Erdrich's Love Research Articles

An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Julie Hensley

An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Julie Hensley Jason Howard Most artists carry their childhood landscape like a native language," poet and fiction writer Julie Hensley states, an observation that contains the framework for her captivating short story collection Landfall, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. Winner of the Non/Fiction Collection Prize, the book centers on Conrad's Fork, a small Kentucky town conjured so vividly that, in the words of [End Page 54] bestselling novelist Amy Greene, "it's easy to forget [it] is a fictional place." That's due in no small part to Hensley's childhood in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where Elizabeth Taylor famously choked on a chicken bone and the spectre of John Fox, Jr. continues to haunt the hills. The stories and people she encountered there continue to inform her writing, she says, a legacy to which she pays tribute in this recent interview with Appalachian Heritage. ________ JASON HOWARD Landfall is billed as "A Ring of Stories," and it does seem as if there is a circular structure—the unbroken circle as the Carter Family would call it—to the collection. Can you talk about that? JULIE HENSLEY I struggled for a long time with knowing the book was finished. Many of the stories were part of my MFA thesis at Arizona State University, and I regularly submitted many different versions of Landfall to first book contests for over a decade. I kept changing the sequencing, occasionally adding or omitting a story. The book was a perpetual runner-up in so many contests—the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Katharine Anne Porter Prize, the LindaS. Bruckheimer Award. Finally, it won the Everett Southwest Literature Award, a contest which includes a generous prize but does not actually publish the book. I told myself I would give the project one more year of revision and one more round of submission, then I would let it go and move on. The following summer, when I was teaching for a month in Mexico, I wrote three mornings a week at Café Montenegro, [End Page 55] a little coffeehouse off the central plaza in San Miguel de Allende. As I crafted what became "Expecting," I felt Landfall click into place as a book. It was like I'd been jiggling a key in a lock for years, and suddenly, as the voices of Cora and Grace emerged, the bolts gave and shifted. When that door opened, so many things settled into place—characters I subconsciously had been worrying about just reappeared, pushing their own stories to fruition in the periphery of the narrative. The book itself suddenly, literally came full circle. I might have called Landfall "A Novel-in-Stories" or "A Cycle of Stories." Certainly, books I've heard ascribed with those labels (Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Alice McDermott's After This) were influential. But I gravitated toward the idea of a ring or circle because of the way that shape conveys both continuity and paralysis. A circle goes on for always, but it also creates a kind of enclosure, and by extension, a kind of exclusion. In my experience, small towns can do both: offer protection or cage one inside a tight pattern of conformity. The same might be said for family communities. You could argue certain stories in my book are as much "Ring of Fire" as "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Ultimately, I believe the book is about connection, though. I want it to be hopeful. JH The book is mostly set in Conrad's Fork, a fictional small town in Kentucky, and you do a great job in this book of showing how the supposedly simple, ordinary lives of small town Americans are actually rich and complex and stressful. Did you feel a sort of responsibility to do that as a writer from a small town, or did that theme just emerge by instinct? [End Page 56] Click for larger view View full resolution Julie Hensley [End Page 57] HENSLEY I always feel a responsibility to my characters to make them real and to make their lives matter. Conrad's Fork is...

Native storytelling and narrative innovation: Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine as fictional ethnography

Native storytelling and narrative innovation: Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine as fictional ethnography

Partial faiths: postsecular fiction in the age of Pynchon and Morrison

Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion's place in postmodern life.Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, Jurgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists: Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly.But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full mapping of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.

Transatlantic voices: interpretations of Native North American literatures

Introduction (Elvira Pulitano, Universite de Lausanne) I. Theoretical Crossings 1. 'They Have Stories, Don't They?': Some Doubts Regarding an Overused Theorem (Hartwig Isernhagen, Universitat Basel) 2. Plotting History: The Function of History in Native North American Literature (Bernadette Rigal-Cellard, Universite Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III) 3. Transculturality and Transdifference: The Case of Native America (Helmbrecht Breinig, Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg) II. From the Early Fiction to Recent Directions: Native-European Transactions 4. American Indian Novels of the 1930s: John Joseph Mathews's Sundown and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (Gaetano Prampolini, Universita di Firenze) 5. Transatlantic Crossings: New Directions in the Contemporary Native American Novel (Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Technische Universitat Dresden) III. Trauma, Memory, and Narratives of Healing: Native American Women Writers in a Transnational Context 6. Of Time and Trauma: The Possibilities for Narrative in Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Deborah L. Madsen, Universite de Geneve) 7. 'keep wide awake in the eyes': Seeing Eyes in Wendy Rose's Poetry (Kathryn Napier Gray, University of Plymouth, UK) 8. Anamnesiac Mappings: National Histories and Transnational Healing in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (Rebecca Tillett, University of East Anglia, Norwich) IV. Comparative Mythologies, Transatlantic Journeys: Native American Re-inventions of Europe 9. Vizenor's Trickster Theft: Pretexts and Paratexts of Darkness in Saint Louis's Bearheart (Paul Beekman Taylor, Universite de Geneve) 10. 'June walked over it like water and came home': Cross-cultural Symbolism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks (Mark Shackleton, University of Helsinki) 11. Encounters Across Time and Space: The Sacred, the Profane, and the Political in Linda Hogan's Power (Yonka Krasteva, Velikotarnovski Universitet (University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria)) 12. Double Translation: James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk (Ulla Haselstein, Freie Universitat, Berlin) 13. Clown, Indians, and Poodles: Spectacular Others in Louis Owens's I Hear the Train (Simone Pellerin, Universite Paul Valery-Montpellier III) 14. Oklahoma International: Jim Barnes, Poetry, and the Sites Of Imagination (A. Robert Lee, Nihon University, Tokyo (formerly of the University of Kent, Canterbury))

A Turning Point in Native American Fiction?

Review Article| September 01 2008 A Turning Point in Native American Fiction? Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, by Treuer, David, St. Paul: Greywolf Press, 2006. 212 pages. Karl Kroeber Karl Kroeber Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (3): 388–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Karl Kroeber; A Turning Point in Native American Fiction?. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2008; 54 (3): 388–395. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Jailing of Cecelia Capture and the Rhetoric of Individualism

I see my personal story as to colonization and my writing as testimony aimed at undoing those processes that attempt to keep us the grips of the colonizer's mental bondage. Gloria Bird Gloria Bird's description of her writing as an act of bearing witness to those forces and processes that keep American Indians in the grips of the colonizer's mental bondage resonates with reading of Janet Campbell Hale's critically neglected novel The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985). I say neglected reference to the striking contrast between the amount of scholarship devoted to certain American Indian novels and the attention given to Hale's story of one Indian's struggle for liberation from mental bondage. While casual search of the MLA bibliographic data base turns up references to numerous articles and dissertations devoted to such contemporary American Indian writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Linda Hogan, similar search under Hale's name calls up very few citations. This constitutes scholarly silence that is nearly deafening. What makes this silence puzzling is that Hale's novel was released to number of positive reviews and even received nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. (1) Certainly many possible explanations exist for this lack of scholarly engagement, not the least of which is the argument that the other writers produce more aesthetically pleasing texts. Yet aesthetic evaluation is tricky process. For instance, it is easy to imagine an admirer of Sherman Alexie praising his clear style while the same breath denouncing the stories of Gerald Vizenor as inaccessibly allusive. In response, fan of Vizenor's fiction might deride Alexie's work as overly simplistic. This imaginary debate, microcosm, highlights the historical and cultural shiftiness of aesthetic criteria. However, my aim is not to argue for the aesthetic merits of what Toni Morrison calls a beautifully written book. That seems more the function of the book review. I also do not wish to engage an evaluative comparison of Hale's novel with the works of other more celebrated American Indian authors. Rather, I want to suggest possible reasons for the scholarly neglect of the novel and then argue for how it contributes an important, if neglected, element to the mosaic of contemporary American Indian literary expression. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture differs significant ways from those novels that have elicited the lion's share of critical response. One of the most apparent differences is Hale's novel's lack of what I would call explicit signifiers of Indianness. By Indianness, I refer to the often overt elements of traditional indigenous cultures that inform and enrich the works of such writers as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. This absence Hale's novel presents critical dilemma for scholars accustomed to identifying and interpreting these elements. In other words, when we approach texts by Indian authors, many of us tend to look for traces of specific oral traditions, symbols from the Native culture, and articulations of an indigenous spirituality and worldview. Furthermore, we often find style that defies conventions of literary realism and develops narrative themes that subvert or critique the dominant cultural values while celebrating aspects of indigenous culture. Or, recent strand of critical inquiry seen most prominently the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Craig Womack, we might explore the relationship between cultural and political sovereignty and the works of literature. These elements and arguments do not assume prominent position Hale's novel. On the other hand, these elements do figure prominently works of the two Indian writers who draw the most attention from literary scholars: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. …

Catholicism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dennis Walsh; Catholicism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2001; 25 (2): 107–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.25.2.e33j70664342t7j0 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and the (De)Mythologizing of the American West

“Fighting; his way with knife and gun,” the Texas cowboy was evolved, a fearless rider, a workman of sublime self-confidence, unequaled in the technique and tricks of “cowpunching,” the most accurate on the trigger and the last to leave untasted the glass which the bartender silently refilled. When the northern trails became an institution the Texan was trail-boss and straw-boss; and as boss he was a dictator. As an underling he was not so successful in the north; with a Yankee boss, or worse yet an Englishman, he cherished a studied disregard for authority, and an assured satisfaction in the superiority of is own ways.

False Miracles and Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

In the last decade of the twentieth century, American culture seems increasingly at war with itself; racial and cultural divisions appear to be at once more marked and more insidious than ever before. We read the endless essays in “liberal” journals, listen to reactionary shoutings on the radio, and turn with disgusted disbelief from the “talk” shows on television. Then, some works of literature come to our rescue, as the reflecting ponds in which we can see some sort of truth that we can feel seep into us on an emotional, even a spiritual level. Louise Erdrich is a purveyor of such works, a novelist who writes from her perspective as a person of both Chippewa and German ancestry, sometimes assisted by the late Michael Dorris, her former collaborator and former husband—also of mixed heritage.

What about the Sweetheart?: The "Different Shape" of Anishinabe Two Sisters Stories in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love

Even though she grew up off-reservation speaking English, and writes a novel, a European form, Louise Erdrich's work is informed and ordered by elements of Anishinabe as well as of German-American, Catholic, and Midwestern cultures. These elements tantalize non-Anishinabe readers by lending a to her fiction, a that they can sense but cannot fully distinguish. In order to discern the of her novels, readers must educate themselves about the Anishinabe background of the works. The meaning of Anishinabe storytelling relies on cultural knowledge through which the hearer fills in the blanks of the teller's synechdochic omission[s] (Kroeber 104-05). This transaction between speaker and listener is illustrated in the story of a white translator, Frederick Burton; his unnamed Anishinabe informant; and an Anishinabe song. Burton had been told by the informant that the song meant am out all night on the river seeking for my sweetheart, and had translated into a song popular in the early part of this century. Later, however, he was informed of the literal translation, which is this: Throughout night I keep awake throughout night I keep awake upon a river I keep awake. (Kroeber 105) But what about the sweetheart?, Burton asked. His informant replied that the repetition of awake three times told the Anishinabe hearer all he or she needed to know. Why does a man keep awake all night when he want to sleep?.... Only one reason. I go to find my sweetheart. The word is not there but we understand it (Burton qtd. in Kroeber 105).(1) Like the traditional song with its invisible lover, Erdrich's novels contain knowledge, concepts, and characters that become apparent only when readers educate themselves in the Anishinabe culture that informs her works. Although she attended college and graduate school in writing and literature, Erdrich insists that a more primary influence on her novels is the practice of oral storytelling, because she grew up in a household where both Native and non-Native relatives told and still tell stories with great virtuosity (Wong interview 38-39). This oral influence is demonstrated formally in the episodic form of the novels and the fact that, as in traditional stories of the Anishinabe, the same characters evolve through many works (Schumacher interview 175-76). As in oral storytelling, the events of a story will sometimes be contradicted in its retelling by another narrator: no definitive version exists (Caldwell interview 67; Chavkin interview 224). As in the Nanabozho story cycle, stories continue nose to tail (Jones interview 4); sometimes characters dead in one tale live again in another story. For example, June Kashpaw dies in the opening scene of Love Medicine but appears as a ghost in The Bingo Palace; the scene of her death is retold from a point of view as the opening of Tales of Burning Love. Sister Leopolda apparently dies in Love Medicine but appears as a centenarian in Tales of Burning Love. Formal features of oral narrative in Erdrich's work have been noted by Erdrich herself (Chavkin 4), Pittman, Rainwater, Ruppert, Schultz and others. In addition to formal features, however, Erdrich's work also draws on characters, plot patterns and relationships from traditional Anishinabe culture and mythology.(2) Specifically, stories about Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, a polar pair of in a cycle of stories commonly told by Anishinabe women, gives the reader a new perspective on the relationships between women that are central to Erdrich's novels. The relationship between these has no close analogue in European American folklore and therefore lends a to Erdrich's fiction. The metaphor of a different shape of relationships between women is derived from a key scene in Tales of Burning Love in which Eleanor and Dot, the two sisters of this novel, first meet. …

A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

well as spiritual and psychological ill health. Critics have argued that Erdrich's fiction depicts the valiant survival of Native American people and their struggle to regain their nearly forgotten cultural heritage.2 While Erdrich's fiction certainly portrays the value in cultural knowledge, Love Medicine, as Catherine Rainwater has shown, uncovers the resulting ambivalence experienced by her characters as they attempt to reconcile their Native American heritage with the expectations of the dominant white culture in the modern and postmodern United States.3 The ambivalence created in this attempted reconciliation underscores the difficulty faced by Erdrich's characters in reaching a balance between the spheres of past and present, personal and communal, private and public. Love Medicine presents characters searching for a healthy balance between seemingly diametrically opposed cultures. This search for a healthy balance is evinced in the characters' belief systems, in their relationships with each other, and within their own sense of personal identity. Marie Kashpaw, June Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, Nector Kashpaw, and Lipsha Morrisey contend with their personal identities and beliefs, others' perceptions and expectations, and their place in their families and community. Love Medicine depicts characters whose searches lead them to discard obsolete identities as they journey to

Sacred Chance: Gambling and the Contemporary Native American Indian Novel

The rise of high stakes reservation gambling has occasioned new interest in the role of gambling in Native American Indian culture. Since the late 1970s the fortunes of many tribal communities have been bound up with the economic, legal and cultural implications of the gambling trade. Contemporaneous with this development, Native American writers have explored the role of traditional gambling practices in the modern world. In three contemporary works of fiction, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (later republished as Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles) and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, traditional gambling stories and their attendant practices provide a ritual site where the forces of assimilation are contested. In each, a good gambler is pitted against an evil opponent. The evil opponent is associated with both European American culture and the evil gamblers of Native American tradition. In this way, gambling stories provide a framework to assign value and difference. Because these values and differences are imagined within an indigenous paradigm that anthropologizes European American culture, the gambling ritual also provides a means to theorize about the role traditional belief systems might play

Reading Asian American Poetry

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the historic emergence of and ethnic consciousness movements in the United States, was considered an important vehicle for expressing the politicization of race. Indeed, this could be viewed as a racial in relations theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant's sense of forging links between cultural representations and social dynamics of inequality and racialized empowerment. Poems were at rallies, fundraisers, and other events, and circulated in independent low-budget and ethnic publications. Rodolfo Gonzales's Yo Soy Jouquin/I am Jouquin (1972 [1967]) is a prime example of a poem that was valued for articulating a cultural and political subjectivity and history that had previously been marginalized. The anthology Time to Greez! Incantations from the (1975), focusing on U.S. Third World writing and edited by a multiracial collective, included mainly poetry. Although published in 1984, Audre Lorde's argument that is a genre suited to those with few material resources and little uninterrupted time might have been formulated by her observation of emergent racialized and gendered poetries during this earlier period. Of all the art forms, is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Poetry, Lorde argues, has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women (116). Lorde's well-known formulation that poetry is not a luxury posits that the knowledges conceived and produced by poetic discourse are vital to the cultural survival of marginalized peoples. We can see an apparent turn away from toward prose, however, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when prose fiction became a prevalent means of circulating narratives of difference among a larger audience. Immensely popular works of this period, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior were crossover hits that were considered successes in the mainstream marketplace, i.e., among consumers not necessarily of the same identity as the authors. No longer mainly the political tools of movement audiences, narratives of became explicitly commodified and promoted by publishing corporations to white as well as nonwhite readers and to secondary- and college-level educational institutions as teaching materials. When we consider what works are de rigeur in the multicultural literature curriculum and in multicultural literary studies, we think mostly of prose fiction and nonfiction: Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, essays by Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in addition to the above-mentioned titles by Walker and Kingston. I give this recent historical account of the genres in which we read race in order to situate my project of reading Asian American within the context of Asian American and multicultural literary studies. What accounts for the contrast in the reception of prose versus within multicultural literary studies? What difference does it make to specifically recognize poetic practices as part of racial, and specifically Asian American, discourse? 1 When Asian American literature is recognized at all as a body of work distinct from Asian literature, it is assumed to be a recently invented and individualistic phenomenon, associated with the names of bestselling authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Those that are aware of specific Asian American poets again often assume that the body of Asian American poetic writing originated in recent volumes of by individual critically-lauded writers. …

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks: An Annotated Survey of Criticism through 1994

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks: An Annotated Survey of Criticism through 1994

Cross-Cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich's Love Medicine

Cross-Cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich's Love Medicine

Three Student Guides to Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

Three Student Guides to Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

The Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota: Its History as Depicted in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Beet Queen

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Julie Maristuen-Rodakowski; The Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota: Its History as Depicted in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Beet Queen. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 1988; 12 (3): 33–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.12.3.r08660v62325u887 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Lungfish, or Acts of Survival in Contemporary Female Writing

Lungfish, say, are also contemporary female writings: Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing, Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine-all are works confirming the accuracy of Rule's metaphor, confirming the pull of life to move on when there is no way left to live, to seek breath in a new element. The new kind of survival these works initiate is a

“Her Laugh an Ace”: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William Gleason; “Her Laugh an Ace”: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 1987; 11 (3): 51–73. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.11.3.m0k8173j986k4926 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search