“My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad has 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.”

“I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words.”

—Louise Erdrich

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When I put those Louise Erdrich interview links at the foot of Monday’s post, I knew they would surely be good reads for anyone who needed one (uh, two). But I’ve since read them and they are FAR TOO GOOD to have been eclipsed like that. So I’m claiming a do-over and giving them today’s full attention! If you’re not familiar with the novelist and her work, there’s a great overview/intro at the top of this first link—

• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 (2010, by Lisa Halliday)
In this 2010 interview — which is outside the Paris Review paywall for the week — Erdrich talks about everything from her dad’s letter-writing skills to the difficulties of learning the Ojibwe language, to why she changed her name, tied herself to a chair, voted for Richard Nixon, rewrites her work even after it’s published, and so many other things. It is long and wide-ranging! But more than that, every answer is a total wow of a different sort from the one before it.

• A Conversation with Louise Erdrich (2024, by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain)
With HolyWhiteMountain, Erdrich talks much more about her bookstore, her influences (Native and non), and the collective fight for Native sovereignty, “joke by joke, book by book, political win by political win.” (I believe this one lives outside the paywall.)

The first Erdrich book I read was Tracks, in a continuing ed class I took with my sister and a friend right after I graduated from college. (I don’t remember what the class was called but I remember we read The Bluest Eye and The House on Mango Street and In the Time of Butterflies … it was a great class.) Now I wish I could read her rewrite. The most recent Erdrich I read was Future Home of the Living God, which I liked many things about, but I didn’t quite love the whole of it. (Now I’m curious if this was the book she was talking about in the 2010 interview — “I suppose I could go back to my eternal science fiction novel …”) Somehow I think I’ve never read Love Medicine, so I’ll rectify that, but these interviews most made me want to read The Night Watchman. And you?