Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich
Erdrich at the 2015 National Book Festival.
Born	Karen Louise Erdrich (1954-06-07) June 7, 1954 Little Falls, Minnesota, US
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, poet
Genre	Native American literature, children's books
Literary movement	Postmodernism, Native American Renaissance
Notable works	Love Medicine Tracks The Beet Queen The Bingo Palace The Round House

Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich, June 7, 1954)^[1] is an American author, writer of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe and Chippewa).^[2]

Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and also received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.^[3] In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House.^[4] She was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival in September, 2015.^[5] She was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works.

She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.^[6]

Early and personal life

Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was the oldest of seven children to her father, Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and her mother, Rita (née Gourneau), a Chippewa Indian (of half Ojibwe and half French blood). Both parents taught at a boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians for many years.^[7] While Erdrich was a child, her father paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. Her sister Heidi is a poet who also lives in Minnesota and publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich.^[8] Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1976.^[9] She was a part of the first class of women admitted to the college and earned an A.B. in English. During her freshman year at the college, Erdrich met her future husband and collaborator, Michael Dorris, an anthropologist, writer, and then-director of the new Native American Studies program. While attending Dorris’ class, she began to look into her own ancestry, which birthed her inspiration for her literary work, such as poems, short stories, and novels.

In 1978, Erdrich enrolled into a Master of Arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Nearly a year later, she had earned the Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979.^[10] Some of the poems and stories that were written, which intertwined with her heritage, while in the M.A. program later turned out to become published works of Erdrich. She later returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence.^[10]

Erdrich remained in contact with Dorris. He attended one of Erdrich’s poetry readings and became impressed with her work. As a writer himself, Dorris published the best-selling novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and in 1989 received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.^[10] He then began to gain an interest in working with Erdrich. Although Erdrich and Dorris at a time were on two different sides of the world, Erdrich in Boston and Dorris in New Zealand for field research, the two began to work on short stories together. One short story that involved this collaborative work was titled "The World’s Greatest Fisherman", which won five thousand dollars in the Nelson Algren fiction competition.^[10] Erdrich and Dorris then expanded the story into Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Around the same time as their collaborative success, Dorris left New Zealand, and upon returning, Erdrich and Dorris' literary partnership led them to a romantic relationship. Erdrich married Dorris in 1981, and they raised three adopted children and three biological children until their separation in 1995 and Dorris' suicide in 1997. Following Dorris' suicide, Erdrich released The Antelope Wife (1998).

During the publication of Love Medicine, Erdrich also produced her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984), which highlights the struggles between Native and non-Native cultures and also commemorates and celebrates family, ties of kinship, autobiographical meditations, monologues, and love poetry while also incorporating an influence of Ojibwe myths and legends.^[10] Erdrich continued to write poems, which have been included in her collections. However, though her poetry is well known, Erdrich remains best known as a novelist, producing a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels.^[10]

Although many of Erdrich’s works show an influence from Native American heritage, her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) also included a focus on the European side of her ancestry. The novel includes stories of a World War II veteran that took place in a small North Dakota town. The novel went on to become a finalist for the National Book Award.

Aside from fiction, Erdrich has also written non-fiction. The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995) included the timeline of her pregnancy and birth of her first child, and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country traces travels she took in northern Minnesota and Ontario's lakes following the birth of her last daughter.^[11]

She returned to Dartmouth in 2009 to receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters and to deliver the commencement address.^[12]

Erdrich and her two sisters have hosted writers' workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.^[13]

When asked in an interview if writing is a lonely life for her Erdrich replied, "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." Erdrich currently lives in Minnesota.^[14]

Work

Her heritage from both parents is influential in her life and prominent in her work.^[15]

In 1979 she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman", a short story about June Kashpaw, a divorced Ojibwe woman whose death by hypothermia brought her relatives home to a fictional North Dakota reservation for her funeral. It won the Nelson Algren Short Fiction prize and eventually became the first chapter of her debut novel, Love Medicine, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1984.^[12]

Love Medicine won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.^[16] It has also been featured on the National Advanced Placement Test for Literature.^[17] Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.^[18]

Tracks (1988) goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation and introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Nanabozho.^[19] Tracks shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church. The Bingo Palace (1994), set in the 1980s, describes the effects of a casino and a factory on the reservation community. Tales of Burning Love (1997) finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the previous books, and introduces a new set of white people into the reservation universe.

The Antelope Wife (1998), Erdrich's first novel after her divorce from Dorris, was the first of her novels to be set outside the continuity of the previous books.^[20] She subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns, and has published five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), a macabre mystery that again draws on Erdrich's Native American and German-American heritage. Both novels have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen. In 2009, Erdrich's novel The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The narrative focuses on the historical lynching of four Native people wrongly accused of murdering a Caucasian family, and the effect of this injustice on the current generations.

Erdrich's complexly interwoven series of novels have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. Like Faulkner's, Erdrich's successive novels created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.^[21]

Birchbark Books

The bookstore hosts literary readings and other events, including the release of each of Erdrich's new works as well as the works and careers of other writers, particularly local Native writers. Erdrich and her staff consider Birchbark Books to be a “teaching bookstore”.^[22] In addition to books, the store sells Native art and traditional medicines, and Native American jewelry. A small nonprofit publisher founded by Erdrich and her sister, Wiigwaas Press, is affiliated with the store.^[22]

Awards

• 1983 Pushcart Prize in Poetry
• 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for Love Medicine^[16]
• 1985 Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts^[23]
• 1987 O. Henry Award, for the short story "Fleur" (published in Esquire, August 1986)^[24]
• 1999 World Fantasy Award, for The Antelope Wife^[25]
• 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas^[26]
• 2005 Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota
• 2006 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, for the children's book "The Game of Silence"^[27]
• 2007 Honorary Doctorate from the University of North Dakota; refused by Erdrich because of her opposition to the university's North Dakota Fighting Sioux mascot^[28]
• 2009 Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters) from Dartmouth College^[29][30]
• 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, for Plague of Doves^[31]
• 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House^[32][33]
• 2013 Rough Rider Award
• 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award^[34]
• 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction^[35]
• 2015 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction^[5]

Works

Novels

• Love Medicine (1984)
• The Beet Queen (1986)
• Tracks (1988)
• The Crown of Columbus [coauthored with Michael Dorris] (1991)
• The Bingo Palace (1994)
• Tales of Burning Love (1997)
• The Antelope Wife (1998)
• The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
• The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003)
• Four Souls (2004)
• The Painted Drum (2005)
• The Plague of Doves (Harper, 2008)
• Shadow Tag (Harper, 2010)
• The Round House (2012)
• LaRose (2016)

Story collections

• The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories 1978-2008 (2009)

Children's literature

• Grandmother's Pigeon (1996)
• The Birchbark House (1999)
• The Range Eternal (2002)
• The Game of Silence (2005)
• The Porcupine Year (2008)
• Chickadee (2012)
• Makoons (2016)

Poetry

• Jacklight (1984)
• Baptism of Desire (1989)
• Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003)

Non-fiction

• Route Two [coauthored with Michael Dorris] (1990)
• The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birthyear (1995)
• Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003)

As editor or contributor

• The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris (Foreword) (1989)
• The Best American Short Stories 1993 (Editor, with Katrina Kenison) (1993)

Interviews

• Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, ed. Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (Mississippi UP, 1994)
• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 Interview with Louise Erdrich by Lisa Halliday in The Paris Review

Essays

• Two Languages in Mind, But Just One in the Heart (2000)

See also

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas

Further reading

Monographs

• Seema Kurup, Understanding Louise Erdrich (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2015).
• Frances Washburn, Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013).
• David Stirrup, Louise Erdrich (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012)
• Peter Beidler and Gay Barton, A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich (Columbia: Missouri UP, 2006)
• Connie A. Jacobs, The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People (Peter Lang, 2001)
• Lorena L. Stookey, Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood, 1999)

Essay collections

• Louise Erdrich: Critical Insights, ed. Jane Hafen (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2012).
• Louise Erdrich, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (London: Continuum, 2011).
• The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, ed. Allan Chavkin (Birmingham: Alabama UP, 1999).

Teaching guides

• Approaches To Teaching The Works Of Louise Erdrich, ed. Greg Sarris, Connie A. Jacobs and James Richard Giles (MLA, 2004)

References

External links

• Louise Erdrich's Birchbark Blog
• Louise Erdrich at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Works by or about Louise Erdrich in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Louise Erdrich at Library of Congress Authorities — with 35 catalog records