Always an adventurous man, at the age of 17, Ralph Louis Erdrich worked his way through Alaska, earning his living by playing poker and by working as a cook’s helper. He sent home some of the money to help out his parents, who owned and operated a butcher shop in Wahpeton, North Dakota. The family had also lived in Little Falls, Long Prairie, and Elmore, Minnesota. After service in the Air Force, Ralph went to school on the GI Bill, earned teaching credentials and set off on a new adventure—teaching American Indian students on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Here, he met tribal chairman Patrick Gourneau.1
An able storyteller and talker, Gourneau and Erdrich became friends. Of course, Gourneau’s handsome young daughter, Rita Joane, was an incentive for Ralph Erdrich to make continuous and numerous visits to the Gourneau home. At that time, Rita was attending the State School of Service in Wahpeton. The two were married by Father George at Saint Ann’s Church in Belcourt, North Dakota. Karen Louise Erdrich, the first child of Ralph and Rita Gourneau Erdrich, arrived at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954.
The 1950s era into which Erdrich was born was both a hopeful time and a turbulent time in the United States. Post–World War II, the economy was growing; former servicemen home from the war and anxious to get on with their lives usually married and had children, who comprised the biggest population bubble in American history—the baby boomers. There were opportunities to be had in the cities of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, where the auto industry grew rapidly as young families bought their first cars on the time payment plan. Young men in the Midwest and the South and elsewhere took over family farms and bought modern innovations in equipment and farming practices. Movies starring the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Debbie Reynolds thrilled people at the drive-in theaters and shocked people with their rumored risqué lifestyles off-screen. As Americans became more prosperous, many buying homes for the first time, a dark undercurrent also pervaded the country.
Beginning in 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin publicly accused well-known Americans of being communist sympathizers. It was the era of the Red scare as Russian power and influence in the world grew. Some of the very people that Americans admired in the movie theaters were accused of being communist sympathizers, as were members of President Harry Truman’s administration and high-placed officials in the U.S. Army.
In 1954, the year of Erdrich’s birth, the United States held the McCarthy hearings, ostensibly to investigate the private lives of Americans accused of being members of the Communist Party. However, the hearings did not go as McCarthy would have wished. The country soon became tired of the witch hunt, and when McCarthy and his committee could produce no evidence to support their claims against ordinary Americans, McCarthy found himself discredited. He was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died only three years later, at the age of 48, most likely from complications of alcoholism. For most Americans, the fear of a communist under every bed receded like the memory of a bad dream. But, for American Indians, particularly the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indians of Erdrich’s family, a long nightmare was only beginning.
In 1943, a survey conducted by the U.S. Senate concluded that living conditions on reservations were extremely poor, and that serious mismanagement by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the root cause of this endemic poverty. Congress decided that the solution was neither reform of the BIA nor further investment in education and infrastructure and job creating programs, but rather, the termination of the special relationship between the tribes and the federal government. Goals of this termination policy included ending federal supervision of tribes by abolishing the BIA and repealing discriminatory laws against Indians. While these lofty goals may have sounded good in theory, in practice, termination also meant the immediate withdrawal of any government assistance in the form of federal aid and services as well as removal of all Indian land from trust status, which made the land vulnerable to alienation from its Indian owners by unscrupulous people. Furthermore, all Indian tribes, which were sovereign nations with their own laws, policies, and practices under treaty agreements going back for hundreds of years, would suddenly be subject to the laws of whatever state within which the tribe was located.
No doubt, some people in positions of power saw these moves as beneficial to American Indians since, theoretically at least, they would be brought into mainstream society, but there was another, far less, philanthropic reason for this action. The U.S. government after World War II was deeply in debt. Terminating the relationship with Indian tribes would also mean ending its financial obligation to them, thus saving the United States a considerable amount of money—never mind that doing so would violate treaty obligations. It took 10 years before this policy was actually enabled in 1953 with the first of several Senate and House bills, which eventually resulted in the House Concurrent Resolution 108. This bill called for immediate termination of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe, along with four other specifically named tribes,2 and all tribes in California, New York, Florida, and Texas. This was not the equivalent of throwing a wealthy socialite out of a penthouse apartment. American Indians then, as now, were among the poorest of the poor in the United States. Suddenly removing all support—whether in the form of commodity food through the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, health care, or minimal cash payments—would have had devastating results. Further, removing all American Indian lands from trust status would immediately open the Indians to predatory land grabs. Indeed, at least some of the land owned and occupied by tribes was valuable for the natural resources present in the form of timber, fisheries, coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium deposits. Finally, the move was a violation of the sovereignty of native nations guaranteed by treaties.
The fight against termination would continue for 20 years, with Erdrich’s maternal grandfather as Tribal Council President of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa guiding his tribe through this troublesome and frightening time. This situation would no doubt have been a topic of conversation at family gatherings for Erdrich as she grew up and would have shaped her view of Indian–White relationships and her own place in both the world of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and the wider world of mainstream society.
Wahpeton, North Dakota, where Erdrich was raised surrounded by her family and siblings, is a small town just across the Missouri River from its twin town of Breckenridge, Minnesota. People here are a hardy folk, surviving as they must the harsh blasts of winter blizzards blustering across the plains, the violent summer storms that sometimes spawn tornadoes, and spring floods that threaten to overtop the levies built to protect the communities from the rising water of the river that flows between Wahpeton and Breckenridge. In and around Wahpeton, women were still mostly stay-at-home wives and mothers who looked after their children and cleaned their neat brick or wood frame houses while their husbands ran the local drugstore, clerked in the hardware store, or farmed the rich prairie soil and worried about their crops. Everyone watched the skies for the vicious summer storms that could wipe out a farmer’s fields in less than five minutes or the winter blizzards that could claim many of the rancher’s newly born and vulnerable calves. Of course, the prosperity of the farmers influenced the prosperity of the town shopkeepers. People lived close to the earth and directly or indirectly depended on it for their livelihood. The local population hunted deer, pheasant, grouse, ducks, and geese in season and out to supplement the family dinner menu.
The town was, and still is, a Beaver Cleaver kind of place where people go to church on Sundays, honor their war veterans, cheer for their high school sports teams, and celebrate many holidays with a parade down Main Street. The majority of the population is of Euro-American descent, mostly German or Norwegian, with some claiming Irish or French or English ancestry. Brown folks are not very numerous, but there are a few African Americans and, of course, Indians of Ojibwe and Lakota and mixed tribal heritages. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Erdrich would have been unusual with her bi-ethnic heritage, but she seems to have no painful memories of being different or ostracized because of it. Indeed, an essay she wrote for Smithsonian magazine is a tribute to her hometown. She begins the essay by stating that early in her life, like young people in small towns everywhere, she had wanted to escape from the insularity of the place. That comment probably indicates the desire for adventure, for evading the seeming emptiness of small town life that many teenagers experience. However, Erdrich continues that in spite of those teenage yearnings for escape, in her later years, her hometown is a place that, “. . . [I]have ever after held close in my heart,”3 a sentiment that seems to be an echo of many other adventure-seeking young people who left their hometowns for the wider world, but returned in middle age or old age for a visit or even to retire, realizing that the peacefulness and security of small town America was not a bad place to start, and perhaps to end, a life.
Unlike many towns where the streets wander in odd jogs and loops to follow the topography of the landscape, Wahpeton is laid out in regular squares with straight streets, which in many places used to be lined with big elm trees. Unfortunately, Dutch elm disease claimed most of these giant beauties in the 1960s. Buildings, too, have fallen into disrepair, some demolished to make way for newer ones, and others put to different uses. In her Smithsonian essay, Erdrich writes that the art deco movie theater, where she worked as a teenager, has been converted into a bar, and that the small café next door where she waitressed has been “stripped now of its ornate wooden booths, marble soda fountain, frosted mirrors and strange glass details into which were embedded the wings of blue morpho butterflies.”4 Certainly, changes have come, as they have in many small towns across America.
Wahpeton’s population grew steadily from its early beginnings in the late 1860s to a peak population of just over 9,000 at the 1980 census. Then, the young people moved out in greater numbers and the old people passed on. Since then, the population has declined to around 7,400, but the town is not dead yet. The second largest employer used to be the 3M plant, but it spun off to Imation in 1997, closed in 2007, and was reinvented as Comdel—a company that makes medical devices, among other things. Other small manufacturing companies provide a few jobs for the community, but most of the businesses in town provide support for the agriculture of the region. Farmers here grow sugar beets and sunflowers and wheat, drink coffee at the little cafés in town when it is too wet to plant or it is winter, and the cows have already been fed. Erdrich hoed sugar beets at least for a while as a youngster among other jobs she held, both during summers and after school.
While her parents were both teachers in the school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wahpeton, their children did not attend school there. Erdrich says that she is not sure why that was; perhaps there was a school policy that prohibited it. She attended schools in Wahpeton, first Zimmerman, then Saint John’s Catholic School, and eventually graduated from Wahpeton High School. Raised as a devout Catholic, Erdrich read the Old Testament from an early age and was enamored of the mystical, magical events she found within the pages, but she says that after she began school, she discovered that religion “was about rules.” About her teachers, who were mostly nuns, she writes, “some were celestial, others were disturbed.” Not a practitioner of any religion today, she says, “. . . I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. . . . When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.”5 That honest statement is somewhat curious in a time when mainstream America views Indians as naturally spiritual, adhering to the traditional religious practice of their tribe of origin, and even American Indian scholars are wary of declaring themselves agnostic.
Family history and the inclinations of direct relatives do not necessarily insure that descendants will follow the same artistic paths. For instance, Mozart’s children did not become composers, but the example of an artistic bent set by a parent would likely lead a child to appreciate whatever particular art form they observe. Erdrich has often mentioned that her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was a storyteller, and she has said that her father, too, was a talker. Orality has always been a part of American Indian tradition, but the urge to put those stories into written form was encouraged by Ralph Erdrich, who, it has been reported in many places, paid his young daughter a nickel for each story she wrote as a child. Few, if any, aspiring writers are paid for their stories from childhood, so early on, Erdrich would have learned that words have a monetary as well as an aesthetic value, and that writing for a living was a possibility.
Erdrich’s childhood was as ordinary as that of any American child growing up in a Midwestern small town in the 1950s and 1960s. It was also extraordinary and unusual in that she had educator parents who actively encouraged her to write stories; she came from a mixed race heritage in a town where the overwhelming majority of the population was of mainstream European descent.
Like many other teenagers from small town America, she obviously wanted to see “the other side of the hill,” because she applied for admission and was accepted to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Erdrich says that her mother knew of Dartmouth and wrote off for information and admissions materials for her daughter. An Ivy League liberal arts institution, Dartmouth was founded prior to the American Revolution in 1769 by the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, who had earlier established a school in Connecticut that was principally for the education of Native Americans. The charter for Dartmouth stated that the college was founded “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land . . . and also of English Youth and any others.”6
Perhaps it was this history of attention to the education of American Indians that attracted Erdrich’s mother, and Louise in turn, to this particular college or perhaps it was Dartmouth’s newly established Native American Studies Program. Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian and one of the first, if not the very first, American Indians to become educated and to write and publish was a protégé of Wheelock. Charles Eastman, a Dakota author and physician at Pine Ridge Agency in the late 1890s, was also a former Dartmouth student. If Erdrich had applied to attend one year earlier, she would have been denied admission, not because of her heritage or scholarship, but because she was a woman. Until 1972—the year Erdrich was accepted for admission—Dartmouth had been an all-male school. Even with the change of policy, for several years thereafter, men far outnumbered women enrolling at the school.
Erdrich’s first year at Dartmouth was also the first year of the college’s Native American Studies Program, where the man she would one day marry, Michael Dorris, was the director. In her keynote address to the graduating class of Dartmouth in 2009, Erdrich recounted her arrival at Dartmouth in the fall of 1972. She flew from her hometown to Boston where she changed to a small commuter plane for the final flight into Lebanon, New Hampshire. This commuter flight carried not only human passengers but also “livestock,” as Erdrich puts it—baby chicks in cardboard crates behind a curtain, who peeped in terror every time the plane encountered some turbulence. Erdrich says she was terrified of being away from home, of going to college, of the plane flight, of changing planes at the busy Logan Airport in Boston, but the chicks had no awareness of being on a plane. Erdrich knew her situation all too well, and, she says, had some faith that the pilot knew how to land the plane. The chicks, which had no alternative but blind trust, helped to assuage her fears.
When the plane landed and classes began, she says she felt that everyone else knew so much more than she did. She spent long hours in the library catching up. She studied hard, but she also had to work outside the classroom and academic life. Contrary to what some people believe, she did not get a free ride. Her entire family sacrificed so that Louise, and later, two of her sisters, could attend Dartmouth. Part of that sacrifice meant that Louise had to work while attending classes. She worked first as a breakfast short order cook and later as a research assistant in the microfilm division of Baker Library. During her summers back in Wahpeton, she held jobs as a lifeguard at the city pool and as a flagman on a road construction crew, among others.
In college, she met American Indians from other tribes, including her Navajo roommate. She felt comfortable with Chippewas and Dakotas because she had grown up surrounded by members of both tribes, but it took her a while to get to know people from other tribes, and she frankly states that she did not understand the “non-Indians, the people who came from East Coast backgrounds.” Further, “I hadn’t left Wahpeton [before going to Dartmouth] so I only knew a particular Wahpeton mixture of people, all smashed and molded into a similar shape by small-town life.”7
As educators, both her parents valued higher education, but they also must have missed their eldest daughter. Both wrote her letters. Erdrich says that her mother’s letters were “newsy, full of recipes, fun, and practical advice,” while her father’s letters were “witty, anecdotal and intelligent.”8 She read with pleasure the following letter from her father:
Dear Daughter:
Your mother is making every sort of apple concoction known to man with the eleven tons of apples I harvested. She finds time for all of this because you left clothes behind. She only has to slightly alter those duds for your sister Lise who is rapidly becoming the best dressed eighth grader of all time as she inherits your ex wardrobe. Our house is steeped in apple juice and attracts half a million bees from all parts of the country. The insides of our compost cans have the fattest ants in all of entomological history. These critters have achieved their corpulent state as the result of the presence of the apple crap—peelings and such—which comes from the extra time Mom has—which is because Lise gets your duds. See how your going to college has upset the balance of nature?
Magnum est vectigal parsimonia. [Thrift is great revenue.]
Love, Dad9
His letter effectively illustrates Ralph Erdrich’s command of language and vocabulary as well as his innate storytelling ability. No doubt, his children, including daughters Louise, Lise, and Heid, inherited that talent and were nurtured by his example.
Henry Hart, a poet and professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, was a classmate of Erdrich’s, both entering freshmen in 1972. Hart says that not everyone connected with Dartmouth was content with the decision to admit women to the college. He recalls that prior to enrolling at Dartmouth himself, he attended a dinner of alumni where an older alum pounded his fist on the restaurant table while declaring that, “Women will ruin the Dartmouth traditions,”—something that Hart found surprising. He had attended public schools in a small farming town in the Berkshire Hills of Connecticut where, he says, he was happy to be in the company of women. According to both Erdrich and Hart, the ratio of men to women for that first year of the coeducational change was 9–1. Hart recalls hearing the vulgar epithet of “quahog” hurled at female students.
Located near the Vermont border in Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth’s climate was not much different from that of Erdrich’s hometown of Wahpeton, North Dakota. Both have long, cold winters with an abundance of snow and short summer growing seasons. Hanover in the early 1970s had a population not much larger than that of Wahpeton, excluding the student population of Dartmouth, which today numbers around 4,000. A major difference between the two small towns, though, was the terrain. Located in the upper Great Plains, Wahpeton is surrounded by rolling hills and rich farmland with a paucity of trees, while Hanover is surrounded by mountainous terrain well known for winter skiing opportunities. Dartmouth owned, and still owns, the Dartmouth Skiway.
The outdoor activities, particularly skiing, were one of the reasons that Hart was attracted to Dartmouth. There is no evidence that Erdrich ever skied, but Hart worked as an instructor for three winters at the Dartmouth Skiway, paying for much of his college bills with his earnings. Erdrich did know how to ice skate, and may have enjoyed that activity at Dartmouth as well as back home in Wahpeton.
Hart recalls seeing Karen, as she was then known, early in the fall semester of 1972, when she was walking across campus in front of the Hopkins Center, a kind of arts building known as the Hop. He asks rhetorically, “Why do you think certain people are uniquely beautiful and why are you immediately drawn to them?” He thought she was lovely, that she stuck out in a crowd, reminding him of his grandmother when his grandmother was young. Hart’s grandmother was a Swede who grew up in a Christian mission, among other places in Mongolia and China during the early 20th century. He says that his grandmother and Karen Louise Erdrich both exhibited a pensive, reserved, tranquil personality.
Both Hart and Erdrich have each indicated that they were shy and reserved—something that Hart, at least, regrets because he did not get to know her better. They took at least some classes together and both attended a campus event known as Thursday Poets, a writing group that met in the poetry room of Sanborn House, where the English Department was located. Both studied with Professors Brenda Silver and Jay Parini, who admired Erdrich’s growing prowess as a poet and mentored her. Hart says that he, too, greatly admired her writing, just as he admires everything she has done since their student days at Dartmouth.
At one point, the poet, George Starbuck, came to Dartmouth to read his own work and to discuss student work. At that time, Hart was fond of astronomy images in his poetry—something that Starbuck disliked. Starbuck was tired of moon imagery in poems, he said in a cutting criticism of Hart’s work. However, Erdrich spoke out in favor of using moon imagery—something that endeared her even further for Hart—who felt that he had at least one poetic companion in the room. In turn, Hart was impressed by the poems Erdrich published in Dart, the student literary magazine. She had a more mature style, he felt, than any of the other poets on campus.
Erdrich indicates that her preparation for college life was incomplete, that she had some knowledge of Shakespeare because her father had purchased a record player and recordings of Shakespeare’s tragedies for the family, but that her reading habits were indiscriminate. She says, “I worked hard to catch up with people. I didn’t know any of the writers other Dartmouth freshmen had read.”10
Her creative writing focus was poetry, and some of these early efforts appear in Dart, a literary magazine published at Dartmouth, which is now defunct. However, it was a student-produced publication sponsored by the college that flourished at the time. A paragraph on the opening page indicates that “We welcome poetry, fiction, and art work from all members of the Dartmouth community.”11 The faculty advisors were George M. Young, Jr. and Jay Parini.
The Spring 1975 issue of the magazine includes a short story attributed to Karen Erdrich, which was her given name. Later, she would drop the Karen in favor of Louise, her middle name. She says, “There were so many Karens when I was born. . . . I was happier when I was called Louise. I thought it had a good, lucky sort of writerliness to it.”12 The short story, entitled “Renny,” is about a young girl who is stalked by a man in a stocking cap. The girl’s parents run a bakery, about which the main character says,
Mama was mad at me for being late. I was supposed to work right after school selling long johns and buns to people who had to buy things cheap. That was the only kind would buy in our bakery. The other bakery in town looked clean and hadn’t a cracked front window. Their ways weren’t no better than ours of baking. I knew. They were dirty in the back and just hid it better.13
While this is not the polished writing Erdrich would later produce, the above passage demonstrates the style of characterization that would become common in Erdrich’s later writing. Here, the reader can see precursors of the kind of introspective commentary about other characters and situations that Erdrich uses for Nanapush and Pauline in Tracks, for instance. Here, too, is the poetic language that is typical of Erdrich’s writing style. In “Renny,” she wrote, “Somedays all it would take was the pure, thin tiddlywink of jesus.” And,
Stars turn on the pipes. Smokewater music. Dawn of bells and of windows. Ruby red for eyes, gold of gold and the black book and blue cloak and the pure tasteless Christ, blind inside me. It was almost as good as skating, walking down the aisle mouthing that floaty cracker.
Another section in this short story is more obviously poetry because the words are set off with wider margins from the main body of the story and the lines and spacing between words appear deliberately arranged to emphasize certain words. The poem is ambiguous, as much of poetry is, and here, it allows the reader to choose what actually happened to young Renny. Perhaps the stalker sexually molested her, but Erdrich uses a knife to represent a penis:
. . . cold. black. hot.knife. and he
had me with it and again he
had me with it It
had an eye and it looked all through me . . . 14
However, she obviously was following the dictum given to every creative writing student—write what you know. Not to say that she knew exactly what it felt like to be stalked and raped or that she knew anyone who had that particular experience, but she knew what she felt as a young woman who might be concerned that such an event was possible, and to write from that perspective. She knew how it felt to be an adolescent girl who might sometimes chafe under adult authority. (“Mama was mad at me for being late.”) She also knew about Catholicism since she was raised as a Catholic and attended Catholic schools. She artfully uses creative language to describe nuns and the priest at Mass:
Crows, they look like crows at the altar. The bright man comes in with the golden cups. He sings, they flap about him, he sings for blood. The bells ring seven times. Three times the dark birds in the pews touch their claws to their breasts. Crows sing in the loft. . . . 15
Quite possibly, Erdrich had sat often in the pew at mass, musing about the physical appearance of those attending with her. This same story also contains references to intensely cold winters, of walking to school in a dress (likely the dress code if her Catholic school forbade slacks), of “dumb farmers, clods, thinking they knew it all,” which may sound hypercritical, but would not have been an unusual response by a teenager growing up in a small town, farming community.
It seems odd that Erdrich’s first publication would be narrative fiction because she would focus on poetry for many years before publishing narrative in short stories and novels. In later issues of this student magazine, she published poems. The Fall 1975/Winter 1976 issues contain two overtly sexual poems—“Ode to High-School Sex” and “Night on Ward B.” The first poem is a playful romp in the hay between “badboys” and “goodgirls.” The last stanza reads,
We will leap into hills with joined up tails,
conspiring with spring. WE will catch the drunk plums
on our coiled up tongues,
as the continent of winter sinks!
All tippling Ripple, we will tune our parts
to the damned band of love, the golden
dying of harvests.16
If Erdrich was a shy young woman in person, she was certainly not shy in print. The second poem reads like a horror story, as it describes a “simpleton,” presumably an inmate of a mental institution who fantasizes about the nipples of a “servant-girl,” who is apparently aware of his obsession, but refuses him her attentions. Part of the poem reads:
Two pearls. A feast. But she refused
and lost in longing—he cut them off
to fondle in his pocket till the day
they changed, grew hooks, began to bleed—
and then he fed them moths
till they grew wings
and flew, pink and shivering to her breasts again.
These poems appeared in the Fall 1975/Winter 1976 edition of Dart during Erdrich’s senior year.
Poems published in the Spring 1976 edition of the magazine were quite different. Whether these were recent poems or something written earlier is unknown, but one of the poems, “The Hinterlands,” seems to express a nostalgia for her home back on the North Dakota prairies, and may have been written earlier, when she first came to Dartmouth, or perhaps her time at Dartmouth had given her a new perspective and appreciation for her hometown. The second stanza reads:
When the sky pales and lengthens
and its cold ring of bone
vanishes behind a cloud,
I remember my home.17
The third stanza pays homage to the farmers that are the bedrock of the community, but the last two-line stanza seems to channel Yeats’ famous poem, “The Second Coming,” with that ominous ending—“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”18 Erdrich’s poem ends—“The fields, turning in sleep, cry softly/and something stops in the shadow of a barn.”19 It also evokes the early poems of Robert Bly. Another Erdrich poem, “Grace,” is published on the facing page on the same issue of Dart, and it too seems nostalgic for Wahpeton, although the first line starts with the word “London.” Erdrich had spent time as an international student at Oxford University in England during her enrollment at Dartmouth. The poem opens with lines about life in London, but goes on to a stanza that compares her mother’s experience in North Dakota potato fields with the historic city landscape of London:
I dream of my mother picking potatoes
as a young girl on the reservation.
When her back hurt, she stood up
level with a cloud of grit
that whirled in the distance.
Probably she blew into her hands
as I do now—near a drafty window
from which I see
two towers of copper verdigris.
There is a sense of wonder at the differences between the two worlds Erdrich has experienced. However, where the previous poem ended ominously, this one has a humorous twist at the end, following the stanza written above:
Between them, the moon may rise, it depends
On popular demand.
If it does, I’ll rub my eyes
& thank the Queen for planning the surprise.
Both Hart and Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth in 1976—the year this last edition of Dart was issued. Hart stayed on to work in and around Hanover for the next year, and Erdrich was still there, at least for a while, the summer after graduation. Hart recalls visiting her at her apartment on the outskirts of town. They talked about poetry, and he says it took him not a little effort to screw up his courage and show her some of his poems. One of them was a short lyric about a red eft, a newt that Hart would later revise and publish in his first book, The Ghost Ship.20 Hart says, “I remember she had a book about seashells next to her when I visited her, and that I was thrilled to be with her one-on-one chatting about something we were both passionate about.”21
The two would never meet again. Hart went on to a career as a poet, critical writer, and professor. Erdrich would return to her beloved Wahpeton, but within a few years, she would go back to Dartmouth.
1. Lisa Halliday, Interview, “The Art of Fiction No. 208,” Paris Review N195 (Winter 2010).
2. Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, and Potawatomi.
3. Louise Erdrich, “My Kind of Town,” Smithsonian 37.5 (August 2006): 20–3.
4. Ibid.
5. Halliday, Interview, Paris Review.
6. Dartmouth College webpage, http://dartmouth.edu/home/about/history/html.
7. Halliday, Interview, Paris Review.
8. Sarah T. Williams, “The Three Graces: Louise, Lise and Heid Erdrich—Sisters First, Writers Second—Look Back on Their Parents’ Hand in Fostering a Shared Love of Language,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb 3, 2008.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Dart, the Dartmouth Literary Magazine IX, No. 1 (Fall 1975/Winter 1976).
12. Halliday, Interview, Paris Review.
13. Karen Erdrich, “Renny,” Dart, the Magazine of the Arts III, No. 2. (Spring 1975) (nonpaginated).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Karen Erdrich, “Ode to High-School Sex,” Dart, the Dartmouth Literary Magazine IX, No. 1 (Fall 1975/Winter 1976).
17. Karen Erdrich, “The Hinterlands,” Dart, The Dartmouth Literary Magazine IV, No. 2. (Spring 1976).
18. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthan (New York: Collier Books, 1962).
19. Erdrich, “The Hinterlands.”
20. Henry W. Hart, The Ghost Ship (Crested Butte: Blue Moon Books, 1990).
21. Email communication with Henry W. Hart, June 24, 2011.