'I'm just hanging out in the stairwell of my attic,' Louise Erdrich laughs down the phone line from her home in Minnesota, after being asked…
laughs down the phone line from her home in Minnesota, after being asked if she needs to sign off and do whatever it is that the world demands of Very Important Authors on any given Tuesday. "So I'm fine to talk, don't worry.", including a National Book Award for 2012's. But the novelist, poet, and activist still speaks like someone who simply loves a good conversation, especially about a great book.
I think that characters are both from outside the writer and from within the writer, so it’s as if the writer has been developing some sort of interior voice unknown, a subterranean voice that begins to speak to them. And these characters are very willful and powerful — willful in such a way that you find yourself writing a line that encapsulates this part of them.where a character says, "They always try to solve Indians. They solve us by getting rid of us.
I think in doing this long body of work that I’ve been working on, it’s something that has to be grappled with, an acknowledgment of history. It’s true that the policies that start with dispossession do not stop there — they continue on with attempting to use white sugar, white flour, dried potato, dried eggs, canned pork for the rations that were to be delivered by treaty, and that food being handed down has led to a legacy of an incredibly high rate of diabetes and heart disease.
Ah, how to parse this out! Because of course I think about this stuff a lot, but I never come to any sensible conclusions []. I do think it's important to have the lived experience in some ways, it's important to have the family connections, the ancestral connections. Or it is for me, at least. But it's also important, I think, to take it book by book in each situation.
Your work sometimes leans into the supernatural but stops short of full-on magical realism. Is there a line that you draw?
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