Louise Erdrich wins 2013 American Book Award

On November 23, 2013, author Louise Erdrich received a well-deserved 2013 American Book Award for her novel THE ROUND HOUSE, which has been called the Native American TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The American Book Award celebrates diversity and recognizes authors for outstanding literary achievement — a unique honor, since it’s an award given by other writers, with no categories, no nominees, and no losers.

“The novel showcases her [Erdrich’s] extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together…[a] powerful novel worth reading.”

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 

Advice to Myself, poem by Louise Erdrich

ADVICE TO MYSELF
by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons 
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

“Advice to Myself” is found in Louise Erdrich’s poetry collection Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Louise Erdrich, born on June 7, 1954, is an American author 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 Ojibwa and Chippewa). In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. 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.

Louise Erdrich Discusses the Writer’s Trance

“I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence …

But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, it can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.”

LOUISE ERDRICH, The Paris Review (Winter 2010)

Illustration: Portrait of Louise Erdrich (Chicago Magazine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)

Advice to Myself, Poem by Louise Erdrich

ADVICE TO MYSELF
by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons 
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

…”Advice to Myself” is found in Louise Erdrich’s poetry collection Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

PHOTO: Louise Erdrich photographed by Paul Emmel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Louise Erdrich, born on June 7, 1954, is an American author 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 Ojibwa and Chippewa). In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. 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.

Wishing Louise Erdrich — one of our favorite novelists — a very happy June 7th birthday! 

Louise Erdrich Wins 2012 National Book Award for Fiction

Native American author Louise Erdrich — and, in my eyes, one of the greatest novelists of all time — won a well-deserved 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel THE ROUND HOUSE, which has been called the Native American TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

“The novel showcases her [Erdrich’s] extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together…[a] powerful novel worth reading.” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 

While THE ROUND HOUSE is still on my reading list, I have read many of Erdrich’s other novels (she’s written about a dozen), and am in awe of her writing and storytelling. Congratulations, Louise! 

Advice from Louise

“…grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range…I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel…The gratification has to come from the effort itself…I approach the work as though…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.” LOUISE ERDRICH, as quoted in a 2010 PARIS REVIEW interview. Find the fascinating interview here.

You can read a review of Erdrich’s most recent novel Shadow Tag in the New York Times here.

I consider Louise Erdrich one of the finest writers of all time — I am in awe of her. In the late 1990s, I was fortunate to have met Ms. Erdrich during a reading in the Chicago area. I was not only impressed with her words, her stories, and her power as a reader, I was also impressed with her as a warm, generous human being.

Thank you for the great advice, Louise.

Photo: Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.