Ep. 216: Heid E. Erdrich on Writing Poetry in the Dark

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, and First People’s Fund, and she has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. She was also the editor of the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations, which was the recipient of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and a Midwest Booksellers Choice Award. Erdrich works as a visual arts curator and collaborator, and as an educator. She teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program of Augsburg University and is the 2019 distinguished visiting professor in the liberal arts at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She lives in Minneapolis. Her latest book is Little Big Bully. 

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Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #216 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am so pleased that you’re here with me today. Today we’re going to be talking to Heid E. Erdrich on writing poetry in the dark. I have been getting so much more into poetry this year. I have mentioned it. I took a class. It has really unlocked and un-bottled some stuff inside me that is really important. And speaking of importance, Heid really talks about how writing can be transformative and we talk about how important to can be in terms of emotional health and strength and recovering from trauma. So I know you’re going to enjoy the interview. Very quickly, what’s going on around here? Well, what is going on? And I mean, very quickly, what is going on is I am very sick there’s something wrong inside me and doctors can’t figure out what it is and I’m in a great deal of pain. Right now, all the time. And I have been for the last 10 days and I need more tests and an MRI and all this other stuff. So, I have been feeling terrible. That is why there was no podcast last week. And I just need to say right now, that if there’s no podcast next week, that is why I’m going to try like hell to get this up. But I can only sit up for about 10 minutes at a time right now. So I’m kind of hearing my voice that I’m upset. I put on lipstick for you and I put on mascara but let me just talk for a minute about what we do when this kind of shit hits us. We do the freaking best that we can. That is all. 

[00:02:09] I have my 90 day classes starting on the Tuesday after this goes out, I’m recording this on Wednesday. It’ll go up on Friday. Hopefully, if I get it done. And then I have 90 day classes starting on Tuesday. That is my focus right now, are these 90 day classes. They are so important to me. They are what I love to do. Number one in my life, you know is writing in terms of my work life. Number one in my life is my people, but number one of my work life, is writing in a very close number two, are helping other writers write their books and revise their books. You know that I love that so much and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I may have to push the class for a week or two, and I can’t even think farther than that, but I don’t think I will. Which is why, if you are taking one of these 90 day classes, I haven’t made that announcement because I think I’m going to be able to do it. Hoping, fingers crossed and that is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We don’t- in writing, we don’t need as much certainty as we think we do. There are plotters and there are pantsers. There are people who plot their books and there are people who fly by the seat of their pants. A real truth of life, I think for most people lies somewhere in the middle, we plan quite a bit and then things happen and we have to fly by the seat of our pants. And I am one of those people who prefers to plan things out. I prefer to have an outline. However, in reality, when I’m writing, I deviate from the outline almost a hundred percent, as soon as I start writing, Oh, one page later, I’m in a different land and that is just life. Remembering that is very important to me, remembering that everything is changing all the time and I don’t need to have the answer for what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day or next week, when the classes start understanding that we can make shifts. And most importantly, we have to take care of ourselves in whatever way that looks like. 

[00:04:13] Knowing that my writing will get done. Yesterday I did my writing while lying on my back on the couch and I got some good words done. I was writing about poetry, about poetry, actually. That was really, really fun. And it didn’t look like sitting up at my desk and it didn’t look like me being the very, very sturdy, resilient, energetic person that I usually am. I’m not sturdy right now. I’m not resilient and I’m not energetic. And I can do some of my work and some of my work, I can’t, I really need to be allowing myself to rest right now. And that is my work. I have a new mantra and I want to share it with you really quickly. It is, “What is my one job right now?” I can only have one job at a time. Right now in this very second. My one job is to record this podcast this intro to this podcast, not even this podcast, just this intro. That is my one job right after this. My one job is to go back to bed and my one job while I’m in bed is to rest. It is not to do anything else. It’s not to worry about doing anything else. My one job is to rest. I don’t want you to be too worried about me. There’s, it’s, it’s something interior. I probably need to lose another organ. My wife says that eventually I’ll just be a brain in a jar because I just, I like to lose organs as often as possible.

[00:05:36] And one of them definitely wants to go away. So, my one job will be to rest. What is your one job? What is your one job right now? Are you driving? Great. Your one job can be making sure you get to where you’re going safely, but also kind of listening to me, listening to me talk to Heid, in our interview thinking about how, what we talk about applies to your writing. That’s your one job. When you get to where you’re going, what’s your one job then. Multitasking is a myth. You know that, I know that I like to do it still my very favorite thing to do is like watch TV while knitting, while eating some ice cream and having a conversation with my wife and I don’t have to do all of those things perfectly when I’m doing them. They don’t require perfection, what requires dedication and deserves all the intelligence you can put toward it however is our important work. And right now my important work is writing, teaching and resting. And I don’t need to know exactly how all of those things are gonna fit together yet.

[00:06:43] So this is a lot longer than I thought it would be anyway. So I’m going to sign off. I’m going to wish you very happy writing as I usually do, but also very happy single-tasking. And very happy thinking about how you don’t need to have all the answers right now on how you’re going to finish your book, how you’re going to be published, how you’re going to get an agent, how you’re going to self-publish we tend to get so wrapped up in trying to future trip and figure everything out. Don’t worry about that. What’s your one job right now. That’s my words for you today moving into the new year generally the first episode of the new year is about money. And I guess this will be the first episode of the new year. It looks like it comes out on January 1st so that’s not going to happen. Hopefully I’ll do it next week, and maybe I won’t, who knows I will do my best. But I like this as the first episode of the new year. What’s your one job? That is what I am asking myself in every moment. And in every moment that kind of shifts a little bit and I think I might continue this as the year moves forward. Single tasking, perhaps. That’s my focus for 2021. So my friends happy writing. Hit me where you find me, come send me an email. Tell me how you’re doing and thank you so much for being here and supporting me and listening to the show. You all mean so much to me. Thank you for getting through this difficult 2020 year let’s move forward into a difficult 2021, and we can do it together. So glad you’re here. 

[00:08:28] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:02] Okay. Well, I could not be more thrilled today to welcome to the show, Heid E. Erdrich. Hello, Heid! How are you? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:09:09] Hi Rachael! You know, it’s, it was a good day here. It was sunny and I got a lot of work done. So things are shifting. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:18] Fantastic. Good. I love that. Let me give you a little introduction and then we’re going to talk all things, poetry and writing. Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, the Loft Literary Center and First People’s Fund, and she has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. She was also the editor of the 2018 anthology, New Poets of Native Nations, which was a recipient of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and a Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award. Erdrich works as a visual arts curator and collaborator and as an educator. She teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program of Augsburg University and is the 2019 distinguished visiting professor in the liberal arts the University of Minnesota, Morris. Erdrich grew up in, can you help me say this? Wahpeton?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:10:20] Wahpeton.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:21] Okay. Washington Putin, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She lives in Minneapolis and her latest book is Little Big Bully and it is really so gorgeous. There it is. If you’re watching on the YouTube, you can see it there. I was so pleased to have been offered this opportunity to talk to you. And as I love to do, and I talk to poets, I would love to invite you to read a poem for us?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:10:47] Oh, I’d be happy to. I’m going to read something that’s not quite characteristic, but it does a good job of describing some of the things that happen in the book. And then I’ll tell you about that later. It’s called, I Feel Like a Fool. Do you? I feel like a fool. Do you, a tarot deck fool, looking back to see if you were looking back at me, I’ll trip right off that cliff. Once in North Dakota, in my actual childhood, I saw a hobo. That’s what we said then with an actual red bandana bundle, he had slung on a stick. He tried to get me to walk under a bridge with him. He said he had a great gift. My bigger sister sniggered at that, or there’d be a red dress hanging in a tree for me too, which brings me back to that fool tumbling ass over tea kettle into some gully, having fallen for it. Then dusting full self’s ass off. Pick yourself up. Start all over again. This is a world of men, this tarot deck and shore the world. And yet I won’t give a single pronoun for it. We were both fools. We are all fools. Once in my actual adult life in hideous time of lies, our own stories were required of us. Fool though I feel real and truly fucked though we be, I picked my first person. I set my truth free. Fool, me fool, me fool me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:37] Thank you. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:12:38] You’re welcome. 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:39] That is so beautiful. And I love that it’s the fool. When I heard this, I was really, really moved the full card. I’m a tarot fan. And the full card tends to really frighten me in a way that it, maybe some people don’t feel, but I never like it when I get the fool. And I think that you capture so much of that danger. You capture a lot of danger with your work.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:13:04] Yeah, there’s a lot in there about fear and danger, but the fool actually comforts me and I do get that card off. And one of the reasons is because it, the fool is moving happily along in the world has no idea they’re about to fall down, but you know, the good nature looks after fools and drunks they say. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:25] Yes

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:13:25] They’d never really get harmed. They just don’t see things coming

Rachael Herron: [00:13:29] That’s true

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:13:30] And they go on and it’s actually a good trait to just be like, okay, I don’t know what’s about to happen, but I am going to travel blindly. So I like that. And, but I felt it keenly when writing from personal experiences and from things that felt really intimate and personal to me in this book, which is something I don’t usually do. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:50] That is a beautiful way. And I think I’ll try to be less scared of the fool when he shows up when I turn him over. So talk to us a little bit about- you are very busy. You do all these things. You’re doing a lot of stuff, not just the writing, but what does your writing process look like? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:14:05] Well, you know, I like the color green, so my office is filled with green things and I get a new chair every time I finish a book 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:15] You get a new chair?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:14:16] Yeah I usually get them. I pick them up on curbs. I get them on yard sales. I get them, I get them secondhand and I think I’ve only once purchased a new chair from Ikea. So, you know, I, it was COVID times and I was finishing a book and I couldn’t stand the chair I worked on in for so long. So I went on to something like, you know, Facebook marketplace or something, and got myself a new green Victorian chair with swan’s heads that’s very regal. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:43] I love that. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:14:44] And that’s where I sit. And usually I work on a laptop on a lap desk and I like to work a lot from dreams. So I will allow myself to snooze because often I have a really good idea after I’ve slept or sleep in a little bit that tends to really jog my creative abilities and I don’t write long hand very often if I’m traveling and travel is a really a good process for me moving in a vehicle or walking even. So I use walking when I can’t travel. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:18] How do you manage to capture the dreams and they’re so ephemeral

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:15:22] You know, sometimes, and then this book most of, maybe about half of the poems in the last section are just literally how the dreams came to me. I didn’t have it to tweak them very much. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:33] Amazing. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:15:34] Yeah. They’re quite vivid and you know, the ones that have narrative are easier to stick with because I can remember aspects of the story and resupply them in my waking self, but generally they’re sensory vivid. So those things are right there. I don’t need you know I don’t need to work too hard to get them. And they’re so strange, usually that it’s, it’s great to just have them come to me. I don’t have to reach for it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:04] You’re kind of blowing my mind right now because listeners of the show will know that I have been, I write novels and memoirs. I do not write poetry because I was kind of a little bit scarred in grad school by poetry. And I’ve recently unlocked that. I took this incredibly beautiful course on writing poetry and I also have incredibly vivid dreams. And I have never thought until I just heard you say those words that I could wake up and write a poem with what I, with what I saw and, you know, not I’m, I want to go to bed now

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:16:36] It’s imperative advice because in a way, because I had a professor in graduate school, Wyatt Prunty, the poet Wyatt Prunty, and his advice was a little different and it was to drink a nice little neat scotch and then lie down on the divan or the sofa or whatever he called it. And, and when you get out for sure, you’ll have a poem he said. it might’ve been like, you know, a blessing that he gave me that. And I believe that there would be a poem because he said there would be. So sometimes there are.

Rachael Herron: [00:17:05] I think that’s beautiful. Sometimes when I want to have a dream, I always have dreams, but I’ll have a piece of cheese before I go to bed, because my mother always said, if you have a dream, if you have a piece of cheese 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:17:16] It’s just cucumbers, 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:17] Really?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:17:18] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:19] That’s like the opposite of cheese. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:17:20] I know

Rachael Herron: [00:17:22] Okay. So, when you sit down to work, do you have a set time that you like to work or set number of words that you’re aiming for or, or is it more organic?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:17:34] Yeah, you know, I don’t do set number of words. I may be like, I gotta finish a poem. I’ve got it. No revise two poems today, or if I’m working on an essay, I gotta get through this section. So you know, those like very encouraging months of the year, when you have to write so many words, they just, I think they have the best of intentions. I’m like, that sounds fun. And then I sit down and I don’t know how many words I wrote, so, and then I just ended up being not interested in that. So I am better at working in the morning and in the late afternoon, somewhere in between, I have to kind of take a break and I can’t really work at night anymore, unless something wakes me up. Like I can’t sleep and I have to go and get it out. And that happened with some of the poems in this book. I just, I couldn’t sleep. I had so many things and I just had to get them out and I think I got 30 of the poems in this book in a very short period, less than a month. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:32] That was my next question. Is that because I don’t know much about poetry. I’ve been it’s it scares me like the fool card does. Do you, with your books, do you go at them because your book is so thematically gathered. Do you go at them with an idea or do you kind of find them as you go, do you often write them in such a short time or was this anomaly?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:18:54] No. I’ve never done anything like, you know, the amount of work that came in such a quick period? I mean, I had been thinking about some of the poems and I’d been driving, commuting, every week out to Morris where I was in residence in 2019. So I had, you know, kind of the stirrings in my head. And I sat down to find out if I had a book and I would find one poem and I was like, it makes sense if I have another poem that goes with it. So it become, came a kind of I used to smoke, kind of a chain smoking adventure. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:28] I miss smoking every day. I understand that.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:19:30] And I think one goes with this one, right. You know, one more couldn’t hurt. Yeah. So it kind of had that feel to it. It was like, Ooh, that was good. I’ll try another one. So yeah, I think it was, it was unusual. It was probably some, you know, slightly manic swing due to the low light during the polar vortex. And I definitely was using my happy light. I might’ve over done it a little bit. But we were really, we were literally stuck in this house for 10 days or 5 days when my daughter didn’t go to school and my husband happened to be in Florida for work almost the entire time. He came home for like less than 48 hours during the only temperatures above minus temperatures. So he didn’t know what we had gone through and it, you know, and it was just, just dark. That was the strangest thing about it. There was no lights, so it was isolation that really helped me to focus. And I hope that is helping some people. I don’t believe we should be multiply productive or overly productive because we’re isolated due to the pandemic. But I do hope that people embrace it as a time to have some interior thoughts that you respect and not be afraid because. You know, this is something poetry is like, I don’t know, like anything you do intimately that doesn’t get rated, like immediately don’t be afraid. Cause nobody’s right there to rate you except for yourself. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:05] Right. No one is going to definitely read all your poems, you know.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:21:07] Yeah, exactly. So just. You know, do not proceed in fear. In fact, the cover art on the book is called, it’s a Sigil Against Fear. It’s by Andrea Carlson. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:19] Okay that just gave me goosebumps

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:21:20] And she’s a good friend of mine. I know. Isn’t it beautiful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:24] It’s incredible. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:21:25] These are emblems from multiple sources, but several of them are indigenous art works that are made in the earth or in trees or made with minerals and Andrea’s Ojibwe too, and helped me a lot thinking about this book. I went to see her that January, I was working on it and we talked a lot until I felt like I really knew the shape of the book. And then luckily, her artwork is available for the cover. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:51] That is so divinely. Cool. I really, really love that. What is your biggest challenge then when it comes to writing? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:21:58] I don’t know. What is your challenge? I am so like, I’m not going to think about that. I kinda like, you know, 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:06] Yeah, no, I guess my challenge, always is, first drafts. First drafts are everything. Once I get a first draft on the page of a book or whatever, I can revise happily. And, but first drafts really, I guess I’m made, I’m learning by talking to you in this episode that I’m just- I’m just made nervous by that, which I don’t know. And the fear of losing control, which I think first drafts are, you have to lose control in a first draft. Yeah. What about you? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:22:34] And I like to surprise myself. I’ve turned that into surprise.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:39] I like that 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:22:40] I was like, oh, what was I doing here? It’s not what I intended to do, but I’m gonna go with it. See what happens.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:44] Surprise 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:22:45] Yeah. I think of it as surprise. Surprise yourself. I mean, it’s actually one of the qualities that I have to evaluate my students on in the MFA program. Surprise was a category. Don’t talk about that a little bit, but yeah, I think, I mean, for me, occasionally I have that voice. That’s like, Oh, this is not going to be relevant. Or this is only relevant to you or who is going to understand. I come from a very, you know, very marginalized background and the native person. And with Ojibwe, you know, an educated person. It’s just, it’s such a strange group of things that I am, that the idea of being relevant is very unlikely to me. So if I start to think about that, then I get like, I get a little nervous. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:33] Yeah. Yeah, I, but I, but I love this idea of surprise. I’m going to add that to my, to my arsenal. What is the biggest joy you get from writing? If you can name one thing. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:23:46] The actual process of writing. I feel good when I am working on the first draft. So I’m the opposite of you. I like it, you know, it feels like imaginative and creative and I’m, if I’m, if it’s going well, I’m tapped into, you know a voice where I’m, you know, communicating with myself and with others that I kind of imagine it, imagine being part of the conversation. So that part is good, but I guess it is equal to the joy of having an audience that understands the book. I think getting a good review is one of the greatest things that anyone can give you, especially if it’s somebody you don’t know and you don’t know how they did the review and then also winning this contest, man. That was that was up there and one of the top 10 days of my life to win the national poetry series of the judge, I never met, you know? So 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:40] How did that feel that day? How, how did you, what did you do?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:24:43] Oh it’s incredible. Oh seriously, I just cried. I don’t cry very often and I, it was, it was some crazy crying and laughing, you know, similar to election the day of, or the Saturday after election. Very similar. Yeah, but it felt, you know, like satisfaction and completion. I’ve been writing a long time. I had, you know, this was my seventh book of poems to be published. I have an eighth that is out there still and I just really never expected to have a national publisher or a national audience. So it’s really huge for me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:22] I adore that. That just makes me feel so good to hear.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:25:24] I hope everybody gets a little piece of that somewhere. No matter what it is, savor it.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:31] Yeah. And sit in it and rejoice in it. Like we did that Saturday after the election

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:25:36] Yes exactly. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:37] Can you share a craft tip with the writers in the audience? With the whole, the whole audience as writers as well.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:25:42] Yeah. You know, the, the poem that I read, I Feel Like a Fool, Do you? Switches pronouns a little bit. And I often ask my students to consider how a poem would feel in a different pronoun in we or you instead of I, and just to try it and see, you know, or she, or her, or they, or them just switch it a little bit and see how it feels. What does it do for the poem? How does it expand it? Or how does it make it more intimate if you switch back to I, when you’ve been doing a she/he and I think that sometimes it gives you a perspective that you wouldn’t have, and often, it shows a writer that they have not stayed in the same person throughout the whole poem. So they have to justify why they’ve switched from I, to she, or we,

Rachael Herron: [00:26:40] They have to, they have to pick really, they have to decide, which is most powerful,

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:26:44] Right, I mean, you know, we don’t have that luxury often in writing pros, you know, you really got to stick with it, but in poetry you can be true to the poem and take it outside of your experience or move into your experience with something that is not actual to you because we’re not bound by the same rules of nonfiction. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:07] It might be like naming the favorite child, but do you have a particular pronoun or voice that you like to use? like first person, second person, third person. What is your, what’s your favorite in poetry? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:27:19] I like second person. I like seeing you, you know, I feel like I’m inviting someone or addressing someone, but I also am enlarging the experience. So it’s not just me, you know, I do like that. We can’t do it too much, it gets a little tedious to the reader, but there are times when I think it would make sense. I don’t stick with one, usually throughout a whole book. I can tell you, I don’t like the first person 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:52] Okay, so you know that 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:53] That’s work for me. That’s hard for me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:58] What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:03] Coffee. Oh my goodness. If I don’t have coffee, I’m like, what is wrong with me today? You know, I don’t even know

Rachael Herron: [00:28:14] I gave it up

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:15] Oh you gave it up?

Rachael Herron: [00:28:16] I gave it up for a number of years. Cause my acupuncturist told me my cortisol response would be better and I just recently took it up again. I was stupid to have given it up is so it’s like so perfect. It’s a perfect drug

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:29] Yeah. I’m, you know, it’s either that, or I seek medication to have the stimulation, you know, and I, I use other stimulants too legal ones, you know, but I, I do need it. It’s good for the neurons firing and you know, walking helps too. Some people it’s exercise I used to swim. Oh my gosh. Do you remember when you could just go into a gym and go into the pool? 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:54] I fell in love with swimming, unfortunately, a year before the pandemic and I’ve been 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:59] Yeah, well, that for me is super meditative, you know, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:05] Have you read “Why We Swim?” 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:28:59] No

Rachael Herron: [00:29:05] by Bonnie Tsui?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:29:06] Oh. I need to read that

Rachael Herron: [00:29:08] It’s beautiful. It’s, it’s one of those personalized memoirs, but with a lot of reportage and she’s actually gonna be on the show next week and, and it’s a beautiful book and you’ll love it because you’ll feel like you’re in the pool. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:29:20] Oh, that would be great. Yeah. I mean just the, and apparently chlorine is supposed to open up your synapses too.

Rachael Herron: [00:29:19] That’s interesting.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:29:30] So taking a shower, going swimming, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:31] You know, and cigarettes too actually help the neurons connect better in your brain, which is why we love to do it. You know, I haven’t smoked since I was 20.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:29:41] Briefly. And then after a few years, it’s the opposite. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:45] Exactly. Yeah. I also have ADHD and I have prescribed to stimulants myself, but I have been preferring coffee. Coffee is just to bring it back to your, the thing that affects you in a surprising way.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:29:57] Yeah, and I mean, and it has health benefits, so I’m all for the coffee. You know, I did worry like what if we, you know, people hoarding TP. I was like, oh no, what if we have a coffee shortage? I’m a terrible person. That’s my concern when, you know, we have so much to worry about, but honestly, if you don’t focus on some of the smaller things, it’s really hard to have the emotional bandwidth to understand and try and change the larger things. So go ahead and care about your coffee.

Rachael Herron: [00:30:27] Heck yeah my perfectly cup by cup Malita brewed. My wife makes a whole pot, but I just like my one, my cup by cup. What is the best book that you’ve read recently? And what did you love about it?

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:30:38] You know, I, I’ve been doing a lot of these lists of things and, you know, what did you like, when did you read. Cause I haven’t actually been able to read that much. It’s sort of sad, but I went back to a book. I think it came out 2019, Brother Bullet by Cassandra Lopez. It’s a book of poems and it’s a very, very sad book where she names the bullets that killed her brother and addresses it and talks about what it’s doing, where it’s been, and it just is, it’s extremely helpful for looking through processing grief the way she wrote it you feel you know, company in a difficult place. And I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful book for that so I think, you know, take a look at it and I’m trying to remember published hew New Mexico. So yeah take a look at that book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:45] Thank you for the recommendation. One of my favorite topics is grief. That’s what I always want to read about. So thank you. That was Cassandra 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:31:52] Lopez, 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:53] Lopez. That’s right. Brother Bullet. Thank you. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:31:59] Kinda great to talk to too. She’s a very interesting person. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:04] I’m going to put her on my list. That’s how I get names for this show. And can you please tell us a little bit about Little Big Bully now and where people can find it, but just kind of tell us the what’s behind it.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:32:19] The book has an arc to it. It starts with a poem called how, which asks, how did we get to this place? I asked that question in 2017 or 18 in the spring. When I saw a lot of contentiousness between people who should be allies and just weren’t and I, and it’s a, it’s a sort of meditation on distracted thinking and how like everything just piles up and how did this happen? How did that happen? And then the rest of the book I learned, I understood later was sort of answering that question. How did things happen? And it goes through an arc of how do we come to be abused? What within us is the mechanism that gets tripped and when that especially women allow for abuse in their lives, I’m not blaming women for being abused, but there is something that has been done to girls to make it more likely that they will be abused. And I looked for where those things came from and, and how can you fight it? And how could you use a narrative change to fight it? That was so there’s some sort of fairytale quality to some or, you know, kind of mythic quality to some of the first poems about witnessing and experiencing you know, assault of acts and how to move through them. And that’s sort of the micro and its interest with love poems, which I thought nobody’s going to like this because they’re love poems in here, but the love poems are about self-sovereignty and about how can you stay safe and love someone else even a safe person. So those poems are there and they’re really important to that kind of, you know, it’s not a series of poems in the victim mode at all. It’s about moving through these things and on you know, encountering narcissists and understanding that there’s a rhetorical way to get rid of a narcissist and it’s just, don’t respond. Don’t talk to them, let them, let all of their disengaged. And it’s like incredibly powerful. If you can do it, you do it. There are many people who can’t, but it’s one of the most powerful things you can find for yourself. So I moved through that and moved to political situation of abuse. Since they’re a little larger issue of the people side with a bully, or do they side with those who need protection? And what does that, let’s the implication of that, that, you know, in my opinion, 25% of our fellow citizens and people I know and have loved people who I’m related to, sided with the bullies. And what does that mean? How could that be? So they moved from that to the future, 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:17] The book, I really believe that things happen, you know, the way they do and you are led to things that you need. And, and I just want to say very personally to you that this was a book that I needed and I’m doing a bunch of stuff around an abusive relationship that I was in, in my twenties. And it was really, really helpful to me and, and deeply upsetting in a visceral way that was completely necessary to some of my healing. So thank you very much. I wanted to kind of thank you publicly for that.

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:35:50] You’re so welcome. And I’m so grateful because you know, you worry when you write frankly, about assault and other experiences, stocking and abuse that you’re, you know, when you’ll trigger people and that is not at all my intention and then I tried in every poem to take a personal responsibility and also to show people some way forward from the difficult actions that others have inflicted on them. 

Rachael Herron: [00:36:18] You’re contributing to that method of healing. I really believe with this book. So thank you. How can we, where can we find you out on the internet? 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:36:27] Oh well, I’m giving one more reading this year with oh, Cracked Walnut reading series and its Pullets and Pints and that little be online and zoom reading. I can’t remember who my co-writers are they just kind of yeah, so Google that that’s, tweak, I think it’s on the eighth and I’m also part of the LA book Fest, series of readers. And that was pre-recorded, but that’s going to be shown on the 17^th. The book you can get pretty much anywhere since it’s from Penguin. However, if you buy it from Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, I will have a signed copy. 

Rachael Herron: [00:37:16] Very cool. Oh, that’s awesome. 

Heid E. Erdrich: [00:37:19] I know that’s the only place that you can get things signed in. I really miss that part of having a new book, it’s signing it to people. 

Rachael Herron: [00:37:25] Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.