Night Train
Author Interview

On Night Train: Lise Erdrich in conversation with Jonis Agee

Q: You call these pieces “fictions” instead of stories. Why is that? What is the difference?

A: Time, attention, discipline. This is a form I can start and finish because there is a limit to the word count. It has a certain integrity. After twenty years I noticed that there were quite a few of them so they could be a collection.

Q: What should a “fiction” do?

A: It should open up a can of whup-ass. If it can’t do that, it should at least produce a question.

Q: Is the traditional short story broken? Or did your subject matter demand a non-traditional form?

A: No, it’s not the subject matter, just ADHD. There are a dozen unfinished book manuscripts lying around the house in which I aspire to the traditional story form. I need to consider these for ten or twenty years, some things should not be rushed.  

Q: Where do your stories come from?

A: Coffee.

Q: Like Sherman Alexie, you use comedy, satire, parody, and slapstick even in the stories dealing with reservation and Native American life. What is it about these experiences that make this approach especially useful and/or appropriate?

A: That is simply the approach that many here among us take to everyday life. That is how the world looks if you have to get on with it.

Q: What’s it like growing up in a family of writers and artists?

A: I was a middle child of seven. I just wanted to get out of there alive, I didn’t notice if everyone was artists or writers or whatever. I just wanted the drumstick.
 
Truthfully, seriously, I saw that my mother was an artist and kept on drawing and painting and creating things even with all the other stuff she had to do—sew and knit all our clothes, teach us how to read and draw and tie our shoes, grow a garden and can the food, cook all our meals from scratch and nothing, bake bread and cinnamon rolls and granola, make homemade soup every day, go to all the school plays and PTA and other stuff, den mother, church lady—all of that and a full-time job. Her father, my grandpa, was the first “book writer” I ever knew. He did that on top of the 24/7 work life he had for over forty years—truck farmer, tribal chairman, night watchman at the ordnance plant. And my father is 82 and didn’t stop working until pretty recently; he was a teacher at the Indian School and the public school and was in the National Guard summer and weekends. He could always hold an audience with his tales, even school kids; he wrote books of limericks for amusement and always made time to play with us and take us to the gym, skating, skiing, help us with homework, take us on nature hikes and “bow-hunting” expeditions. When I was about ten or eleven years old, my father and I were up in a tree and a buck and two does came and posed right under it like an Outdoor Life cover. It was a perfect shot. Of course he didn’t take it. Instead I could have this story all to myself for years and years and years and save it until right now, this second. Maybe he heard me whisper, “Don’t shoot.” Or maybe he didn’t hear. The incident was never ever mentioned. He has posed as a crabby deaf old German for some time now.

Q: Did you always know you were going to be a writer? When did you begin writing?

A: I started writing and illustrating books when I was five years old. They were about horses and dogs and wild animals. I was always collecting pets and creatures and imitating their habits, movements, vocals, dining etiquette. I was running and climbing everywhere and was knocked unconscious and saw a vision when I jumped out of a tree trying to be the ape from the Tarzan movies; the branch I was swinging on decided to break. It was really disappointing to learn I could not grow up to be an animal. So I wanted to be a veterinarian or an artist.

Q: You don’t earn your living as a writer or academic. How does your job support, inform, and/or interfere with your writing?

A: Roof overhead!

Q: “Indian Ice Cream” is a story that documents a certain time on the reservation through a cluster of events. Would you say that this technique defines your writing, your vision?

A: Oh I hope not. Happens a lot, though. What I mean is that it is right for this particular book. It happened enough times to constitute a category. And there were enough discrete incidents in this category to constitute a collection (or maybe it’s a syndrome). And there are a lot of other ways and means and techniques going on elsewhere, just not in this particular book. I’m all over the place.

I should state that this is not a book about Indians 101, and it has only random contact with the subject; it is a complete idiosyncrasy as to any ideas it may contain and therefore cannot be generalized to any population.

Q: How does a fiction such as “Corn is Number One” coexist with “Great Love Poems of the State Hospital”? What do they share?

A: I think they are both about the self-actualizing potential, the need to be free and to grow. Carl Rogers studied agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before he became the father of humanistic pop psychology and “non-directive person-centered therapy” and author of On Becoming A Person. There is just something about that whole corny philosophy vs. real life experiences counseling sociopaths and drug addicts. It strikes my funny bone so very deeply.

Q: The stories are arranged to form an alphabet in English. Why?

A: I experienced a significant trauma a few years back and had to make baby steps; it was simple standard operating procedure for creating order out of chaos and something out of nothing.

Q: As a clinician, you deal with hardcore realities, while your fiction is driven by fantasy, surrealism, and comedy. What is the relationship?

A: Oh good god you mean there is supposed to be a boundary? I guess I am in trouble.

Q: Are there any recurrent “characters” or narrative voices in these fictions that you especially like? Why? Were any of them especially difficult for you to write? Why?

A: They’re all difficult. I would like them all to go away. Why? So I can be sane! What else. Otherwise, I like the point of view of the dog who can divine hidden knowledge with his nose. I also like the magical-thinking XXXL blonde in the grocery store. And of course the Well-Adjusted Individual.

Q: “Tribe Unknown (Fleur-de-lis)” breaks with the tone and technique of the other stories. What is that?

A: I was temporarily possessed by a different book.

Q: What do you want readers to come away with from your fiction?

A: Maybe just a little surprise, or truly I hope somebody, somewhere will think, “This book is just as good as a can of Pringles.” The reason I hope for that is because many years ago I read a blurb on one of your books of very-short stories and the blurber compared the stories to potato chips, i.e., you can’t eat just one. And I thought, maybe someday I can attain that level of validation.

Q: Describe the writing of these fictions—how you work, when, where?

A: When I get up and drink coffee in the morning at home and then sometimes on my coffee breaks here and there. After that I would rather not have anything to do with them. They are mean to me.

Q: Are there any writers who have influenced you in terms of creating a distinct voice?

A: Some of these stories were published twenty years ago. At that time I recall being taken with the new “sudden” fiction and “instant” fiction anthologies, so anyone who was in those. Richard Brautigan must have influenced the story “Beehive.” I also took to longer works, Jim Harrison especially, where the writer cuts to the chase, gets to the point, gets her done with poetic muscle. Meanwhile I marveled at the singular genius of Gerald Vizenor, Ray Young Bear, Joy Harjo, and then later on Sherman Alexie, but he is just a youth and I had already hoped to be favorably compared to a can of Pringles at that point.