The Antelope Wife

About the author

Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction

“Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208,” interview by Lisa Halliday, first published in The Paris Review. Copyright © 2010 by The Paris Review, used with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

ONLY ONE PASSENGER TRAIN per day makes the Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo, North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers.” Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, but we met in the Fargo Econo Lodge parking lot. From there, with Erdrich’s eight-year-old daughter, Kiizh (Sky in Ojibwe), we drove five hours up to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, on the Manitoba border. Every August, when tick season has subsided, Erdrich and her sister Heid spend a week in a former monastery here to attend the Little Shell Powwow and to conduct a writing workshop at the Turtle Mountain Community College. One afternoon, participants took turns reciting poetry under a beside the single-room house where Erdrich’s mother grew up. The workshop is mainly attended by Ojibwe or other Native people from neighboring reservations, and is in its eighth year.

Moving east with my mattress and writing table.

Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first of seven children raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, by a German American father and a mother who is half “a mixture of other tribes plus French” and half Ojibwe — Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, being one of numerous Native American tribes comprised by the Anishinaabe (“Original People”). Both of Erdrich’s parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. For many years, her grandfather Patrick Gourneau, Aunishinaubay, was the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair.

Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976, and returned in June 2009 to receive an honorary doctorate of letters and deliver the main commencement address; the same year, her novel The Plague of Doves, which centers on the lynching of four Indians wrongly accused of murdering a white family (and which Philip Roth has called “her dazzling masterpiece”), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After invariably classifying Erdrich as a Native American writer, many reviewers proceed to compare her work to that of William Faulkner or Gabriel García Márquez: Faulkner for her tangled family trees, her ventriloquist skill, and her expansive use of a fictional province no less fully imagined than Yoknapatawpha County; García Márquez for her flirtations with magical realism. But so strange are Erdrich’s narrative rhythms, and so bonded is her language to its subject matter, that it seems just as accurate to call hers a genre of one.

When the workshop was over, Erdrich drove us back to Fargo for walleye cakes at the Hotel Donaldson, and then to visit her parents, who still live in the modest house in Wahpeton where Erdrich grew up. The next day, while Erdrich attended a wedding in Flandreau, South Dakota, her sister took me the remaining two hundred miles to Minneapolis, where, three days later, Erdrich and I reconvened at her bookstore and Native American arts shop, Birchbark Books. Here, Erdrich’s eldest daughter, Persia, decides which children’s books to stock. Taped to most of the shelves are detailed recommendations handwritten by Erdrich herself. An upside-down canoe hangs from the ceiling, suspended between a birchbark reading loft and a Roman Catholic confessional decorated with sweetgrass rosaries. We linger at the store, but not until we make the long walk to Erdrich’s house do we finally sit down on the back porch and turn the tape recorder on.

Erdrich was wearing her driving clothes: jeans, sandals, and an untucked button-down shirt. A Belgian shepherd named Maki dozed at our feet, and Erdrich’s youngest daughter came out a couple of times — once to ask whether we wanted Play-Doh ice-cream cones, later to report that a Mr. Sparky was on the phone. Then a neighboring buzz saw started up, and we moved inside: up to a small attic room pleasantly cluttered with photographs, artifacts, and many more Catholic and Ojibwe totems, including moccasins, shells, bells, dice, bitterroot, a bone breastplate, an abalone shell for burning sage, a turtle stool, a Huichol mask with a scorpion across its mouth and a double-headed eagle on its brow, and a small army of Virgin statuettes. Crowded into a bookshelf beside a worn armchair in the center of the room are the hardbound spiral notebooks in which, in a deeply slanted longhand, Erdrich still writes most of her books — sitting in the chair with a wooden board laid across its arms as a desk.

INTERVIEWER: 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.

INTERVIEWER: What had you done?

ERDRICH: 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.

INTERVIEWER: Was your teacher anything like the one in your story “Sister Godzilla”?

ERDRICH: 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 and a blond bouffant do, and wore a chiffon scarf tied at the tip of her chin. Before Miss Smith, I’d never recognized 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, and was a reader from then on.

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.

INTERVIEWER: What are the letters about?

ERDRICH: Mushroom hunting. Roman Stoics. American Indian Movement politics. Longfellow. Stamp collecting. Apples. He and my mother have an orchard. 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.

INTERVIEWER: Did your mother speak Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language) when you were growing up?

ERDRICH: 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 completely. Learning language is far more difficult later 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.

INTERVIEWER: Were you raised to be devout?

ERDRICH: 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 the Bible, 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.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like to leave Wahpeton for Dartmouth?

ERDRICH: 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.

INTERVIEWER: When did you start writing?

ERDRICH: 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.

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.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you when you wrote Love Medicine?

ERDRICH: 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, green linoleum floors, and a little desk with 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.

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 book

About the Revision

THE ORIGINAL ANTELOPE WIFE 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