poet in the Poetry in the Schools program underwritten by the National Endowment for the Arts. She also later worked on a film for Mid-America Television which dealt with the clash of cultures between the Sioux and the European settlers in the 1800s.

She returned to the East in 1978 when she received a fellowship to teach at Johns Hopkins University, later worked as newspaper editor of an urban Indian organization in Boston, and eventually turned to her own writing full-time. Erdrich's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, New England Review, Redbook, MS magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Earth Power Coming (a Native American literature anthology, Simon Ortiz, ed.), and The Best American Short Stories of 1983. She has also been awarded the American Academy of Poets Prize, the Nelson Algren Short Fiction Award, and the National Award for Fiction; and a chapter of her novel Love Medicine will be included in the 1985 O. Henry Prize collection. In 1985, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine.

Sometimes lyrical, sometimes narrative, her poetry in Jacklight speaks of love and courage, blending a mythical, even mystical, past with a present that challenges Erdrich to define a historical, as well as personal and present, struggle to survive. Erdrich creates characters who call up our own desires and fears and who mesh our identities with our own pasts. Like a jacklight, her book draws us into its woods of “mystery, and shelter.” We follow to find each other, to find who we are.

In both books, Erdrich's rich characters are “bits and pieces” from her past, but she is quick to point out that her writing is not autobiographical. The events and people are an admixture of real places, people and impressions, and experiences she could have had or people she feels did or do exist.

She writes with a sadness over the despair, failure, and confusion of her struggling characters, specifically women or Native Americans, but this sadness is suffused with empathy and admiration for their love and endurance amid their struggle. Erdrich wants to tell the truth, and she is careful not to inadvertently encourage stereotyping, for example, alcoholism as an Indian problem. In the character Gordie in Love Medicine, we come to understand his alcoholism not only as a more universal human struggle, but also as one part of a complex search for catharsis and, ultimately, self-identity.

In Love Medicine Erdrich writes with perception, honesty, and great sensitivity. Her prose is often poetic and resonant, yet unpretentious and clear. There is strength in the delicate balance between the feminist and racial overtones and the gently humorous and ironic tones that pervade her writing. Perhaps this arises from her belief in humanity despite prejudices and brutality, and her resolution “not to give up hope. Humans can survive.”

[George]: Would you give an autobiographical sketch, telling how you came to be a writer?

[Erdrich]: I grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, which is a medium-sized town right on the border with Minnesota. My parents worked at the Wahpeton Indian School, and we lived on the campus in employee housing. I went to public schools and for a few years to a parochial school, St. John's, and after I was through with school I went to Dartmouth. My mother read about the Native American program there and helped me apply. So that's how I finally left. But I think that the eighteen years I lived in Wahpeton, along with visiting the reservation my mother is from, and all the time I've spent in North Dakota since, has formed me as a writer. Someone said that writers live until they're twenty-five and write about it afterward. I don't think that's entirely true, but what truth there is in the statement lies for me in the fact that I know nowhere else like North Dakota, care about no one else like I do people from North Dakota. That's excepting friends and family, of course, who don't find their way directly into my fiction.

What about your teaching experiences?

I taught poetry in the schools all through North Dakota, and also composition and creative writing at Johns Hopkins. I never was much of a teacher and don't think I would be now. My husband is the best teacher in the world. His name is Michael Dorris, and he's a professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth.

You're enrolled with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, right? Have you ever lived in the Turtle Mountain area for any extended period of time?

Yes, I'm enrolled as a Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and from time to time, our family would spend time visiting there, or I'd go by myself and visit grandparents, aunts, uncles. I never lived on the reservation for any stretch of time, so all I know is from visiting there, and loving the place and the people. It really is beautiful around there, and the Chippewas have the best sense of humor of any group of people I've ever known.

So you grew up with a strong sense of connection to your past?

Yes, both sides of my family were strongly connected to their own histories. My father is a terrific storyteller and made his relatives and the characters in the towns where he grew up almost mythic. I owe “Step-and-a-Half Waleski” in Jacklight completely to him. There really was a woman like her in his childhood. My mother told stories too, about her childhood, mainly what it was like on the home place, or allotment, where my grandparents lived, and what the reservation was like during the Depression.

Did you have an interest in writing poetry or fiction while in high school?

I wrote a few things in high school, but I mostly confided in my diary and journals. I kept endless self-absorbed journals. Not until college did I try anything that resembled a poem or short story. Then once I started writing, I just knew that was it. I was going to be a writer and nothing would stop me. That was all that mattered for a long time, and I had a very romantic view of myself as an obsessed artist. [Erdrich confided in an earlier conversation: “I wanted to be some kind of artist, and it didn't really matter what kind. And then I found out pretty quick once I got into college and took some art courses that I wasn't going to be a visual artist. But then I started writing and that was very satisfying.”] As time went on it became more and more routine until now it's nine to five. I write when the children are in school, share absolutely everything with my husband, and love doing it, but see it as just part of life.

The divisions in Jacklight, such as “Hunters” and “Runaways,” serve as unifying themes. Were many of the poems written with that structure or those themes in mind?

The divisions in Jacklight were suggested by my editor at Holt, Judy Karasik, who jolted me out of my ideas on an assigned order to the book and, I think, gave it more life. “The Butcher's Wife” poems were written as a chapter, but the others fit together in odder ways.

To what degree are images, such as light in the woods, symbolic in the book? I see jacklighting as a possible element in poems dealing with the Chippewa or women.

Jacklighting and hunting are both strong metaphors for me of sexual and love relations between men and women. In the male tradition, men are the hunters and women are their prey, but in the poem “Jacklight,” I am trying to say something like this: if our relationships are ever going to be human, and not just play-by-numbers, men have to follow women into the woods and women likewise. There must be an exchange, a transformation, a power shared between them. [Erdrich earlier indicated that it is in this transformation where we arrive at a different stage of power.] Living in empty country, the woods to me have always been a place of mystery, a shelter. That's where we have to go to find each other.

I sense this transformation of the hunter and hunted in several poems in the book, for example, in “Chahinkapa Zoo” where the animals are no longer hunters. They have been hunted and are now caged. Was there that correlation in your own mind when you wrote the poem?

I never thought of that, but it's a good idea. Sometimes things work out on an unconscious level.

What about this reversal in poems dealing with people, for example, “The Lady in the Pink Mustang”? You write about her “bare lap” being “floodlit from under the dash” as she's trying to lure the semi-driver.

That's an interesting idea, too. I guess she is using her sexuality in the same kind of way that the men in the poems are using the jacklight, to attract in an animal way, to paralyze and fascinate. The difference is that she is defiant because in her world men are still in control.

Are you searching for a personal identity in these poems?

A writer has to start somewhere, and I started with myself. [“But (those poems were) all in my 20s kind of stuff you know.” Erdrich laughs. She points out the cynicism in some of the earlier poems got resolved in time.] I'm sure I worked out a lot about my identity in the poems, but more than that, it gave me a way to make something more interesting of my own bits and pieces of personality than was probably there in reality. Language is magic that way.

“The Butcher's Wife” is dedicated to your grandmother. Does the butcher's wife actually portray your grandmother, or is she representative to some degree?

Yes, I do have a grandmother whose life vaguely resembles the life lived by Mary Kroger. She is a tough woman with a mystical bent who ran a butchershop for years and now lives in a tiny town in Minnesota and raises guinea hens. She's never pulled her punches with anybody, and I love her, but I wouldn't say that the poems are about her in particular. They are about a character, a fictional persona, someone I imagined myself in the skin of and wrote about.

I'm interested in the three Leonard poems in “The Butcher's Wife.” Why are they placed in that section of the book? Can you comment on them?

About the Leonard poems, I was hoping to write a whole book. I was going to have many characters, like Step-and-a-Half Waleski. But I just ran out of steam. I'd kind of thought that I'd said enough anyway. I don't know what all I'd wanted to say, but I think what I was trying to do really was write a novel, and the instinct to keep on building onto her character was a really novelistic instinct. So I probably needed to get on with my fiction where my heart really was.

Could you comment on the influence of religion, specifically the Catholic Church, in your life and writing?

Catholicism has always been important to me even though I am not a practicing Catholic now. The ritual is full of symbols, mysteries, and the unsaid. That affects a person always, once you know it as a child.

What authors or works have influenced you—the fact that you write, how you write, or what you write?

I read everything, and probably everything from cereal boxes to William Faulkner has been an influence. I'd say the biggest influence I've had on my work has been my husband. Not only does Michael edit, help arrange, comment, and come very close to writing the work himself, but I am his client too and he's my literary agent. He knows the characters, knows the things they'd do, what they'd say, how to get them from one place to another and so on. Most of the characters were invented between the two of us. We have similar backgrounds, so he knows who I'm talking about. As for writers, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison and Alejo Carpentier, on and on. [Earlier Erdrich also pointed out that she read William Gass, originally from North Dakota, very seriously. She “was very taken” with his style and language. Concerning Carpentier, she was very impressed with his book The Kingdom of This World, a historical collage pervaded by mythology. I later wondered about its influence on Erdrich's Love Medicine.] My favorite reading is firsthand accounts of adventures, travel journals, diaries. I am indebted to my sister Lise for getting me interested in John Tanner's journals.

In your novel, style, language, and point of view change from chapter to chapter. Can you comment on this and also on your development as a writer in general?

I had trouble going from poetry to fiction because the language just has to give in order to have a narrative voice that will carry the reader. One must say, “Then she did this, he did that, they opened the door,” and so on, I fell in love with writing in a sensual way, loved the feel of words, and still do, but a fiction writer has to temper this to tell a story.

Do you still write much poetry? If not, do you think you will return to it in the future?

I don't write any poetry, except private things, and won't return to it unless I run out of steam with fiction. Maybe!

What was your main purpose in writing Love Medicine? Do you think you achieved it?

I don't know if I achieved what I wanted to do in Love Medicine. I don't know what purpose I had in mind, except to write as honestly as possible, and to resolve things for a few characters. I wanted to tell a story, so if I told it, that's done.

What do you feel is a writer's biggest obstacle?

Time and money are a writer's biggest obstacles, and by the grace of foundations, fellowships, writers' colonies, and mainly by the support of my husband, I've not had to deal with these two big worries since 1981. Before then I had all kinds of jobs and went crazy trying to write with some sense of continuity.

What are you hoping to accomplish in your new novel, Beet Queen?

The novel I'm working on now picks up some people I've had kicking around and puts them in challenging situations. I don't know what I'll accomplish, again, but if the story is there, that's enough.