Warmer here in the Pioneer Valley, N Massachusetts near VT and NH. Horses are shedding and the mud is thick. Sun seems very strong.
Thank you for your stories, they are powerful and have been good for me.
Mary

Hello Louise. Appreciated your comments about the warmer weather. Just wanted to let you know what a pleasure it was to visit your store on Sat. 21 March. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to speak with you for a bit more while I was in. Went next door for lunch and came back in to spend more time looking around. Had a chance to visit with Carolyn for awhile, what a treat. I had a great time browsing for nearly an hour! I'll be back as soon as possible, hopefully with some dollars in my pocket. Your business is such an asset to the neighbourhood and the wider community. Hope to see you again soon. Ron H.

Longed for spring. Loved our first walk in the warm weather with our doggies, Arkas and Zeus, last week. Yet enjoyed today's hard rain and clouds because I was able to stay in and finish reading Isabel Allende's "The Sum of Our Days." Guilt-free reading. Today I decided that winter is too long in Minnesota, yet, at the same time, not long enough.

and how could I comment on your blog without telling you that I am savoring your latest book, "The Red Convertible." Story-by-story with pauses to make it last. Thank you for all your wonderful stories and thoughts. "Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country," and "The Master Butchers Singing Club" are my favorites today, in this moment.

Here in northern California we too feel the warmth of an emerging spring. I am rereading the Little No Horse book after about 5 years. It sings to me even more! I have given it over the years to my daughters and my mother and my friends saying "this is my favorite book by my favorite author". What is it about Father Damien that makes me want to talk to him too? What would he say to me to help me with my life? What am I not seeing in the world of spirits that could show me a truth undiscovered? I find myself looking out of the corner of my eye to see that hidden shadow that is more than just a tree or a bush or... Thanks I am growing again in insights! Peace and Prosperity to You!

Ms. Erdrich,
I first fell in love with your work in a class back in 1990 and was excited to find this bookstore. Maybe if I'm lucky I can make a trip up there this summer when I visit my folks in Iowa. It would indeed be a long trip. I'm happy everyone is experiencing such wonderful spring weather as I am still feeling the cold in my bones, probably leftover from our big ice storm in January. There are so many books on your site that I am not sure where to start first. It is like opening your eyes for the first time and deciding what to focus on first. Thank you for opening such a bookstore and making so many things available. I cried when I found this oasis, it means much to me.

Hi from France ! I was in Minnesota on vacation last summer. Bought "The painted Drum" and Sherman Alexie 's Flight in a bookstore in St Paul. Loved both books. I Found out about your bookstore while in France, so disappointed I missed it but hopefuly there's Internet. Wht I love about Native American literature is that it is special nd unforgetable, it remains with you long after the reading it is something I can't explain. At the moment, I'm reading Joseph Bodyden's "3 day-road" in French. I would like to read all your books, they are quite easy to find in book stores here in France. I'm addicted because I want to understand why Native American people are disregarded. Thank you for fighting for the recognition of Native American literature, languages and cultures and for allowing people like me to get to know them and their people.

Hello! I can't believe that at last I have found a website on Native American literature!! I am from Italy, and lived in the States while I was doing my research for my thesis (almost 10 years ago) on this talented writer/storyteller Louise Erdrich.
Amazing! just finished reading The Plague of Doves and I have to say I simply loved it, like all Erdrich's novels ( my favourites are Tracks and Love Medicine). The dialogues are so funny, witty, and full of life. At the same time there is such humanity in her characters that breaks my heart.
In this novel I have found what I expected,ie, the circle of storytelling, which ends where it started bringing balance and harmony to stories and lives that were chaotic.
Please Ms. Erdrich keep on writing wonderful stories!

I know just how she felt. Birchbark is one of two handmade places my imagination turns to in conjuring pure happiness (the other is Upaya Zen Center). If family weren't waiting for me to move on, I'd stay all day, grinning at the ceiling or reading everything within reach.

This is a lovely site. Thank you for creating it.

My family and I live in Texas, and have only been to Birchbark Bookstore once, so it is especially touching to see these tender drawings and notes on good books. They capture some of the charming warmth of where you are.

At the moment I am deep into writing about FOUR SOULS, and am struck by what a finely crafted and deeply felt book it is. For Scarecrow Press, I am compiling a reference guide called 21ST CENTURY GOTHIC: GREAT GOTHIC NOVELS SINCE 2000, and FOUR SOULS more than earned its place as one of the fifty-five most intriguing neo-Gothic works from around the world. It has both terror and a wintry humor, a woman who has been hurt and intends to hurt, and I simply haven't read anything as involving for a long time. If any haven't had a chance to read it, I'd reach for it next.

Cheers from Texas,
danel.olson@lonestar.edu

i LOVE your new website. especially the Dogs section (even though I am a cat person myself). What a fun read!!! i'll be back for more dog blogs and other book recommendations.

Native music. Birchbark Books creates comfort.

I would like to share some thoughts about the new Louise Erdrich novel, The Plague of Doves. I do this with great caution, aware that with publication coming in May, most will not have seen it and it would not be fair to reveal the outcome of the various story lines in the book. I have a copy now only because until very recently my wife was a bookstore owner and as such we received an advanced reader’s copy.

As with Erdrich’s other recent novels, as I went through the book I kept a crazy quilt chart of the relationships of the key characters, always a process that engages me. (Historical reference at the library or on the internet is also a frequent itch for me; who was this Mustache Maude anyway?) These relationships unfold through a succession of stories featuring the same characters in different situations at different times. Erdrich has honed this structure, taking it, I believe, to a new level of sophistication and engagement for the reader.

The ability to create a novel that holds together as a whole out of these multiple stories is quite a creative achievement. The gifted and accomplished E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is structured as a succession of the stories of people who successively come to posess a particular accordion, but the people are not particularly related. There the narrative thrust that is so critical seemed attenuated; the multiple stories did not seem to add up to a satisfying overall story.

When we experience a singular story, even one with flashbacks, this narrative thrust and unity is less an issue for me. I think of Hemingway’s Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In Wendell Barry’s quietly intense novel, Jaber Crow, we find the multiple stories over a long period – but here one character holds center stage. Marilynne Robinson’s heralded Gilead has a somewhat similar structure, the life and soul of Reverend John Ames unfolding page after beautiful page.

But with Plague of Doves the genius is to take a structure of multiple stories and multiple key characters and through their vividness and the power of their stories and connections create a strong overall narrative thrust. And we are engaged, satisfied, richer for it.


At times these individual stories (several of which I realized I had previously read in The New Yorker) made me question their possibility – could they really have happened? Could the banker John Wildstrand really have conspired with teenager Billy Peace to kidnap his own wife as part of a fake ransom plot? Could there really be this many complex interrelationships among this many characters over this many generations? This would not pose a question if the overall novel was written at some other level of realism (fantasy,magical realism,whatever), but at what I perceive as the somewhat grounded realism in Plague of Doves it did occur as a question for me.

As I reflected on this, I concluded that it really isn’t an issue. Think of Eliot Spitzer. Also, I’ve never lived in the Plague of Doves setting- Pluto, North Dakota, with a stable, smaller circle of people in a relatively more isolated community. I also think of some of the improbable synchronicity in the closing of our own bookstore early this year; the very last book in the store (the others had already left with astonishing speed), a book about Down Syndrome children, was bought by a special needs teacher who was familiar with it and had been wanting it.

When we think of these things, what is possible or probable to us changes. Life is full of improbable stories.

Two flat-out probables for me are that The Plague of Doves will be more then well received by readers and critics and that Louise Erdrich will continue to provide us with mind-, heart- and soul-nourishing characters and stories.