“I have really been moved by the fact that this generation has continued to love books along with all the other electronic mediums everyone’s embraced. Books have kept this bond.” -- Louise Erdrich
In this episode of The Archive Project, Louise Erdrich reflects on 16 years of owning her bookstore, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, including its rocky start, how it gained a foothold in the community, and what it and other small, independent bookstores owe to the Harry Potter series. She goes on to discuss the differences in bookstore culture around the world, five reasons why independent bookstores have survived despite the odds, and concludes her lecture with the poem she wrote that lives on the stone steps of the vegetable garden outside of her bookstore.
Bio:
Karen Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, to a German-American father and a French-Ojibwe mother. She was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. In 1972, she was among the first women admitted to Dartmouth College, where the Native American studies department was established the same year under department head—and her later husband—Michael Dorris. In 1984, Erdrich published her first novel, "Love Medicine", to great critical acclaim, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction. In her over thirty-year publishing career, Erdrich has published fifteen novels, as well as three poetry collections, five children’s books (three of which she illustrated), three books of nonfiction, and dozens of short stories. Among her many awards and accolades, Erdrich has received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2015 she was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, given to writers with “unique, enduring voices” whose work addresses the American experience. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters, where she owns the bookstore and Native American arts shop Birchbark Books & Native Arts.
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