Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.
The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?
Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.
I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.
At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.
There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.
“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”
I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?
I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.
Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.
And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.
Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write?
Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.
“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.
Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.
Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.
Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.
Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”
This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.
The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?
I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.
Author photo of Louise Erdrich by Jenn Ackerman.