Poured Over: Louise Erdrich on The Sentence

“I’d always wanted to write a ghost story. And I always wanted to write about what it was like to be haunted, because I feel that so many of us are.” Louise Erdrich’s new novel, The Sentence—her first after The Night Watchman, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—is a funny, big-hearted and profound story of second chances and ghosts, books and bookselling, and the messy love between spouses and parents and children. Louise joins us on the show to talk about hauntings, perfect short novels, the joys of bookselling, the power of names and more. Featured books: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and Euphoria by Lily King. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

From this episode:

Louise Erdrich: And then I had this line come to me: While in prison, I received a dictionary. And once I wrote it down, I had this entire voice come to me. So that beginning was written relatively quickly, quickly for me, and I followed this voice all the way through it. It’s funny, I think most writers feel that if you have a strong voice in a book, it’s kind of chosen you. I’m not sure where that comes from, but Tookie seem to choose me and I kept writing in her voice.

…I think in every indigenous culture, there’s a very close connection between your name and your spirit. And names or dreamed names are given names connect you to your world. It’s very different than the Western way of naming people. And you can be named after someone or nicknamed. And you probably have a legal name. So, with every person, there are many names, many names. But the important name, the one he’s talking about is, is the name that the spirits know you’re by. So, the spiritual world would know a person by the name that has been dreamed specifically for that person. So that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about a world of spirituality in which he participates continually. I don’t know that a lot of people really think of urban indigenous people as participating in a lot of ceremonies, a lot of ceremonial life. But that’s exactly what happens. It may not be what people generally think of as being out on the plains and a forest by the ocean, whatever, it’s in the city. And there are so many connections in the city. So, I wanted to have that in the book as well. The fact that he has, he is living in a city, and he is participating in a spiritual life. Every day, he is part of his own tribal, spiritual traditions.

B&N: And like names, books connect us in so many different ways at so many different points. I know books have gotten a lot of us through the bulk of the pandemic, which obviously is continuing. But you also have this wonderful line in the book where you say, books aren’t meant to be safe.

Louise Erdrich: Oh, yes, that’s right. And then that writer who’s in the book, Louise, when Tookie tells her that she thinks a line in a book actually kills…that a sentence in the book actually has the power of life and death, Louise mutters I wish I could write a sentence like that. That’s a writer. And whether it’s me or not, doesn’t matter. It’s like any writer is like, I want to write a sentence that has that kind of power.