Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

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?