Louise Erdrich’s Writing Routine

“I would not think about whether I had a good idea; I would just write it. I would not think about whether I was capable; I would just put my pen on the page.”

Louise Erdrich has written her way through grief, motherhood, bookshop ownership, and nearly every form of American tumult. For five decades now, she’s delivered a steady stream of fiction—novels, children’s books, picture books, poetry—that feels personal and mythic all at once. Her voice is singular, but the lives she chronicles, from Ojibwe families on the Great Plains to haunted clerks in a Minneapolis bookstore, are rooted in a deep sense of communal memory.

Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, and raised in North Dakota, Erdrich is the daughter of a German-American father and a French-Ojibwe mother. Both were educators. “They’re wonderful people,” she told TeachingBooks, “and they’re both schoolteachers. They still live in North Dakota where I grew up. They grow a tremendous garden every summer filled with all sorts of berries and every sort of vegetable.”

That sense of land—its texture, its temporality, its meaning—is one of the constants in Erdrich’s work, whether she’s writing about Ojibwe ancestors migrating from Madeline Island to the Turtle Mountains, or a single mother harvesting high bush cranberries in a modern urban park.