Louise Erdrich

When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I've never come to be a competent speaker. I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience.

I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe's termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.

My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.