Louise Erdrich On Writer's Self Doubt, Exhaustion, Motherhood & War

What if, when you sit down to write, you find yourself filled with doubt? What if you are never sure you can do it? What if you’ve done it before, but now are afraid you have nothing left? And what if, ultimately, you are just so damn tired you can barely stay awake long enough to write another word?

What if you knew that Louise Erdrich felt all of those very same things?

In February of 2003, I was lucky enough to interview Erdrich for The Rake magazine. She had just published The Master Butchers Singing Club, had a two-year-old and two adolescent daughters living at home with her, and had recently opened her now famous indie bookstore, Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. So much of what Erdrich had to say back then—about writing, about motherhood, about war, about dumpster diving, and about life itself—still resonates today.

Here is the interview, just as it appeared some twenty years ago.

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It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles) to write. Writing becomes a talisman against sleep, as she strings one word after the next simply to stay awake.

Erdrich’s exhaustion is the well-earned reward of a life equally matched to the richness and complexity of her writing, and that’s the way she likes it. The demands of a writing life combined with motherhood—demands unveiled with rich clarity in her 1995 memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance—are still fresh and concrete for Erdrich, who has a two-year-old and two adolescent daughters at home. As if to defy the constraints of traditional female domesticity, Erdrich writes prolifically, with 15 published books to date, including her latest novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club, in which she turns her attention to her German-American ancestry and in particular, her paternal grandfather’s experience of fighting in World War I on the German side, before immigrating to the United States and plying his trade as a butcher.

Erdrich, whose previous novels have rummaged the lore of her French-Ojibwa maternal heritage, primarily writes fiction. But she draws heavily from genealogical research, family legends, personal tragedy (she suffered the deaths of her son, and her husband, Michael Dorris), and the mythical landscape of her North Dakota childhood. She has published eight novels plus assorted poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. She is a permanent fixture on bestseller lists and a favorite of critics and scholars, and her voice is celebrated as one of the most important in the annals of Native literature.

All of this is just not enough. Three years ago, Erdrich opened an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, near her home in Kenwood. It is a gathering place for the Native American arts community and a repository for a hand-picked crop of books reflecting the convictions and idiosyncrasies of the owner: Native writers, local authors, small runs from independent presses, literary novels, and obscure volumes alongside classics in fiction, parenting, gardening, and spirituality. The entire southwest corner of the store is dedicated to what Erdrich describes as high-quality children’s books, the sorts of books you really want to read to your kids. Beside the parakeet cage is a tiny reading nook—The Hobbit Hole—tucked under the stairs and looking out at pretty red shelves topped with Native American Barbies and hand-crafted birdhouses.

This eclectic montage is scattered thoughtfully amongst other offerings. Displays of Native handcrafts—quilts, pottery, baskets, and paintings—punctuate tables and shelves, along with books and little glass cases of herbs, jewelry, and music. Erdrich refers to the bookstore as an extension of her home, and the warmly scuffed maple floorboards, birch-bark reading loft, and brightly upholstered chairs and rockers do create a comfy ambience. But for Erdrich’s true fans, the bookstore’s physical manifestation of her tangy sense of humor promises further delight. For example, a large, ornately carved wooden confessional towers against the eastern wall. Patrons are invited to sit and read, or just think, inside the confessional, where cleanliness is literally next to godliness. (Shelves on one side of the unit display Wash Away Your Sins body care products and handmade cedar soaps; shelves on the other side hold an array of lush hardcovers on spirituality.)

While Erdrich fends off sleep for the sake of another novel (her current work-in-progress begins in New Hampshire, where she lived for many years, and wends its way back to her homelands of Minnesota and North Dakota) and tours the nation to promote The Master Butchers Singing Club, new manager Brian Baxter (formerly of Baxter’s Books) runs shop at Birchbark and does his damnedest to manage Erdrich’s schedule as well. His first task may be to bring the shop into the black, since the hand-written FAQ propped near Birchbark’s cash register says the store currently operates at a deficit of three to five thousand dollars each month. But “We’re passionate about this place and what it stands for and we’ll hang in there until… either we make it or go broke,” the humble sheet of cardboard assures loyal customers. Profits, if and when they materialize, will go back to the Native community. Meanwhile, the bookstore is committed to providing a “grassroots outlet for Native gardeners, artists, a place for books—provoking, intelligent Native and non-Native literary books, noncorporate, out of the box, and cheerfully eccentric in a world dominated by monolithic interests.”

Not a simple mandate, but Erdrich enjoys life most when it’s “really complicated.” She thrives in the deepest and sometimes darkest interstices of human experience, personal and political borderlands where cultures collide, and where humor and tragedy, love and hate, success and failure, and life and death spill over the thresholds and become inextricably linked.

I spoke with the overbooked Louise Erdrich on a quiet Friday evening when her two-year-old daughter was too tired (or rather, too soundly asleep) to participate in the pow-wow Erdrich was otherwise committed to attend.

Ouellette: It’s a relief to finally be speaking to you. You’re hard to pin down. But then, you know that. We’ve been holding the cover of the magazine for you. You’ve seen The Rake?

Erdrich: Oh, yes. I see The Rake all the time, I see it all over. I liked the cover of your last issue [“Are You on a Terrorist Watch List?”]. I haven’t actually read it yet, but my first thought was, Oh my God, I probably am on one of those lists.

Well, you certainly could be. You’re very well known. And here you are again with a new book, getting rave reviews and creating a lot of hoopla. What is it like to be at a point where you just do what you do and the reception is automatically there?

Oh, wow. [Laughs.] Well, you know, I haven’t really taken that in, to be honest. I’ve never really gotten to the point where I feel that way. I sit down to write and inevitably I am filled with doubt. Actually, I am never sure I can do it. I think, “Oh, well. That was it, I’m done now, there’s nothing left.” For other writers, of course, it’s the opposite. I have no problem feeling optimistic about the work of others, and I do believe in being positive. I’m just not able to do it with my own writing.

And yet, you write and you write. What is a typical writing day for you?

A writing day. Well. You must understand, I’m so tired now, I do what I can do. I write in the morning until I get too tired. I write for as long as I can keep myself awake writing. I fall asleep writing. I have a two-year-old, and you know how it is when you have a baby. You’re just exhausted all the time. I try to get however much writing I can get done before I fall asleep. [Laughs.] But I have to say, I’m very lucky. I have two women who help me with the baby, and they’re absolutely wonderful. They are truly the reason I can write at all. I’m grateful because without their help I couldn’t do it.

You have two older daughters at home, as well. Do you rely on them for help?

No, actually, I really try not to. I wouldn’t want to expect that of them. That’s not the way my mother handled it with me. I was the oldest of seven children, and yet my mother made a tremendous effort to preserve a sense of childhood for me, to protect that space and freedom that is unique to childhood. She did not want to burden me with maternal responsibilities.

She didn’t want you to be a “little mother”?

Right. She really didn’t. I mean, of course I helped out, that’s what you do. But it wasn’t the expectation that I would take on the mothering role while I was still growing up myself. And I’m really glad for that. It gave me the freedom to explore and to have other experiences. It allowed me to discover what I really wanted to do. I was blessed to have so much freedom as a child. I had a fascinating childhood, and I recognize with some sadness that today children don’t often experience such freedom growing up.

In The Blue Jay’s Dance, you have a very haunting bit about caretaking. You’re referring to the rigors of combining writing with motherhood and acknowledging your gratitude that you could have your baby with you and still do at least some of the work you loved. You wrote, “I couldn’t take her with me on the job I had one long year that required fitting on rubber-soled white shoes, a white polyester uniform, then walking over to the locked ward of the state mental hospital to start the day by stripping the night-soiled beds of insane women.”

I’ve had a lot of work experiences in my life that make me thankful for what I am doing now. I’ve hoed sugar beets, lifeguarded, waited tables. I’m certain that having done those jobs helps me very much as a writer, but I’m very happy to be doing this work now.

You began your writing life early, though. You’ve said that your dad used to give you a nickel for every story you wrote, and your mother wove construction-paper covers for your homemade books.

Oh, yes. He did that, they did that. My parents were very encouraging. I was a highly paid writer from the beginning. [Laughs.] Both of my parents were incredibly supportive. They’re still alive, living in North Dakota.

Do they read your work?

Yes, absolutely. My father was a big part of the process of writing this new book. He went over the manuscript, reviewed all of the research, all of the historical detail. Fidelis [the main character in The Master Butchers Singing Club] is based on my grandfather’s history, and the photograph on the book’s dust jacket is of my grandfather when he was about 17 years old. I just love the way it captures him in his starched white shirt and his apron and his youth. I grew up with that picture, and my grandfather was actually in a singing club. So this title has been with me in a way for many years.

Do you get back to North Dakota often?

As often as I can. It’s important to me to be with my family, we’re very close. There are a lot of us now, with all the children, and it’s chaotic when we’re all there, you know, the way it’s always chaotic in a big family. But that’s not a bad sort of chaos. More of a lively chaos.

So you’ve got your family and your writing, and now the bookstore. You’ve invested a lot of energy into the store these past few years. Can you talk a bit about that?

Oh, the bookstore is just a wonderful place. It’s very familial. And I just cannot stress how important it is that we’re an independent bookstore. That’s a critical distinction in this corporate culture. Because we are independent, it means we have the freedom and the autonomy to choose titles for reasons that aren’t strictly about selling or making a profit. For reasons quite different from those that drive the major chains. Not that that’s an experience people can’t choose, but it’s a different experience to shop at one of the large, chain bookstores. We love the store and believe it’s important to keep that option—the independent, the neighborhood store—alive and available.

And now you have Brian Baxter to manage the day to day operations?

Oh, Brian. Yes, Brian is an adorable human being. We just love Brian. We all think he’s wonderful, although we try not to let him know just how wonderful we think he is. We wouldn’t want him to swell up and get too, you know, comfortable somehow. Because we wouldn’t want him to not do all the wonderful things he’s doing. [Laughs.] We have a great time together. My daughters helped out in the beginning. We’ve furnished the store with old chairs that we more or less dragged out of dumpsters here in the neighborhood. Well, this is a nice neighborhood, and people throw away some beautiful things. So we picked them up and hauled them off to be reupholstered, and then brought them into the store.

That sounds a bit like a character from the new book, Step-and-a-Half, turning trash into treasure.

Yes. You could say it was my mother’s influence. She was ecological before that was even a word people used. She was a gardener and a seamstress, she grew all our food, she sewed all my clothes, she reused, she conserved. She was amazing.

And that was atypical in your town at the time—Wahpeton, North Dakota?

It was atypical everywhere then, I think. This was the 1950s and 60s, before the environmental consciousness of later decades. It was impressive what she did. And my mother was—is—an incredibly talented seamstress. As I said, she sewed all my clothes.

And this was a good thing at the time?

Definitely. It was a very good thing. I mean, there weren’t a lot of retail options then in a town that size for buying nice clothes. I was lucky to have my mother sew for me. Oh, I remember one time ordering two of those “dollar dresses” from the Sears catalog. They had these “surprise” dresses, they were called, and you could order them for a dollar. So we decided to send away for two of them. Oh, were they ever awful. Just hideous! [Laughs heartily.]

In 1986 you told the Chicago Tribune—

Oh, dear, 1986? That’s a long time ago to remember…

No, no, it’s nothing to worry about. You told the Chicago Tribune that your “fondest hope” was that people would be reading you in 10 or 20 years as someone who had written about the American experience in all of its diversity. Has that hope been realized?

My fondest hope—well, my fondest hope as a writer. I don’t know if I’ve done that. I’ve written books that I needed to write, you write what you have to write. But that particular theme is no less important now than it was then. The diversity of people and their experiences in this country absolutely deserves our attention, especially now.

Is it true that Minnesota has the largest urban Native population in the country?

That may be true, I know that we’re way up there. We certainly have one of the largest concentrations of Native people. The need for community building and for an outlet for creative expression for Native people here is very real.

You’ve done a lot for Native writers, and for new and unknown writers. You’ve participated at the Loft and other venues and drawn crowds for writers who would otherwise not necessarily have had wide audiences.

I was peripherally involved in the Loft years ago. Now that energy goes more in the direction of the bookstore, to create a community of encouragement for writers, Native and non-Native writers, to help writers get read and to bring people together in certain ways. That’s the emphasis.

And how are you dealing with the current political situation?

Well, The Master Butchers Singing Club is a book about war. My grandfather fought in the trenches of World War I. I have to talk about that. It’s the biggest privilege to be on a book tour right now and to be asked how I feel about the war, because I definitely want to answer that question. I’m one of the Code Pink people, speaking out against this war. I believe war is degradation, it’s a terrible thing. Virginia Woolf called for an end to war in Three Guineas. She spoke out against war as an answer to conflict. Because war is an assault on humanity, it’s an assault on children. War is human degradation. Whether you’re talking about the first or second World Wars, or this pending war against Iraq. Look at the devastation that was caused by the war this nation waged against Native Americans. I’m not a naive person, and I do realize that there are times when war is inevitable, but I do not believe this is one of those times. I do not believe that the stakes are so high that there are not other ways Saddam Hussein could be contained. So this is very important to me, to speak about this, and to speak about it in connection with this book, which begins in the wake of the manslaughter of World War I.

I have this odd sense that as a nation of consumers we are being sold a war. The war is pitched and hyped to us every day. We are supposed to buy into it just the way it was “un-American” not to spend money after 9/11. Not buying this war is not un-American to my mind. Not buying it is exercising the freedom of conscience we have always stood for. It is very American to refuse a con job.