Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

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 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