Gilbert Cruz: I was going to ask you about one story in particular, The Love of My Days, that I read somewhere was written over eight years. It's a 10-page story. What are you doing to these stories over that time? Are you leaving them for a year? Are you coming back and changing a sentence? What is the work that is being done on them?

Louise Erdrich: Well, it's hard to know about this story because I started it, you know, quite a while ago and then I put it away. I didn't even know I had it. And I think I was changing from Microsoft to Pages.

Gilbert Cruz: That's That's the real truth right there.

Louise Erdrich: There it is. That's That's That's how it came to be.

Gilbert Cruz: It's the book review from the New York Times. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and today on the show, we are talking to Puliter Prize and National Book Award winner, Louise Erdrich. Since the publication of her first novel, Love Medicine, in 1984, Louise has made her mark in just about every corner of the American literary scene. She's one of the most prolific Native American authors and has published a couple dozen books from fiction to non-fiction to poetry and books for kids. Her latest is a collection of short stories that she wrote over the past two decades. It's called Python's Kiss, some non-fiction. So, when I sat down with Louise, that's where we started.

Louise Erdrich: So, I want to talk about stories for a bit. Um, yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: What What are the nuggets? How do you find that there's a thing that turns into a story?

Louise Erdrich: I like how you ask what are the nuggets because that is that is really what happens. I I have a set of words just randomly pop up and I'll write I keep notebooks. I write something down and sometimes something keeps going for a while but it always fizzles out and I think wow that's gone that energy is gone for these stories something came back and then I would would write a little more and a little more it just crept along this you know army crawled along the forest floor somehow.

Gilbert Cruz: until it got to the end.

Gilbert Cruz: And you I mean the the answer is obviously yes because you have finished these stories, but you have the patience to army crawl through years of working on a single story intermittently.

Louise Erdrich: I it isn't really patience. Uh really everything I do is it's to amuse myself in so many ways. So, I probably got impatient with the story cuz it wasn't getting anywhere and I went on to something else and then I lost my patience with it there and then I came back to something and then maybe I get a little bit of a reward or I get a wine or even a paragraph and then I'm hooked again.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: You know, easily hooked. I'm wondering how do you know when something is a story as opposed to a novel or a poem or a children's book? What is it that in your mind leads to you saying this is going to exist in this box?

Louise Erdrich: It it announces itself. I don't have a way of changing it if it's not going to be what what it wants to be.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: If it's going to be a a novel, then it it it keeps going. It simply won't stop. If it's a story, it evolves toward an ending in the next 15 or 20 pages. It and I I can't really explain it better than that. I mean, it's a it's a process that seems to happen outside of my will or exactly what I want to be doing. I mean, it's what the writing wants to do with itself. You can't really control everything that's going to happen in your in your your writing life, in your art life, in whatever you do. And you have to be comfortable with that. And I always I think I always was because I was never a very in control person. It's never been me.

Gilbert Cruz: Can Can I ask what you mean by that?

Louise Erdrich: I mean, I didn't have a lot of control over my I didn't really know how to control a lot of my behavior, how to work with people around me, a lot of awkwardness.

Louise Erdrich: I have a lot of experience but I have a very uh rudimentary ability to process my experience except through writing. That's my only that's always been my only real way of processing. It's it's changed as it goes along and I I I keep a lot of diaries probably because it's helped me.

Gilbert Cruz: Are those diaries um things, you know, like daily reflections that that these are things that happened to me or they sort of more philosophical?

Louise Erdrich: Well, they started as cries of woe. That's how a lot of diaries start.

Gilbert Cruz: it's a great place to start.

Louise Erdrich: It's a cry of woe. every I mean, I've looked through my my old notebooks and they're very funny because nothing as dramatic or stupid has ever happened to anybody else but me or that Louise from back then. Um, but then they they slowly became more invested in taking note of what was happening. And what really has been helpful for me in looking back is that I to a surprising extent did write about things that were happening around me about not so much people but about little travels. I did I wrote lots of detail down

Gilbert Cruz: and this is from an early age from when you were a teenager from when you were in university like when did you start this?

Louise Erdrich: I started it in fifth grade.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh my, that's very early.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah. Because I was so overwhelmed. I worked in a movie theater and I was so overwhelmed by seeing Planet of the Apes. The end of it really knocked me over.

Gilbert Cruz: It's one of the great movie endings of all time.

Louise Erdrich: It's a great movie.

Gilbert Cruz: Uh, you know, damn you. Damn you, you did it. You know, hopefully I'm not spoiling it for anyone. We all know what happens at the end of Planet of the Age. Do you remember why it was so um jarring for you?

Louise Erdrich: I do because then you immediately assume, okay, it was a nuclear war. This is what happened.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: At the time, growing up in North Dakota, our state was the third largest nuclear power in the world. We had we were surrounded by hundreds of ICBM missiles. just so much nuclear power. It was it was a it was astounding. We were kind of proud of it in some perverted way because we were a national sacrifice area.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: So the end of Planet of the Apes was I I decided that I should really take this seriously. And then I started thinking a lot more about it throughout my life. if I would return to it.

Gilbert Cruz: And you're referring to all of, you know, all of the ICBMs that are in missile silos underground that on the off chance something we got into a nuclear conflration with someone, they would all launch from all of those around you.

Louise Erdrich: They would all launch from North Dakota, but North Dakota was the sponge that would pick the up all of the ones that were launched at us.

Louise Erdrich: It's come back to me a lot now. I'm working on a different book, but uh well, I don't want to get into it actually. It's

Gilbert Cruz: okay. Let's let's just leave it.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay, we'll move away from it for now. So, I ask I feel like I ask authors all the time about influences, their favorite writers, their favorite books. But actually, rarely or or in in in this job at least, I've rarely gotten a chance to talk about short stories, hear authors talk about short stories. Um I I'd love to hear you know writers or stories that um have influenced you in writing in this particular form.

Louise Erdrich: Anton Czechov number one. I mean most writers say Anton Czechov. I mean there's that that's one person I go back to all the time to read. Um George Saunders of course

Gilbert Cruz: a man who himself loves Czechov.

Louise Erdrich: Absolutely. Yeah. I think everyone I admire always always goes back to Czechov. Um, uh, I read Lauren Grath's Brawler, the first story. That's a collection. And I cried. I don't usually cry. It's It's unusual. But that story, uh, who else

Gilbert Cruz: can I interrupt you to ask what it was? Um, what was it about it that made you emotional?

Louise Erdrich: Yes, there's a part in the story where you think that something has happened, but then it turns around and says, "If only that had happened," and then tells the truth of what happened. And at that point, you know, your heart starts beating a little differently. And by the end of it, you're wrecked on the page because it's also about this is something that I I love in fiction. That's the child hero, a child who is a hero.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: And this hero is trying to to save her family and it does, you know, I don't want to say exactly what happens, but um it makes you cry.

Gilbert Cruz: I feel like right after this interview, I'm gonna go read the story. I think we have a copy downstairs in the office. Yeah,

Louise Erdrich: you have to.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm curious just off that note, off that feeling, that emotional feeling reading that Lauren Gra story, do you do you ever get readers of yours telling you that they got emotional, cried at certain parts? And is that something that if and when it happens, does is it surprising to you? Do you know that things are going to have a certain effect with readers or can you never tell?

Louise Erdrich: If if if something I write surprises me into tearing up, then I think maybe it will. And for instance, the end of Love of My Days did get to me that way. It's wonderful to hear that because it strikes as someone who's doesn't write fiction, never has the idea that I would something would come out of me. I would write something. I would it would I would be the person whose brain invented it and yet it would still strike me or surprise me in such a way that I would have an additional emotional reaction is it's another reason why art is amazing. It's just like you know you the writer put something down on paper. It wouldn't exist without you and yet you are tearing up at the thing that you invented. It is very strange because I I know you hear this from other writers, but it's very true. There's there's really no way to control everything that happens in a piece of art.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: So, whatever is in you that's writing down the words can take over and you sometimes I don't even think I wrote it. Sometimes, for instance, when I look back at the story that I was talking about, how it took me for a long time to write it, some of these stories, I wasn't sure that I had written it or I had it didn't seem like something I had written. And yet, obviously, it was in my handwriting. So,

Gilbert Cruz: how does that is the creation part of it still mysterious to you in some way?

Louise Erdrich: Yeah, thank God. I mean, we have to have a mystery. I I don't think I'd like it if I knew if I knew much more about it than I do. I I like working on uh a level that isn't all me. I'm uh in my real life a boring person. I don't have interesting things to I'm sorry anyone who's listening interesting things to say. I don't really have a kind of magical personality, but the stories write themselves. the the novels they and I I must have something to do with it because I'm I I do have um an immense amount of research that goes into everything.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: And thought and emotion, but there's some piece of it that belongs to some other world, some other entity. not an entity, but that place where art happens. Uh, whatever it is.

Gilbert Cruz: After the break, Louise explains why crawling around on the floor was part of her writing process. In Python's Kiss, your collection, you have one story that read to me for much of it like a like a ghost story. There's a a story called Borcelino. You have two interlin stories that are essentially science fiction. I'm wondering, do you think about genre when you're writing or is it just this is the story I wrote and I am Louise and these are the elements and let someone else categorize it.

Louise Erdrich: I love how you say that. I'm Louise. Let someone else figure it out. Yeah, that's how it is. I don't I didn't really think about the genre be to be honest. I

Gilbert Cruz: I don't know. I felt like this is the way things are trending that there'd be an afterlife that's run by various competing corporations and you wanted to get in.

Louise Erdrich: Mhm.

Louise Erdrich: And I even have more of it that's about that I wrote a long time ago about giant data centers that have to be tended by low wage workers. A and so I didn't think of it as science fiction. No, I thought of it as a possible a speculative fiction. I like I like that kind of that term.

Louise Erdrich: I I'm curious if I were to ask your children, right, what it looks like when you're writing, what do you what do you think they would say? Are you lost in your thoughts while you're walking around? Are you do you have to disappear into a room of your own or ha or have you sort of have you been able to integrate it into your your daily life in a way that work, you know, where you don't have to remove yourself?

Louise Erdrich: Well, I do prefer to remove myself, but I rarely can really remove myself. And I think they would just say that either I have a glazed look in, you know, I have sort of a glazed a effect or I do I when when one of them asked me, you're you seem a little seem a little off today. Are you crawling around on the floor again? Because that's how I find sometimes I just have to throw everything on the floor that I have all these notebooks, these crazy notes and everything that I've taken and I have to crawl through them and put them in order and I'm crawling around on the floor. That's part of my process.

Gilbert Cruz: That's incredible. I I It's, you know, physicalizing this intellectual act.

Louise Erdrich: Is that what it is? I feel like it's what it is. You know, you have these little all these little scraps of paper and and you need to there needs to be a part of your body that's sort of working with it.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah. I'm like putting them in stacks and then I'll find one that maybe, you know, I forgot it. It might be the beginning of the story or something.

Gilbert Cruz: So, I had the chance last year to interview Isabel Aende, and she talked about the fact that she had a decades worth of of letters from her mother. She estimated that she had more than 20,000 letters. We're not here to compare numbers, but but I know that you in your own way have a a real cache of letters from a parent, letters from your father. I'm sort of jealous of the both of you to have something that you could refer to, go back and refer to time and again. I I'd love to hear about those letters and what that relationship was like, this written relationship. Did your dad consider himself a writer? I think he did. I mean, I considered him a writer. He included poems, stories. He would he would make a story like like out of anything that happened in our family like your mother is canning again. and he would enlarge it to she's canned the toads in the garden. She's canned the the slugs on the plants. She's canned everything. And he'd go in this long list of things that she'd canned. And he would, you know, they're wonderful letters. He also started this project that I eventually uh made into a booklet which was he which was to write a limmerick about every town in North Dakota. So he he he did that. So I was his letters are really one of the treasures of my life. I have have um stacks of them. My mother also wrote letters. We were a letterw writing family. Uh my grandfather

Louise Erdrich: I um have my grandfather's letter is from when he was a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Chipua and he went through. It's it's what the night watchman is based on the personality that I knew from the letters and knew from being around him.

Gilbert Cruz: I know when you have spoken about the night watchman again uh the the the book whose main character is based in part in your grandfather which won the Pulitzer Prize. You you've you've said you know that the award didn't go to you the Pulitzer Prize didn't go to you it went to the book and maybe by extension it went to your grandfather. Um, and I'm curious about the way that you've talked about this book because it seems even though each of the books that you've written are surely personal in some way that there's something about this one in particular and and all the accolades that it has gotten that that has made you talk about it in a very specific way.

Louise Erdrich: Well, it's very special to me because I I wasn't for instance, this happened to me later in my life when I knew that I shouldn't attempt to take a control of a book when I had I had less ego invested in it. When I wrote say the Master Butcher Singing Club, I had too much of my own ego invested. I thought I had some great ideas, but I could have done a much better book if I'd been older and if I'd understood that sometimes the book is very simple. The story is very simple and you have to stay with the simplicity. Uh that's what happened with the night watchman. I just decided that I would stay simple.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm. Um, can I just ask you one or two questions about your bookstore, which I've never been to and I would love to go to one day.

Louise Erdrich: Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: In 2001, you opened a bookstore in Minneapolis. It's been open for a quarter century now, and there's nothing to guarantee that any business, let alone an indie bookstore, which is, is going to succeed. Um, I'm wondering how involved are you in the bookstore and whether or not owning this store and minglingly with customers and and doing all that stuff has has it made you think differently about books and the way they exist in people's lives?

Louise Erdrich: It's entirely changed my way of looking at books and the way they affect people and how they how how you know the survival of this bookstore has been it's been a levitating act. It really has. Um, there were times I thought I' I didn't know how it could go on. It was very hard, rough going. I'd started it right when Amazon started taking over so much of the industry and so much of book life. But when I first started, there was only one set of shelves that had any native titles on them. And they were mostly by non-native authors about native people.

Louise Erdrich: And now we could fill the whole bookstore. It's not a huge bookstore. It's small, but we could fill it all with native books. It's a general bookstore, but something has happened in indigenous writing has just exploded into into view. And I knew this was going to happen because I knew that once a lot of people from a lot of different tribes began to write about their backgrounds, there would be some similarities, but they would be so uniquely different that people would want to read them and there would be book after book after book. And that's what's happened.

Gilbert Cruz: Is there um as you said, you could fill your entire bookstore um with native authors if you so wished. I'm I'm wondering if there are um either a few authors or you know a few categories that you would recommend to our listeners who you know maybe their experience of native authors starts and ends with you or starts and ends with you and Joy Harjo or you know or goes as far as Steven Graham Jones. But who are some other people that we should be reading?

Louise Erdrich: Um, well, first of all, this is an a writer I return to over and over and read his book over and over. This is James Welch, and his book Winter in the Blood, he's all of his books are excellent. Um, he's not with us anymore, but his book Winter in the Blood, published, I think, in 1974, should have won the won the Pulitzer Prize that year. to the year it wasn't given out, but it's the most beautiful, bleak, short, funny, intensely personal book. It It's a novel that I I I would love to have written. It's It's an amazing book. It begins and ends and wraps up in a story that goes back and forth through time, but it's really the story of a kind of it's kind of a binge story, but it's funny and it's beautiful. I don't know. It's one of my favorite books of all time.

Gilbert Cruz: Coming up, you might be as surprised as I was to learn what book Louise currently has on her shelf. We're going to talk a little bit more about books. um for more than a decade. I think as you know because you participated in this feature almost exactly 10 years ago in April 2016. For more than a decade the New York Times Book Review has been doing by the book. It is a series in which we ask authors a set of recurring questions about their reading, their reading habits, books that they love. Um we uh do an audio version of that now and and I want to ask you a few questions.

Louise Erdrich: Okay.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. Let's start with this one. Um, what is the what's what's the last book that you've recommended to a member of your family and you said you have to read this.

Louise Erdrich: Uh, so my my family a a lot of my family have insomnia. So we do we listen to books to put us to sleep and I have one that is perfect for sleeping too. It's uh Shauna's book. So, it's it's not somebody who's going to listen to this. The Pillow Book was written in um around 1000. It's very old. It's it's incredibly fresh and new. everything about it. It's a book of miscellaney. Uh and it it is a book with entries like hateful things, depressing things, splendid things. And there's these beautiful lists and there's beautiful descriptions of the sliver of a moon at sunrise, you know, and things that just are so evocative, but they're disconnected. So, they're perfect for falling asleep, too.

Gilbert Cruz: Louise, I'm going to give it a shot. I often have to listen to something myself to fall asleep at night. So, okay. Um, next question. Are there books that you find yourself returning to time and again?

Louise Erdrich: Well, I do return to Winter in the Blood by James Welch, Death of the Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. Um, I've read several times I've read this um, story collection called Save Me Stranger by Erica Krauss. There's something about it. It's like a very traditional set of story form stories and they are just they just blow you away. Um, Blest Eye and Ostritz. A I listen I I get back to Oustralitz all the time.

Gilbert Cruz: Tell me a little more about Ostitz. This is the WG Sabbald book.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah. Um I find it one of the most capaciously endlessly fascinating books I've ever read. There's so many parts of it that you just want to read over and over and over. There's a there's a part about ma this there's a part about something called a noarama. There's there there's parts of it that take you off in these long side pieces, but it always returns to this central theme of um Oustralit trying to put together who he is, where he's from. And when he finally does, it's a wrenching part of the book. Um, there's a line in Ostrolitz that's so predictive of what what happened on 911 and it's a line that goes something like giant buildings always have in them a preview of their own destruction.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh wow. That's incredible because Oustralitz I believe came out 3 weeks after 9/11, right?

Louise Erdrich: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Early October 2001. I must admit, I've never read it. I've always wanted to. I've read The Rings of Saturn, which I thought was one of the more amazing and surprising reading experiences I've ever had in my life, which is gorgeous.

Louise Erdrich: and you never knew where it was going.

Gilbert Cruz: And the mixture that he does of photos and real stuff and fictional stuff is is quite unique, right? I guess you answered this one already. The last book that made you cry, you would probably say it was that story in in Brawler, but is there is there another book that would fall into this category? What is the last book that made you cry?

Louise Erdrich: Well, now I don't often cry at stories. It's it's it's unusual, but this was not too long ago also, and it's the end of a book that's not out yet. I got to see it in a advanced reader and it's Anne Patchet's next book, Whistler. It's extraordinary.

Gilbert Cruz: All right, that's quite a tease, Louise.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah, I'm not going to say anything else. You got to read it.

Gilbert Cruz: The these bookstore owner/authors are colluding right here.

Louise Erdrich: Oh, yeah. That's both Lauren and

Gilbert Cruz: it's the three of you.

Louise Erdrich: You wonder when do when do we have time?

Gilbert Cruz: Uh I I I do want I continue to wonder that. Um, I'm curious. Do you think your reading tastes have changed over time?

Louise Erdrich: Yes, I am more critical and I'm I will throw I will just like put a book down if it doesn't interest me enough in the beginning or or if it has um if it has certain things I don't like. I don't like any snorting. I don't like any giggling. I don't like overused things like giggling. I mean, can't you find a better word? Um, or if it's repeating, people are repeatingly gasping at something they hear or so. There's certain things that if they repeat them more than once, I can't take it. or if there's a word that is always repeated by a character and or if someone says something say cavalerely um and it then it happens again two pages later I I I can't take that. So I I

Gilbert Cruz: It sounds like your It sounds like your standards have just increased over the the more you know the more you the more the more books you read at a much higher level.

Louise Erdrich: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Um that's fine. It's just taste.

Louise Erdrich: Maybe

Gilbert Cruz: I support this.

Louise Erdrich: Um,

Louise Erdrich: thank you.

Gilbert Cruz: Are there any books that you think people would be surprised to find on your shelves?

Louise Erdrich: Yes. And it's right here. It's Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest.

Gilbert Cruz: Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest. Please tell me what this book is about.

Louise Erdrich: This book is a Minneapolis book. Is one of the reasons I love Minneapolis so much. Uh there is a controversy about a golf course that's in the that's in the city and is taking up a lot of green space and is polluting a lot of water and it's in our public park system and it's only you know it's used more by a few it's used by golfers but some a lot of people want to keep it but a lot of people who'd rather have public sex would not want to keep So this book is this is a compendium of essays on how to change this into a public sex forest. This part of the golf course,

Gilbert Cruz: you know, I'm glad to have done this interview with you, Louise, if only if only for me to have learned what a public sex forest is.

Louise Erdrich: Well, I'm glad you know too now. And I'll just tell you that it's a published a book published by Matland Systems Engineering. So the engineering problems may be also addressed in here. I'm not sure.

Gilbert Cruz: Louise Erdrich, thank you so much for coming on the book review to talk about your new collection of stories, Python's Kiss. Uh this was just a delight of a conversation. It's it's a joy to have you on.

Louise Erdrich: It's been a pleasure for me to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Gilbert Cruz: The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Lissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Alicia. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad and Paula Schuman. We want to hear what you think about the show. Send us an email at the book review at ny times.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.